Thai Class, Teaching English, and a Funeral

     Amanda and I have been learning Thai for four days now at Payap University. Ajaan Noi, our teacher, is so cute and funny. She is really good at making us practice our tones and pronouncing everything correctly. We have learned so much already I can't imagine what we will know after four months. Right now it is just speaking but in Thai 3 we will start reading and writing. We practice a lot with our Thai friends and they are very nice to go over and over how to say our birthday or what city they are from. Its funny how in English you can pretty much understand what someone is trying to say even if their grammar isn't too good. But in Thai if you say a wrong tone they just stare at you and can't understand at all. Tones are hard and you feel silly, like you are singing all the time.
    English classes are going well. This is our first week teaching everyday and I have had six students. They are all at very different levels so it has been a challenge to know where to start and what they need to learn. I am really enjoying it. You get to know a lot about a person when it is just the two of you and you have an hour to talk. One of my students is a Christian and wants to study "the history Bible" which I think means she just wants to read the Bible in English with me. This is finals week at Payap so most of the students are studying and can't come to English lessons and then they have a two week break so we won't see many of our students for a while.
     Yesterday we had the opportunity to go to a Thai Buddhist funeral. Our friend Un's grandmother passed away and we went as a church to support her and show our respect. Please pray for her and her family. The funeral was in a Buddhist temple and is several days long but we only went one night. It is so interesting to see how it is a struggle to know the difference between culture and religion for Thai Christians. Traditionally there is a time monks chant and the mourners wai the whole time. But all of us Christians did not wai and you could tell that the rest of the people there were wondering why. It was an interesting cultural experience and it made me more aware of how it can be hard to be a Christian here and how we as Christians are called to be different from the world around us. Many of our Thai friends struggle with this in their own families.

Our first day of school in our uniforms!

Ajaan Noi

Off day - watching Wall Street at Airport Plaza

Our Thai class

F4, Mountain, Church meeting, Payap uniforms!

Hello cyber space!
          Hil and I have been busy bees the past few days. On Friday night we had an F4 meeting, which stands for, Fun Family Fellowship Fridays! (I think :) )We had a great time fellowshipping with our sister church, Cheung Doi. We had great food and a wonderful time of worship. We also had the opportunity to share our testimony with someone we did not know well. It was a fun and interesting way to meet someone. You can learn a lot about a person, by listening to their testimonies. (you should try it one day!)

          Saturday we climbed Doi Suthep. Doi in Thai means Mountain! We went with our friends P Ying, Steve and one of the other interns, James. Climbing the mountain was NOT easy. It was hard work. We made it pretty far, but then Hil started feeling sick and we started down the mountain. I was glad, not that she was feeling sick, but that we were heading down, because I knew I could not go on, but I had no excuse besides my "out of shapeness." We made it to the main road and caught a rot daeng (red truck) to an awesome restaurant and drank smoothies until our friends made it down and met us for lunch. 

            Today, Sunday, Hil and I were able to be part of the church planning meeting. These are meetings that the church has quarterly to discuss and plan what is going on in the Church body. Hil and I shared with the group what we are learning, contributing and taking from our internship. Besides our part, the rest of the meeting was in Thai, but we were pleasantly surprised about the amount that we were able to understand. We could not understand details, but we got the main ideas of the meeting. It was great to see how each member of the church had a voice in the meeting and they talked about everything you could think of!

           Our Thai is coming along, but we are ready to hit it running tomorrow! We start our intensive Thai class in the morning. We will be studying 15 hours a week, three hours a day, five days a week. We hope to learn a lot and are excited to be students at Payap University. Hil and I went out with P Ying and Dao and bought our uniforms today. We actually are not required to wear uniforms to our class, but we want to fit in and they are just so cute!

       
Love you all! -Amanda

A List of Good Things

Many important things have happened today.

1. Amanda and I drove Mark to the airport and all the way back by ourselves and didn't get lost. It was quite a success. My navigation and her driving are getting much better. The other way around not so much but its a good thing we have each other! He will be back on Monday and we will try not to miss him to much.

2. The LST group left today. They were so great and we will miss them a lot! They brought in several new people that have signed up to continue studying with us. We will start teaching English every afternoon next week and we are so thankful that LST has set the foundation with many of the students for us.

3.We officially signed up to take Intensive Thai I at Payap University today. We thought we were already registered but with the help of our friend P Wah we discovered we still had to go in and talk to them before class started. We will begin on Monday and we are so excited!

4. Because we are starting Thai class at Payap today was our last day of study with our friend Oi. She has taught us so much and we are hoping we will be a little ahead when we start. We at least know some basic things that have already helped us. Thanks Oi!

5. We went to a school in Sameong yesterday and taught English to 8th graders. They were really fun and hopefully learned a bit. We taught very basic English, like colors, days of the week, animals, and my group was greetings and conversation which proved to be a bit hard. We just tried to make English fun and continued a relationship with one of the teachers, Kru Boo Pa. We hope to go again before we leave.

Having fun with Dao and Onglee

Bible Study on Friday Night

LST Pizza and Domino Party - Oliver, Mark, and Berm

 

Dominoes!

On the way to Samoeng

LST ladies!

One of my classes in Samoeng

Kru Boo Pa

A Few New Pictures

Elephant painting a picture!

Hilary and Aun Aun at the Brownie and Bingo Party

Amanda and P Aon waiting to begin English class with LST

Finally Settling In

        Our stay in Thailand is starting to feel more long term,consistent, and more like home and less like a vacation. We have been very busy here and are on more of a consistent schedule. We, the interns, are starting to feel comfortable in our driving and have been going many places on our own and are getting a good grasp on where things are in the city. We make a good team and it has been really fun learning each other's strengths and weaknesses and playing off each other and working together. We went in search of fabric and wound up at the Wararat Market. It is local market that is unlike any of the tourist markets we have been to. There is a whole section of local food including, but not limited to, pigs head, stomach, live eels, and many interesting sights and smells. It was quite the accomplishment to find it by ourselves, drive up the steep incline into the car garage (yeah Mark!), find the fabric store and somewhat communicate with the people there.
       We also want to the Measa Elephant camp to see some amazingly talented elephants. These elephants were able to play soccer, throw darts, and paint pictures. It was amazing to watch them during the show. We loved it and so did the LST ladies. They all bought a picture painted by an elephant and were so happy to be able to ride an elephant!
       This past Sunday we had an ice cream, brownie, and bingo party. It was a great success. We had over 40 people at the party and we made some new friends who are interested in studying with us. It was a lot of fun to watch the Thai people play bingo, many of them for the first time.
        As interns we have equipping time twice a week to prepare our hearts and minds to be more in tune with the will of God. Right now we are studying about spiritual disciplines and it has been very insightful to have a deeper understanding of things we can do in our daily lives to be in the presents of God more often. Each of the interns are teaching three of the lessons and Hilary and I have both taught one so far. Hilary taught about Meditation and I taught about prayer. We are learning how to meditate and listen to the will of God and we learned about intercessory prayer and how the purpose of prayer is for you to be changed. It is impossible to pray and not be changed. We have also studied about fasting and learned the importance of ridding our body of our daily desires so that we can feast on God's word. Fasting is feasting. After we have our study on the spiritual disciplines we always listen to Dave Ramsey speak on healthy Christian financial planning. This have been very interesting and will be very beneficial to our lives. I am very thankful that Robert is helping us learn how to manage our money (or lack there of) in healthy and godly ways.
          Other than our daily routines, we have been busy building strong relationships with the Thai people here. Hilary and I met two wonderful girls named A and Nong. Their English is good enough to have a simple conversation, but they are craving to know more. We start classes with them tomorrow and we pray that this will open a pathway for them to inquire and seek the Lord. We have also had the wonderful opportunity to assist the LST ladies purchase and hand out over 40 Bibles to new students who are interested in God's word. We are amazed at the work that is happening here. Please continue to pray for these people to continue to coming to the Zone and that they have a desire to learn more about Christianity. Pray that Hilary and I can be shining lights to them and that God will use us to bring more of his children to him. It is our prayer that we can be vessels to help bring answers and truth to a lost nation.
        Lastly, we start our Thai classes at Payap University in a week and a half (Monday 27 Sept). We are so excited to be part of the campus life and improve our Thai. We hope that within a month we will be able to have meaningful (simple but meaningful) conversations with our new friends in Thai.

Prayer Requests

Today we have a few things that we hope you will be praying about.


1. Bringing in more students to study with the Let's Start Talking teachers. Four women have come to teach English here through the Bible and they are having a hard time getting students to come consistently. We pray that we are able to build strong relationships with these new students and that they learn and understand about Christ in the material they are reading.

2. Aun Aun, Amanda's English student who she is studying the book of John with right now. She is curious and learning a lot. We pray for continued growth in her and for her heart to be open to what she is learning.

3. Dao, a student who is a regular here and is studying the Redbook now. She is a freshman at Payap and is so fun to hang out with. We pray that the lessons she learns will lead her ever closer to Christ and that she will continue to bring her friends and classmates to the Zone.

4. Team unity. After being here for four weeks we pray that we interns and the mission team will continue to grow closer to each other and that we will work together for the glory of God in all that we do.

5. Guidance for how to best reach out to the people around us. We are continually meeting new people and we want to draw them into the community here. We pray that God will show us who he wants us to draw in and how we should do it.

6. Thanksgiving for the time we have spent here and the relationships we have formed. We have been so blessed to have amazing Thai Christian friends here and many non-Christian friends who we are trying to connect with the church here.

Thank you for joining with us in prayer.

Mark's Updates...

Open publication - Free publishing - More thailand

God is at work in Thailand

Firstly, Mark's computer was returned! It was found in the back of our truck with a sign that said "In Car." We are so happy it is back so you can all expect more awesome videos soon.

Secondly, I want to tell you an amazing story that happened to me last Friday. I have been teaching English lessons/ Bible studies with a girl named Aun Aun. She is 15 and her family is Buddhist, but she has been coming to the Zone since the beginning of the summer and is open to Christianity. She is the one who sought me out and asked me to be her teacher. We have studies three times now and we are reading form the Book of John. She read to chapter 4 with one of the summer interns and while there were no interns here she read to chapter 13 on here own in Thai. She and I started reading chapter 5 in English and are discussing it so that she can better understand what she is reading. So back to Friday. Aun Aun and I had a lesson at 6:00 on Friday. Everyone at the Zone had gone to dinner with a group of people, but I decided to hang back and do the lesson with her. When she got here, she was surprised that no one else was here. She asked where they were and I told her that they had gone to dinner. She could not believe that I did not go and that I waited at the Zone to do the Bible study with her. It almost brought her to tears and after about ten minutes of her telling me "you should have gone," I finally convinced her that I would rather study the Bible with her than go to dinner with other people. We had an awesome Bible study and she asked a lot of really great, thoughtful questions. I think she is studying and reading a lot on her own. She asked me if just reading the Bible was enough to be a Christian, and that gave me the awesome opportunity to talk to her about giving her life to Christ through baptism. She understood what I was saying and was very receptive. She also asked me about a lot of things that she was confused about. She had read "The DaVinci Code" and was very confused about all the contradictions. At that point, I was able to clarify a great deal to her and explain that as Christians we believe that the Bible is the truth from God. To close the lesson we prayed together. After our lesson, the group was not back from dinner yet, so Aun Aun and I went to have dinner together and walk around at a night market. We had a great time together. On our walk home she started to sing some church songs in Thai and in English. It was amazing to be there with my new friend who was not a Christian, in a country where the vast majority of the people at not Christian, walking down the road singing songs to God at the top of our lungs. It was almost surreal. We really connected and I shared with her some of my own personally struggles and she told me that she would pray for me! Wow, I was amazed. It was a great experience and I can not wait until our next lesson tomorrow!

-Amanda

The Mystery of the Missing Computer

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Case Number 1
Detectives: Hilary and Amanda

8:30 It started out as a normal Sunday here in Thailand. All was well in Chiang Mai. We woke up.

10:00 The first out of the ordinary event was the arrival of four new farang. They are the new Let's Start Talking group from Longview. They all seem very nice and are very excited to be here.

4:00 The second unusual event was the LST sign up where there were many many new people in the Zone who were signing up for times to read with the new readers. We met a few new people and we saw nothing to cause concern. Our friends P Tik and P Oan from the English lessons at the courthouse came and will be studying here for the next few weeks. They invited us to go to Walking Street with them and to eat a Japanese dinner.

5:00 Of course we accepted and had a great time. P Tik was very generous and showered us with gifts, drinks, and an amazing dinner. She even said she was falling in love with us and asked us to call her Bah "Aunt" Tik.

10:00 When we returned we were shocked to find that Mark's laptop was missing! He remembered putting it in the spare room to charge it and saw it last at lunch time. In order to solve this mystery, after a long search and a discussion with Robert and our friends Wut and Bon, we decided to call the local authorities.

11:00 A drunk cop came with a teddy bear notebook and a pink pen to investigate. After unlacing his combat boots and leaving them outside he searched the scene of the crime in order to find the guilty culprit. After inquiring if he had a way to track the serial number or mac address he responded by saying, "Is that possible?" After seeing he would not be much help we proceeded to seek out higher authorities and took a trip to the local police station.

11:30 Mark gave the detective all of his information while we sat outside and watched the goings on of a Thai police station. We saw two people go in the jail and one was a transvestite.
12:00 A post-police station roti(fried sweet pastry thing smothered in condensed milk and sugar) was in order. We ate the last ones on the man's cart.
The odds of this mystery being solved are slim to none and we are sad for Mark's loss, but he is taking it very well. We are going to be much more careful with our belongings now.

Another Awesome Video by Mark