Ban Per Village

Last week I went with Chuck and Krissie and Robin to visit a small church where Chuck was preaching and I was translating into Thai. It was a great experience. I translate regularly from Thai to English at my own church in Udon, which is difficult, but I just have to recognize the Thai words and then I can put them into a coherent English sentence pretty easily. But it's much different to translate from English to Thai, tons harder! It's much harder to come up with the Thai word from somewhere hidden deeply in my brain than to merely recognize the word. Chuck told me he would keep his message simple, but I still told him that I needed the outline in advancce. So, when he gave it to me he had kept it pretty simple. But there were still a few challenging parts - like acronyms.  Chuck said, "Do you know what Grace is? It's God's Riches at Christ's Expense". Well, needless to say that is not the definition in Thai, and at my 7th grade Thai level I had to dumb it down quite a bit. What I said was more like "Grace means that Christ died for us so that we can have a relationship with God". Not bad...you can get the basic idea! I joked with Chuck afterwards when everyone thanked him for his great message that although he thought he was preaching, I just said whatever I wanted to, especially when I didn't know how to translate what he said! Well, that's only partially true....

Here's a picture of Chuck and his wife Chrissy, along with the local pastor.

After church we had lunch at the church and the food was amazing! I love this about church in Thailand. First of all, every church service starts at 10:30 am. So, first of all I get to sleep in a bit on Sunday mornings, but also, when I go to visit different churches, I never have to struggle to remember when the service starts. Just show up at 10:30! The second great thing about Thai churches (at least rural churches) is that we have lunch together afterwards, every week! People just take turn cooking or bringing food. It's really an essential part of the church experience, it would so insulting or strange to the church if you didn't stay to eat. It's the relational aspect of Thai culture.

Here's the kitchen where the women cooked for us.

Robin and I helped out too, making "som tam" - which is papaya salad, made from unripe papaya, lemon juice, garlic, chili peppers and (here's the hard part) rotten fish. It's a staple food in NE Thailand - eaten with sticky rice.

Here I am mashing it up with a large mortar and pestal:

Here we are sampling the hot peppers that we put in:

 Well, it was a really fun day. It was nice to meet this pastor - she has a real passion for her work. Her story is quite sad too. Originally her husband and her were both pastors of the church, and they'd been there for a couple of years when he died. She has continued to pastor the church by herself for the past few years. An amazing woman. She's from central Bangkok too...so she had to learn NE Thai language.