Love & Serve: Dec 2010

Cambodia and Angkor What?

We are back from Cambodia and had a wonderful time while we were there. Going into the trip we did not know exactly what to expect, but we did our best to be tough, flexible and optimistic, thanks to Bob Davidson! After a long 8 hour bus ride we arrived in Bangkok in the middle of the night. We found a small coffee shop connected to a guest house that we waited in for a good 3 hours. We then took a van to the border and had to cross over by walking. It was amazing to immediately see the differences between Thailand and Cambodia. Cambodia is much poorer and the architecture and structural design of the buildings is years behind Thailand; which is not too surprising considering all the political unrest that the county has had in the last century. It was very eye opening to see that kind of poverty. There were many children without clothes, babies without any adults around them, just a cup for people to put money into. We also saw many land mine victims who had lost limbs in accidents. We saw all of this in the first few minutes of crossing the border. Once we arrived to our hotel we were pleasantly surprised by our accommodations. All three of us shared a room and had our own bed. We had a bathroom with an American style toilet and a TV with English channels. Here at the Zone we do not have a TV so we have not watch any in the last 4 and a half months so it was so much fun to watch CSI!

Napping at the bus station in Cambodia

While we were in Cambodia we had the awesome opportunity to teach at two local schools for two days. The groups that we were with from Japan and Singapore did an amazing job at preparing stations for the English days at the schools. Kara was at the spelling station, where the students had to learn to spell vocabulary words from the nativity story. Hilary was at a craft station and I was at the "days of the week" station. In all, there were five groups the students rotated to. The kids had a blast. After they had completed all five stations, we ate Japanese curry together that the group from Japan generously cooked. In the afternoon we put on a carnival for the kids. They had to go the the testing station and answer a question from what they had learned that day. If they answered correctly, they received a game coupon. There were games that ranged from throwing ping pong balls into a box, horseshoes, hit the coconut with a tennis ball to blowing a ping pong ball in a pool of water. The kids had a super fun time, and as they won the games they received prizes. All the prizes were used clothes that had been donated. As the children received their clothes, their eyes lit up wit joy. Many of them won clothes to bring home to their siblings and parents. It was very rewarding to give clothing to these children who either did not have a shirt on the back or desperately needed a new one.

Crafts station at a school

The ping pong station

We (the Thailand group) did a special intensive English class for the core group of students that we were working with. These students are being supported by the church in Singapore to go to English school. They traveled with us to the school and were our helpers and translators. We put on a class for them to teach about heath and good habits. We preformed skits about what happens when you make bad choices and what happens when you make good choices. We ended the class, by playing the board game that we have spent months preparing. The class was a success and the kids learned a lot and had fun.

Intensive English with our sponsored kids

Our favorite day was Friday when we went to the Temples and Angkor Wat. We met a lot of the street children who spend their days selling bracelets and post cards to tourist. After they realized that we we not like their average tourist they stopped trying to sell us their goods, but instead walked with us through the ruins and laughed and played with us. We had a blast with children and it was really hard saying good bye.

Some of our kids at Bayon 

Hanging out with our kids

One of the little girls that was selling at Angkor Wat

We ended the trip with a trip to 60 ROAD! We heard about 60 Road all week from our kids, and knew that they desperately wanted us to take them. So Friday night they each received three dollars and went crazy at 60 Road which is a local carnival. I have to admit it was fun! We road the Ferris wheel and the bumper cars with the kids and had just as much fun as they did. It was a great way to end a great trip.

Throughout our whole experience, our eyes have been opened to the life styles of others. We have seen poverty like we have never seen before, and yet we have seen the joy in a child's eyes from receiving something so small.  This trip has changed us and shaped us and really made us think about our own lives. We are so blessed to be born in America and have so many unbelievable opportunities. God is so good and faithful. Keep Cambodia and the children in your prayers, they are God's precious children.

Tiny Helper, a precious child of God

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

For the past two months we have been preparing to go to Cambodia with other groups from Japan and Singapore. While we are there we will work with kids who sell on the street in Angkor Wat and teach English in their schools. Our big project has been making lessons for the older kids about good health and habits. We have made up a game that has gone through many many revisions and now we think it is perfect, or at least close to perfect. This will be my second trip to Cambodia and I am excited to see some of the kids again and to get to have this experience with everyone else. The bus trip is about 15 hours so we will all be a little sore at the end but I know it will be amazing. What is better than a really long bus ride for bonding! We will be gone for about a week and probably won't have internet most of the time so don't expect too much from us in the way of communication.

Amanda and I officially graduated from Thai 2 this week and we are not starting again until January so it is a nice break for a while. Yay for Christmas break! For the last day of class we had a field trip to an elephant camp and hospital. It was fun to do something different with our classmates outside of class and once again the long bus ride was perfect for chatting and catching up. There was a tiny (sort of) baby elephant that was super super cute and I wanted to steal it and bring it home but I hear they are expensive to raise. I love elephants if you didn't know!

Eating worms at the market after the elephant camp

Baby Ellie!

On Wednesday Robert and his family invited us to dinner and to come help decorate their house for Christmas. It is great to feel part of a family here. They are always so welcoming and giving and so much fun! It is kind of weird to decorate someone else's tree because everyone definitely has a certain way you like to do it yourself. But with all of our forces combined it was beautiful in the end. There is Christmas in Thailand but it is mainly completely secular and not everyone celebrates. The malls and markets are all decorated and it is beautiful!

Stringing popcorn for the tree

Christmas decorating with the Reagans

This week I also cooked Thai food for cell group! Well really I payed for it and P Wah cooked and she taught me along the way. We made gang kiao wan gai, green curry chicken, and it was really good. I might be able to make it by myself one day, we'll see.

-Hilary

I'm Here!

Hello America! I am just settling in to my second week here in Thailand and it has been great so far. I have found several things I can eat here; unfortunately none of it is Thai food. Right now my diet mostly consists of tuna, bread, goldfish (the snack crackers, not the actual fish), and the occasional ice-cream cone. I also discovered that at Rimping, one of the grocery stores, they sell cans of refried beans and flour tortillas! This might sound strange to you, but it makes me very happy!


Amanda, Hilary, and Mark have been here for nearly 4 months and it seems like they are experts on Thailand. It is like I have my own personal tour guides. They have all been taking a Thai class at Payap University and I am amazed at how much Thai they have learned. The three of them have been very helpful to me over these past two weeks!

on Payap campus celebrating graduation

Looking over the city of Chiang Mai

 

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have started helping Robert teach an English class that consists of 4 girls from China. At first, the language barrier was a little intimidating for all of us, but we soon found some common ground. We discovered that all 5 of us enjoy the Twilight book/movie series and we share a love of Taylor Swift. I guess some things are just cross-cultural! I am really enjoying working with these girls and I am looking forward to getting to know them better.

Yesterday, two of our English students took Amanda, Hilary, and I to Doi Suthep, a Buddhist temple here in Chiang Mai. It is a big tourist attraction, because it is situated high on a mountain with a beautiful view of the city. It was very crowded when we went and it made me so sad to see hundreds of people bowing down in prayer and worship to a false God. Thailand is a country very devoted to Buddhism, so please join us in praying that we can reach as many people and plant as many seeds as possible in the time we have here.

At Doi Suthep with our student Neung

Right now, we are preparing for our upcoming trip to Cambodia. We leave this Saturday and will be gone for one week. While we are there we will be teaching English lessons during the day and healthy habits during the afternoon and evening. We are very excited about this opportunity and we can’t wait to see what God has in store for us! Please keep us in your prayers as we travel from Chiang Mai to Cambodia and back again.

Thanks for reading our blog!

Until next time,

Kara

Happy Loi Krathong!

After three months of waiting Kara finally arrived this week! It has been really fun to show her around and try to get her acquainted with everyone and everything. She has been amazed at how much we can function here and how many friends we have and looking back on it we have learned so much in the last three months. Our Thai is coming along nicely, we have lots of Thai friends from church and students at Payap that we are trying to connect, and we just feel very at home. God has really blessed us during our time here and I know that he will do amazing things through Kara as well. Amanda just got back from the States yesterday night and had an amazing time there at her sister's wedding and hanging out with her fiancee. We are all glad to have her back.

Kara arriving at the airport!

This weekend is Loi Krathong here in Thailand. Right now it sounds like a war outside because of all of the fireworks. My favorite part is the release of lanterns into the sky at night and you can just see hundreds of them all at one time floating away on the wind. Its so cool! They also float (or loi) krathongs down the river as a thank you to the river and it is very beautiful. The streets are crazy and there are people just everywhere. We had a girl's weekend last weekend when the boys were all gone on men's retreat and we took pictures on a famous bridge in the city. Already, the streets were extra crowded and there were fireworks zooming over our heads.

Kohm fai (lanterns) and Thai outifts

Girls night at the bridge

  

We were all invited to a special Loi Krathong party at the Chief Justice's house. We all bought traditional Thai skirts and shirts and tried our best not to stick out like crazy. There were 600 people there and we only saw 2 other farangs. There were crazy dancers and singers and everyone was really dressed up and there was amazing food everywhere. We got to hang out with P Rung who is a church member here and a judge at the courthouse and his nephew Onglee. All of us sat with the P Pat the Chief Justice's wife and our friend Ba Tick most of the time. It was so fun and really a once in a lifetime experience. We also invited all of them to our Christmas party and I hope they will come.

About to loi krathong with Onglee

Our hosts the Chief Justice and his wife P Pat

Open Eyes

Firstly, Kara is coming here in exactly one week from today! We are so excited and can't wait. Currently we are airing out her room (its smells really weird) and looking for ways to decorate for her. When she gets here she will jump right in with what we are doing and substitute for Amanda's English class while she is gone in America for her sister's wedding.

Secondly, we had a crazy awesome time this weekend getting our visas renewed in Laos. We went with our friend Steve from New Zealand who needed his visa renewed too and we met up with our friend Haley in Phayao. We made pizza, lit and sent off lanterns, ate crickets, ran into a cow, talked to some really funny ladies at a temple, waited in line forever in Laos immigration, had a prostitute in our guesthouse, befriended the Thai owner of a Mexican restaurant, and generally had an adventure.

Lanterns in Phayao

Crossing the Mekong River to Laos

On the bus home from Chiang Rai Amanda and I were talking about how we are becoming more aware of how lost the majority of Thai people really are. When we first arrived, it was easy to just see how new and exciting everything was but now we can look around more critically and see how much their society needs God. Please pray with us about these things and pray that we can continue to show God to the people here.

Idolatry is very rampant here. There are temples on every high place and in every city with several statues of Buddha in each. It is almost painful to watch the people bow down and offer sacrifices to these golden images. It is so easy to relate this to the people in the Bible always being tempted to bow down to a statue. Recently Amanda said she felt like Shadrach, Meschac and Abednego when we went to a temple and were the only ones not bowing down. One of our students said that Thai people ask for things from Buddha like we ask for things from our god. It is hard to explain the difference and so easy to just nod in agreeance. We strive daily to be lights in a lost world.

This weekend there were only 4 rooms at our guesthouse and we had two of them and one man was in the other. We realized that night that he had a Thai prostitute in his room and we struggled with what to do. Do we say something or simply try to ignore it? It is a common issue here where many farang (white) men come to Thailand for the express purpose to find prostitutes. There are so many young girls here who know nothing else and think that prostitution is the only way they can ever make money. We must help girls understand their value and worth to their heavenly father.

Thai family structure is also changing where parents will leave their children with the rest of the family and move to a bigger city to find work. This puts so much pressure on the rest of the family and is not generally a healthy life for the child, never knowing their parents. And it is very normal in Thai families to have infidelity when they are in these different cities but to simply ignore it to save face. I know it happens in America too but it definitely feels more real to me here. One friend told us a story of a Thai man who had two wives, not legally, and brought them both to his father's funeral and everyone joked about it.

Ladyboys are men that act and dress like women. They are literally everywhere. Buddhism is very accepting and open to new things and this has allowed ladyboys to really be accepted into everyday Thai culture. There is no sense of this being wrong and it is so clear in the Bible that homosexuality is wrong and that God made us the way that he wants us to be. It is important for us to love the person and know that God loves them and wants them to know him.

Thinking of all of these things about the lack of God's will in Thailand makes us more ready and willing than ever to try to share Him with the people around us. We want to be light and hope to the people here and we are excited and encouraged by what we see happening around us.

A little R&R Time- Relaxing and Rocking

This week was the only time for a while that both Amanda and I and Mark didn't have school, since we are doing different programs on different schedules. We knew we wanted to travel somewhere and when we heard our friend Berm was going to Pai we jumped on the chance to go with him. Six of us, including his student Billy and our friend Lisa, squeezed into Berm's little car and took the crazy mountain road to Pai. It was so beautiful! I really love the mountains here, they are so green and misty and ... beautiful! Anyways, we jammed out the whole way and had to take a few stretch breaks and we were all very glad that no one got car sick. Apparently the motto there is "Do nothing in Pai" which means its a great place to relax, hangout,and eat lots of food. There is a cool market every night and lots of farang food and we all bought tshirts. Amanda wanted me to get one with people throwing up on it, there were many of these, but I refused. We stayed at an Israeli guesthouse that had awesome shwarmas and hummus. We drank a lot of coffee and ate too much. Billy's 12th birthday was the second day we were there and we let him pick where to eat and generally bugged him all day with our celebrations. I really thought he was like 15 so I was surprised to know he was just turning 12. We went to a Chinese village and did this crazy ferris wheel type thing. It was hilarious and Lisa and Amanda were screaming the whole time! Later we visited a waterfall and I got a sunburn being there for about 20 minutes. Everyone here thinks white skin is so cool but it really is dumb when I burn all the time. Anyways, the whole trip was really relaxing and fun and a great way for all of us to bond even more. Lisa is going to be taking Thai classes with Mark starting tomorrow so we are loving getting to know her better. One night the router was out at the guesthouse and we even got Billy to play Phase 10 with us instead of playing on his computer. He is hilarious and I'm glad that we got to spend his birthday with him. Here is a link to a video Mark made of our trip...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwb6pawh4iY&feature=share 
-Hilary

Ferris Wheel

Our group in our new Pai shirts

Happy Halloween, by the way! On Saturday night we attended an awesome rockstar party thrown by the Cheung Doi Church of Christ. It was so much fun. There were members from about 3-4 churches that all came together to have a great time of fun and fellowship. There was a buffet of awesome Thai food, a live band, amazing rockstar decorations, and everyone dressed up like a rockstar. The band was great. They sang mostly Thai song, but much to our surprise we were able to sing along to some of the songs! There was even guest appearances by Elvis, Linkin Park, and The Beatles. I was chosen to participate in an air guitar game. I rocked out so much that the plastic cup that was holding my hair up fell out. It was hilarious. Hilary was chosen to play a "raise your hand" game. We both lost, but had a good time doing it. We were able to hang out with one of our students and good friends, Nit. She really got out of her comfort zone and even danced with us. After the party, we went to a friends house to watch a scary movie and eat some imported candy corn in the spirit of Halloween. We didn't last the whole movie because we had to take our friend home, but we did not complain because we were terrified. We finished the movie on Sunday, and it really was not scary at all during the day. All in all we had a great Halloween and hope you did too!
-Amanda

Hil and Nit

Amanda in the air guitar contest