When God Opens the Door

In the past few months God has given us the opportunity to start visiting Pawn's grandmother's village. It started with us taking Pawn's grandmother to the hospital when another truck wasn't available. After we did that twice they expressed interest in having us come to teach English to the students. Saturday is the only free day that we have, and Saturday was perfect for them. So we decided to go about twice a month.

We had been invited to come and spend the night in the village, but leaving our house has always been a problem. We have to leave someone here to take care of Texas and to guard the house. This summer we had someone from Antioch Church come and stay while we went to Isaan, and that worked out really well. It's convenient as long as it's not a ministry Antioch is involved in; then I'm usually the one that stays home.

We spent our first night in this village in October during the semester break. We had a lot of fun, and the people were happy to have us.
The kitchen was built on to this house, and the smoke quickly filled it up. It was not a good time to be in the upstairs bedroom. We enjoyed eating with the family, and they expressed surprise that we would eat with them. We look at it and wonder why we wouldn't, but I'm sure some foreigners would turn their noses up at the food. If we only understood how important the sharing of food is!

After supper, we played a game of Uno with a couple of the students from the village. Hopefully as we spend more time there, we'll have more students who will come and fellowship with us.On Saturday morning it was time for our English class. We had our biggest classes yet with over 40 students present. Rusty had the smaller children, and I had the older students. Teaching English is a lot more fun when you have a good sized class! Rusty had had some Hmong students in his class before, but this was my first Saturday to have them in my class as well. So now I've had Karen, Hmong, and northern Thai students in my class.

The Hmong students come from the village at the top of the mountain. We drove up to their village on another trip and discovered they do have a church building in their village, but it's Seventh Day Adventist. This could explain why we haven't had many of them show up for our classes.

The Hmong students left right after the Bible class and didn't stay to eat lunch with the rest of us. They're interested in having some Bibles in their own language so we'll see what we can do for them, and hopefully they'll be back to study with us again soon!