Ban Per Village

Today I went to a nearby village about 40 km away with the youth and others from my church. There is no church in this village, so they go each month to put on a special program for the kids and to build relationships. A short term medical team came through about 6 months ago and helped to build a positive relationship for the church. While the youth were getting ready for the camp, a few of us went and visited the community leader, just to let him know that we were putting on a program and would be playing music, so it might be a bit noisy. He was really supportive and said next time he would broadcast the program over the community loud speaker...and that we could use his house and property, which was not overly excessive, but was really nice and big, especially compared to other houses in the community. He and his wife are really interested in Christianity, so they are open and supportive.


Here are some pictures of the kids.....I really enjoyed spending time with them and feel like spending time out in the villages helps me to understand life here more and more.






I enjoyed talking to Lee, the woman who hosted us, she has a 1 year old daughter and lives with her mother and brother in a 1 room house, with a kitchen and bathroom off the back. Her husband is working in Singapore, working as a laborer building the subway system. She showed me his picture and said that he's been gone for almost a year and hasn't met his little girl yet, but will come home next month and stay for 1 month before returning again to Singapore. This is a common story here in the Northeast, families are split as young men and sometimes women go overseas with contract companies to Taiwan, Israel, Japan or Singapore. Although they often spend up to 2 years working just to pay off the "start up fees" that they had to pay, they still take these jobs and feel that they are worth it. There are few other options, not a lot of economic opportunities in this part of the country, just farming.

Here's a picture of Lee's cute little girl...

Comments Please...

After several months, I've finally fixed my blog so you can now leave comments. I know, I'm clearly a blogger rookies, thanks for your patience!

Bangkok vs. Udon Thani

This week I went to Bangkok for a couple of days and then went immediately out to a village when I returned. I was surprised at the contrast between urban and rural, developed and not quite so developed, rich and poor, crowded and wide open. In Bangkok they have built mall after mall surrounding the sky train, you can walk from one to the other on sidewalks along the skytrain, you don't even have to go down to the road anymore. In one mall I found a 3 floor bookstore, complete with a Starbucks inside and people drinking coffee and reading books without paying for them (just like in the US!). I can't resist the opportunity to look at English books and usually go to the movies in English while I'm in Bangkok. But this trip I didn't even drink Starbucks coffee, but just had instant Nescafe at the home of my pastor's wife, Uut, who I drove down with. I guess I'm adjusting to Thai culture, where Nescafe is much more popular than real coffee! It was fun to drive the 6 hours to Bangkok with Uut and to stay at her family's home, which happens to be on the same street I lived on when I first moved to Bangkok 10 years ago. So, we laughed at how many times we had probably passed each other without even realizing it.

Upon returning to Udon, I went out to a village church, the one in Na Khun Yai that is growing rubber trees and raising fish, with Norm and Dorie, my coworkers who are about to retire. They went to say goodbye, which was hard for them, but they were great. They will be really missed and have been a good example to me of the importance of taking the time to build relationships, to visit and listen to people and to spend time together, even when it doesn't seem like "productive work". It's amazing how essential this is in such a relationally oriented culture. Nothing you do has any value without being built on a solid relational foundation, and this can take a lot of time to build trust. Without this, it's almost impossible to find out what people really think, what they want and need. If someone comes in with an idea or a project, the Thai's will simply agree, they are too polite to express their true views if they are dissenting. However, once the person leaves they will change or fix or abandon the project and continue to do what they were doing before. This is one of the reasons why I'm so thankful for my "forced" language learning/culture learning time before I begin my "real work". It's allowing me to understand more of the culture here and begin to develop relationships. I find that many times already I have really misinterpreted people's actions and thoughts and misunderstood many things that I've seen and been exposed to. Will I ever get it?? I pray for the humility to keep learning and growing in this area!

Anyway, in the first picture above you see the sky train in Bangkok, with a new fountain next to one of the malls. In the second picture I'm being stared down by a water buffalo who wants to cross the road that we are driving down. Needless to say, we yielded and he won. If you have ever seen the damage that hitting a deer can do to a car, just imagine what marks a water buffalo will leave. That alone will make you yield everytime!

New Friends and Tasty Kangaroo...

This is my new friend Jiab, she's a college student at my church who is smart and funny and a strong leader among the young people. She told me that she wants to serve the Lord full time with her life, but doesn't know what that will look like, so she's praying about it. Last week I took her with me to a missions conference at the Bible School in a neighboring city about 1 1/2 hours away. We heard one of my old college professors speak to the Thai students about what it means to cross cultures in order to serve the Lord. This was a message that, according to Jiab, she hasn't really heard before. It seems like since Thailand is only 1% Christian, there isn't usually much of a challenge for young Christians to go overseas to serve the Lord. It was interesting for me to hear what she thought of the message, and she was still talking about it days later. It was also good for me to hear this message, as a good language practice opportunity, but also as an encouragement to me as someone who has crossed cultures to live and serve the Lord. It was a reminder to understand and accept the culture that I'm in, not to try to change it to be more comfortable for myself, but to remember that I am the guest here and I chose to leave my own culture behind. Also, it was a reminder of God's faithfulness to us no matter where we are and what new challenges we are dealing with, and finally a strong reminder of the importance of commitment.

It was really fun to hear Larry Person's speak, he preached in Thai, which was no problem for him as he grew up here in Thailand, but he was relatively easy to understand, I find that when foreigners speak Thai well, they are much easier for me to understand than Thais! But also, I understood his preaching style, as it was pretty American: introduction, three points, solid summary and a few memorable stories!

Oh, a highlight of the missions night was the chance to eat international food. The picture shows Jiab and I eating Kangaroo meatballs from Australia! They weren't bad, salty and a bit fatty. The Australian English teacher who brought them was appalled that her Thai students prepared them Thai style, complete with chilis! I thought they were much better that way. However, I'll admit that my favorite food of the evening came from the good old US booth - egg salad sandwiches, chocolate chip cookies and rootbeer floats! Definitely worth driving 1 1/2 hours to sample!

Repeated, meaningful practice in every day life (aka: Tips in Language Learning)

My full time job at this point is to learn the Thai language. When I started this a couple of months ago, this primarily involved book learning, as I had to relearn the Thai alphabet (which has 44 consonants and 28(ish) vowels), the tonal system, (5 tones, 4 tone markers which mean 3 different tones when used with the 3 different classes of consonants, and the lack of a tone marker can mean any of the 5 different tones, depending on the class of the first consonant, whether the vowel is short or long, and whether the final consonant is “dead” or “alive”). Just writing about this makes me want to move to a French speaking country...

If you are still reading…you are amazing!

The more I study Thai the more I’m convinced that Thais have to be some of the smartest people on earth. King Ramkamheng the Great invented the Thai alphabet in 1283, based on the Indian alphabets of Sanskrit and Pali. Knowing that his people were incredibly smart, the King decided to make things a bit more challenging by creating a system with no capital letters, no punctuation, and no spaces between words. There is, thankfully, a space at the end of each sentence. So, a Thai sentence would look something like this:

This is John 1:5: "The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not overcome it."

By the way, did I mention that the vowels can appear before, after, above, below and surrounding the consonants??

Anyway, I went on a little tangent with the explanation of the Thai language, but my point was that there was plenty of classroom learning to keep me busy when I first arrived. However, now I’ve learned all of the rules to navigate the Thai language, and although I still have problems with my high and rising tones, there is little more book learning for me, it’s all about vocabulary building, increasing my comprehension and sharpening my tones.

So, I’m trying to find multiples ways to study Thai, like watching Thai game shows, going to Thai movies (the ones with English subtitles are good if the translation is good because it really confirms what I know and is good for learning new phrases, vocab and slang), hanging out with my neighbors, reading books and studying my Bible in Thai. Tonite I watched a 30 minute Thai infomercial on upcoming seminars of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”.

The best way to learn language, everyone tells me, is in every day use. Well, sometimes I doubt if that’s true for me because I really need to see things written and need to repeat them many times before I’ve really learned them, which is hard to do when I’m at the post office and there is a long line of people behind me and I'm trying to remember the classifer for stamps. But last week I had a good experience of learning language by every day use. It started with a small fire in my house…a citronella candle lit to keep the mosquitoes at bay accidentally became closely acquainted with the pillowcase that covers my printer to keep away the dust. I was able to put it out with no major problems, except that I now need to find something new to cover my printer. But, I decided at this point that since I live in a house with bars on my windows, it would be a good idea to have a fire extinguisher. So, like any good language student I looked in my dictionary to find the word before heading out shopping. But, for some reason this word is not in my Thai/English dictionary (although you will be happy to know that the ever useful words firebrigade and firedamp are in my dictionary…)

So I went to Lotus, the “walmart type” store in my city and used hand motions and sound effects to tell the clerk that I needed a machine that could put out a small fire. He didn’t have one, but taught me the phrase “Kreung Dap Peun” and I went to the Big C, only here I couldn’t quite remember the phrase so I asked for a “Krueng Doot Foon”, which is a vacuum cleaner, but quickly realized my mistake and was again given the correct phrase, but also told that this store did not have one. Finally, at the fourth store I was confident in my ability to ask for a “Kreung Dap Peun” and was easily understood, I couldn’t help but think that the clerks were probably in awe of my linguistical ability……and now my Kreung Dap Peun sits in my kitchen, easing my mind and serving as a constant reminder that the best way to really a language is repeated, meaningful practice in everyday life…..

For anyone still out there.....

If you haven't completely given up on my lack of blogging, here are some Christmas pictures. I spent Christmas weekend visiting different village churches, joining in with their Christmas parties and activities and found myself really encouraged. First, I loved the simplicity that Christmas is about the birth of Christ, and the parties celebrated that. Typically, the activities involved a meal together, a brief explanation of Christ's birth, fun games and songs and presents for the kids. Thais are really fun, joyful people and it was fun to play games together, sing, watch kids excitedly open gifts and be really thankful, whether it was a candy bar, flip flops, or a bag of rice! I of course had to join in the fun by singing in English. People were extremely gracious....

Here's a girl praying for our dinner....



Christmas Dinner....Thai style! Eating on the floor, everyone gets their own bowl of rice and shares common main dishes. We made wraps with lettuce, rice, fish and spicy hot sauce.


Here's me and my coworkers, notice the great Poinsetta Tree behind us, I am trying to grow one in front of my house right now, it's only 2 feet tall right now, I wonder if it'll make it to this great height??
For those of you who worry that my Christmas is looking a bit too rural and rustic, here's a picture of one of the Christmas trees in a huge mall in Bangkok....the contrasts of the rich and poor in Thailand never cease to amaze me.

Here are the some of the women at my church, who dressed in these traditional clothes to do a special Thai dance. I also have it on video, which I'm trying to figure out how to add to the blog site. I'm thankful for my church, I'm really enjoying it and slowly building relationships and friendships, and learning a lot about Thai rural life from these great people.


I made instant friends with these kids by playing soccer, the little guy dressed like Santa was so sad when I left. This church has a real outreach in their community with the kids through a soccer team, allowing them to travel, see different parts of Thailand, learn discipline and teamwork and achieve success while they work towards a common goal.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This weekend was American Thanksgiving, and the first time I cried since coming to back to Thailand ( I guess it's good to get that out of the way....). I, obviously, was feeling homesick thinking of all my family being together without me. I was sad for them too, and felt a little bad, because it seems like I am usually the one missing and I wonder if my family, especially my niece and nephews, think that I don't care about them. But my family never gives me a hard time about it, so for that I'm thankful.

This weekend I was also feeling thankful for the privileges that I grew up with that are so easy to take for granted, like education, a supportive family, the opportunity to work and support myself without worrying too much about it, and for the most part being pretty safe and comfortable most of my life. Being back in Thailand has reminded me how these are not basic rights that everyone has, most people in the world have really hard lives. I hesitate to share these examples because I don't want to exploit their stories, but I decided that it's important to give you a glimpse into the lives of people I'm meeting here:

First, I met a man today in church whose wife went to Australia for a whole year to pick fruit to earn money for the family. He's home raising the 3 boys.

I also met a pastor who has been dating his fiance for 9 years because he cannot afford the dowry that should be given to her family before they are able to marry.

I've become friends with a woman who visits the apartment complex where I live. She has a 3 month old baby and is always asking me child raising advice (my 2 years helping care for triplets is coming in handy...). The other day she told me that her husband was sexually abusing her 10 year old daughter from her previous relationship, so she sent her daughter away to a boarding school, but didn't know what to do about her husband. She wants to leave him, but is not sure how she will be able to take care of her baby because she had no money of her own.

Another woman I know is raising her 8 year old son by herself as her husband lives in Japan, where he can make enough money to support his family. The paperwork that allows him to work there legally has expired, so he plans to stay there indefinitely. His wife at one time lived in Japan with her husband, but her paperwork also expired, so she cannot go back. At this point, this family doesn't know when they will be able to be together again.

Meeting these people and hearing these stories has left me feeling hopeless with the lack of options that often come from the lack of resources and opportunities. It humbles me because essentially I've never been left without options or ways to be safe and have my needs met, even if it simply meant moving back home and letting my family help me out for a while. I'm sure some of these people would be grateful for these opportunities. As I live and work in Thailand right now, I'm not making a lot of money. But Thai people always say that I'm rich. I used to get frustrated at that, but now I realize that they are right because I have options. I'm choosing to work here in Thailand, but I could also choose to return to the US and make more money. I am rich, because I have the choice to give up my opportunity to make more money. The families that I meet here don't have that choice.

Salt Farming 101

This week I went to Ban Dung and saw a salt farm, and then harvested rice. First, the salt farm:

They pump water from the earth, which has salt in it I guess, and put it in small plots of land. In about a week, the water dries out, leaving just the salt. This salt is then gathered and ground (before grinding, it looks kind of like salt used to melt ice). Once ground, it’s put in large 50kg bags. 1000kg of this “black salt” (although it’s just off white) sells for 500 baht, about $15. This salt is used in industry, not to eat.

Here is the team grinding the salt and impressing me with their strength to carry these 50 kg bags.

To "make salt" that's suitable for cooking or eating, the water is taken from the ground and put in large vats. It’s boiled for about 1 day, with paracetamol (which is Tylenol!) and some rice. This helps the color to be white, and this salt is suitable for eating. A 5kg bag sells for about 8 baht, or 25 cents. Amazing!!

This farm we visited made the most of their land and their resources. They used the husks that are removed from the rice when it is harvested, as well as corn husks to make the fire. They also raised fish around the outside of the salt fields, as well as Eucalyptus trees. These didn’t seem related to the salt farming, but it was interesting none the less.

The downside of this salt farming village was that there was no grass, in fact the ground surrounding all the little huts and houses was filled with piles of what looked like black sand…the remains of the fires that were used to boil the salt. As we drove out of the village, we of course bought 10kg of salt from the farmers who were so gracious to explain the process to us.

Final step: weigh the salt and sell itat stands all along the roadside....as well as send it Bangkok and beyond.

Thai food.....

Traditionally Thai food is eaten sitting on the ground or the floor, sharing common dishes. Here I'm enjoying Vietnamese spring rolls at an outdoor sala by a small, man made lake. We later ate barbequed fish that had once been swimming by our sala, papaya salad (called somtam), sticky rice and larb (spicy minced pork). The fish comes whole, but I've mastered getting the meat off without eating skin, bones or anything else that doesn't particularly interest me. I also consume lots of fruit here, with pineapple and papaya on the top of the list.

Psalm 139

This Psalm has always been important to me, and verse 9 continues to emerge as a recurring encouragement: "If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast..."

God has brought this verse to mind as I've moved to Korea, Thailand, Philadelphia, and now back to Thailand once again. I'm thankful that there's nowhere I can go where God's all powerful hand cannot hold me fast. There's nowhere I can go that's far away from Him. This thought is especially encouraging when I feel lonely and very far away from those I love the most, who are not just on the other side of the sea, but on the other side of the world. The good news is that God is just as present with them as he is with me.

Let the adventure in Thailand begin!!