Father James Joseph Devlin
Following his five-year ministry in the Mekong Delta, Jesuit priest James Joseph Devlin, shown above with some of the children he worked with at Song Khla in 1981, became the champion of the Vietnamese boat people who fled to Thailand. There were about 7,000 Vietnamese boat people at Song Khla (located on the east coast of southern Thailand) when Father Devlin arrived in 1979; the number soon swelled to 8,000.