Visitors from Afar

During our school break our teacher friends from Isaan came to visit us. This was our first time to host a Thai family in our home. We've had various Bible school students come and stay, but this was our first time to be tour guides and hosts.
They wanted to go to the zoo. Since seeing some of the cool exhibits costs extra money, we just walked around and visited the free animals. I'm glad the penguins are still free--they're some of my favorites!

We found these pandas that were drinking Ovaltine. We had fun taking some different pictures with them.

I think this was the smallest baby elephant that we've ever seen. It was a cutey!
We also went to the elephant show. The boys were too scared to go get their picture taken with the elephants. Although I wasn't looking forward to getting that close to the elephants this time, but I was trying to encourage the kids to do it. It was for the kids!
One of the highlights for Mr. Niyom was a trip to the Karen village. There were so many things going on that he really enjoys. He loves working with wood and enjoyed inspecting the new kitchen the men were building for the church/community center. He also enjoyed looking at the rice fields, flowers, and getting new ideas to take back to Isaan with him.

They also went to church with us on Sunday. Kaimook's family was very instrumental in inviting them and encouraging them to go with us. Mr. Niyom had never been in a church service before, but Ms. Rerai had been to a couple of Catholic services. I think they were really nervous about going because they thought they were going to have to respond and take communion. They were pleasantly surprised about the tone of the services and the friendliness of everyone. Ms. Rerai told me that she had done some type of correspondence Bible class when she was still in school, and she had gone to a Catholic church in Isaan. She has not been back to a church of any kind since she moved to her current village.

Pawn has talked to her about Jesus, and Ms. Rerai said she believed in Him, but we don't know that she has put her trust in Him. We're continuing to pray for and work with her. Please join us in these prayers. She has promised that no matter what school she moves to, she wants to continue working with us. God has us working together for a very good reason!

The End of Camp

The last day of church camp was always a really sad day for me. The end of the ESL/basketball camp in Isaan was no different. Not only did we have to go back home, we were going to lose our summer intern, Carmen on the following Sunday as well.

In true Isaan fashion we had a closing party/ceremony. We the new schools basketballs and certificates for completing the program. Then we had some entertainment, a big Thai grilling party, and of course some karaoke.Some of the students did the traditional Isaan dancing for us.


It was hard to say goodbye. We didn't get to spend as much time with the teachers this year, but we really invested our time in the lives of the advanced English class. We still get phone calls from them, and we're supposed to be sending some Bibles to them. Pawn and Kaimook did a great job sharing the Gospel with them, and it meant so much more to the students coming from people who speak the same language as them. God can use anybody, but there's something special about Thai people reaching Thai people with the Gospel message. The students said they could really tell that Pawn and Kaimook believed what they were talking about and that they really felt loved since Pawn and Kaimook were so sincere in sharing their faith.

Learnng New Things

Near Ms. Rerai's house there's a place where they make khanom jeen. These are noodles that came to Thailand from China. They're good to eat with green curry chicken and other dishes. I had never seen them made before.
We walked behind the house and found this noodle factory. They had already mixed up the dough before we arrived. They had a machine that kneaded the dough, and then they put it through this bag to get separate the dough from the excess water. Then it was time to check the consistency of the dough. You can change it depending on how you like your noodles. Since I'm not a noodle connoisseur I will just have to take their word for it. Then it was time to boil the noodles. First you stir the boiling water to get it swirling. Then they start piping in the noodle dough using a shower head. Once the water slows down you start dropping in the dough using a circular motion. They scoop out the finished noodles and then rinse them in water.Then the noodles are divided into bunches and formed into a circular pattern and placed in a bowl or on a tray. These women make these noodle to sell. I joked with them that they should be able to charge more for these noodles since they were made by farangs. Farangs = higher prices. :)

What We Do In Isaan

It seems we are always busy when we're ministering in Isaan. Since we're living with friends, our days are filled with lots of activities which help us build relationships with the people. This year we often went to our hosts' farm and picked fruit or did other agricultural work. They love it when we enjoy life there and the new experiences we get to have.
This year I learned some interesting things about lamyay. There are so many interesting varieties of fruit here, but I don't really buy too much because I don't know how to choose the best ones. What I learned about lamyay won't help me in choosing it, but I did learn a bit about taste-testing. I don't like the lamyay that has a high water content. I compared the lamyay from our hosts' farm and another farm, and there was definitely a difference! I'm partial to the fruit from out hosts' house. They really liked that.
We teach basketball skills every afternoon. Some of the students take these drills very seriously! Most of the students do a very good job, and they can't wait to get to the actual games.
This year we had a different schedule for the English classes. Rusty had an afternoon class with the teachers. Some of the students were so interested in studying that they joined in too.
We also had an intensive English conversation class with some of the top students from the school. We really got to spend a lot of time with these students as our classes were two hours long, and we did some activities with them in the evening as well.This really doesn't have anything to do with our work, but we just like motorbike pictures. :)
This year the scheduling at the school was extremely crazy. The school we work at had just been upgraded to dream school status (not sure what exactly that means but I do know it gives the school more prestige), and their schedule was crazy with installing a new assistant principal, having district-wide competitions, and adapting to their new status (workload). Since school was canceled for a couple of days during our camp, we set up teaching appointments at the temple kindergarten. This was a hard class to teach because we only taught them for a couple of days, and they had never studied English before. But like all of our kindergarten students, they did a great job!
You can always find a group of kids around Rusty. This year he had another lunch bunch who wanted him to read English books to them, and they were worried about quantity as well. They didn't want him to spend very much time on any of them--they wanted to move on to the next one! They were a very faithful group until the schedule change.

Saaw Chiang Mai

We're on school break here during this next month so I'm hoping to use the time wisely and get caught up on some work. It's always harder to go back and write about things that happened a couple of months ago, but I do want to share some of the highlights even if they are a bit out-dated by now.
One of the highlights of my summer is our trip to Isaan. We've been blessed with the opportunity to work with a school in this part of Thailand conducting a two-week basketball and English camp for two years now. This year our team was rather small, but we enjoyed it. We started off the two weeks with a school holiday. In Thailand that means an opportunity to have a picnic at a waterfall! We picked up some grilled chicken, spicy green papaya salad, and ice and headed off for a day of fun in the water.
After a long, hot day of work, there's nothing like sitting around Ms. Rerai's gazebo or making good use of the hammock. The kids warmed up to us pretty quickly. I don't think they forgot us. We also enjoyed preparing food together and spending time together. This picture shows me working on eating some special fish that Mr. Korn made for us. It wasn't that bad except that it was really salty. Carmen couldn't handle it so I took one for the team and ate her plate too. She didn't know about the special fish breakfast sandwiches yet, but I remembered them so I made sure we didn't have any leftovers.
And of course in Isaan there's always plenty of good sticky rice! This year we enjoyed steaming the black rice...it's a special treat for us.
It looks like Kaimook is stocked up and ready to go with two large baskets of sticky rice. At our house we don't usually eat sticky rice so I guess we stock up when we go to Isaan. I still don't have one of these fancy sticky rice baskets, but I plan to add it to my Thai kitchen soon.

I also need to mention that Kaimook is our saaw Chiang Mai, northern Thai girl. They really like talking to Kaimook and having her sing the song on karaoke/party night. Some of the teachers are supposed to come visit us this month, and they had to time their visit with Kaimook's school break. :)

Saying Goodbye for Now

The dreaded part of the whole trip seemed to overshadow us pretty much the whole second week. The day we all dreaded was quickly approaching. You could tell that it was on everybody's mind. The dinners became more special with more people included. We went out to eat lunch several times, and for our last night we traveled to the city to barbecue Thai style.

We all loaded up into trucks and headed off to the city. Mr. Korn was directing our truck, and we took a tour of the city before heading to the restaurant. He wanted to take us to see Rusty's favorite weekend spot...a nice 7-11 with an Amazon Cafe (coffee shop). We met Mr. Cool there also who is one of the teachers at the school, and he bought our coffee. I think that was mainly because Scott was with us. He and Scott had a good friendship.

We grilled and ate and ate and ate. I think Scott must have been sitting with the wild bunch. They enjoyed putting all kinds of food on his plate to see if he could eat it. They did some of that to Rusty also. I enjoy being a quiet girl...not so adventurous. After eating, we returned to Ms. Rerai's house for one more night of sleeping on the floor and to enjoy one more refreshing cold shower. I say that seriously because after you get over the initial shock of cold water it can be quite invigorating in a very hot climate.We awoke the next morning and began the ordeal of giving gifts and saying goodbye. Ms. Rerai's family presented us all with some Isaan cloth. We wore our cloth to the school in the traditional way, and I think everybody enjoyed that.
This girl was the spokesperson for her school. She started crying not long after she started speaking. So sad! They thanked us for coming and then each class presented gifts to all of us. Lili received more than any of us (the one the students couldn't believe was 14)...she almost needed her own airplane for all of her gifts, lol.We hated to leave, but I'm sure it will be good for the school to go back to their normal routine.
The goodbyes weren't over yet. We had to walk down this long gathering of students waving goodbye, getting last hugs, and taking pictures. It was a reaallly long walk.We finished packing up and were off to eat lunch together in the city before going to the airport. Even this last meal involved karaoke. We all said the final goodbye at the airport. We truly enjoyed getting to spend so much time with Ms. Rerai and her family. I hope they will come visit us in C.M. before too long.

Free evenings

Our evenings were often free, but we did have some outings to experience Isaan life. On this particular evening we went looking for bamboo shoots. One of the school officials let us come on to his property for this hunt. I must say we were all impressed as we toured the grounds and learned what plants could be eaten. If there is ever a shortage of food, I'm convinced I'd like to be in this country since I don't have any of this knowledge myself.

We walked through some of God's amazing creation. It reminds me of how different the world is, but how there is beauty everywhere. I'm so thankful we have a Creator Who loves us and cares for us.
Can you eat that? Yes, you can Scott. It's a jackfruit, and it's yummy!
There was also a special market a few nights a week. It was nice to walk down and sample some of the food, but a lot of the stands sold out early. I'm not used to having to get their early to get the good stuff. Life was different in Isaan. This is an interesting vehicle we saw outside the gate and look at the adorable girl who joined me in the picture!
We returned home that night to do some more work. All the bamboo shoots had to be cleaned and prepared for cooking. Our fingers were probably a little callused by the time we finished, but it was fun to sit around and talk together. I guess that means we were really adapting to the Isaan lifestyle...it's all about the group effort. It's fun that way and seems less like work.

Return from the city

So we returned from the city and left out early Monday morning for a school where Rusty has taught before. Actually he hasn't been teaching at this school but a special class set up by the local government. But first we had a few minor "injuries" that needed to be taken care of at the clinic.

Bryan had a splinter in his finger. I know from the picture it looks like it hurt, but it really wasn't that big of a deal. Of course it wasn't in my finger so it's easy for me to say that. Then I had my swollen infected leg that needed to be cleaned up. The people seemed pretty excited to show off their clinic to us, and I was more impressed with this small clinic than I was in the hospital. Did you notice how the doctor has on a pair of gloves? That made me feel better. After we were all patched up again we headed off to the school.



When we got to the school we had no idea what to expect. We had an assembly with all of the kids, and then it was showtime! We put on an impromptu English lesson, and the kids did great as well as the teachers! I couldn't believe the students were so well behaved in such a large group. We really enjoyed being at this school and would be very interested in going back.













Scott's ukelele has been a big hit with all of the kids and teachers.








Dion's always good at getting some focused teaching in.








After a delicious lunch it was back to our normal routine of basketball in the afternoon. The kids really started showing improvement the second week. We didn't have all of the students everyday for basketball so it was great that they caught on so quickly. They enjoyed doing the drills and playing with the coaches.

Home Away From Home

We finally arrived at our home away from home on Sunday evening after a short flight from BKK and then a two hour drive which was interrupted by our dinner at a moo-ga-ta restaurant (Thai BBQ if you remember from my previous posts). We stayed with the teacher who organized the camp for us; we're all very thankful for large Thai houses. Mr. Korn wanted the whole team to stay together to make it easier so we all invaded the teacher's house. The two guys slept downstairs, the girls had a large room upstairs, and Rusty and I had a small room to ourselves. Of course when you're sleeping on mats on the floor, it's pretty easy to call any corner your room.
Even in Isaan we were met with fresh fruit. We all enjoyed eating a half of a watermelon at a time. Of course the picture lets you know these were just baby watermelons. Our hosts had bought a large bag of them...the only thing that could have made them any more refreshing was if there had been room to store a couple in the fridge. The fridge was absolutely packed full after our trip to Big C to buy groceries for the week. We couldn't even fit water bottles in there although by the second week Dion was stashing the bottles in the freezer to "subsidize" the ice. :)
We spent the early part of our first morning airing up basketballs for the afternoon session. Please notice that we thought we were going to be doing basketball in the afternoon..that meant we didn't take any ESL materials with us. Note for next year...always take basketballs and ESL materials. :)
Last year I believe Jessica aired up all of the basketballs for us. After doing just a few with hand pumps, I have a huge amount of respect for her. It was quite hard. We were so thankful when we reached 30 basketballs and were praying that would be enough to last for a while. The team came prepared...they had basketballs, ball bags, hand pumps, needles, and nets. We were prepared.

We went to the school for the opening ceremony. It lasted about two and a half hours. We had officials from the province and other local government officials who came to welcome us. Since this camp was a sports camp, they used it as an activity of the "To Be Number One" anti-drug campaign. This was a program established by the eldest daughter of the king of Thailand "to promote the prevention of and solutions to drug problems." Encouraging the students to become active in sports is a way of keeping them involved and hopefully increases their confidence and involvement in healthy activities. The program established by the princess also encourages strong family values, and these values also work well with the love and friendship we desire to show the students.
We knew from the ceremony that this was going to be two weeks of good eating...and lots of it! Throughout the ceremony students kept presenting us with coffee, iced water, snacks, more water, and more ice. It was delicious, but I hated to destroy the swan by eating it!
We ate lunch with the teachers, and then we were ready to get to work. The first day is always the hardest because you really don't know what to expect. The students are scared of you at first, and for the Americans who have come over it's their first taste of being inside a Thai classroom. The team did an excellent job! They paired up with a translator and off they went. Only they went off to teach English...not basketball!
It was good though because it was all about the students! We went to Isaan to serve, and we were finally able to do what we went there to do. Even though the students started off shy, we saw lots of smiling faces, and we knew we were in for a treat! We were hooked and ready for the work.