Stickywrites

We had some visitors recently that I had still lacked time to log in my ongoing account of life here in Bkk…

Kirk of the Hills visitors (one who happened to be my father-in-law) – Cartee Bales and Bill Bronson – came through Bangkok for a very short time to visit the work going on in Bangladesh. There is a huge group of believers in the hill tribes of Bangladesh, and Bill went with a group of people from missions teams all over Asia (Phillipines, Japan) as well as other Kirk missions guys, to see the work, consider future involvement, and teach. On their way back thru Bkk, we got a (gasp!) whole day with them, and an unexpected and quite uneventful (except for drinking alot of Gatorade) second day with them when they came down with a bad bug from some food they ate.

Some pics from our adventures (pre-stomach pain symptoms):

A temple near our house, complete with monk housing and farm animals – cows, chicks, pigs, the like.

The enormous king’s park near our house, also a haven for the infamous monitor lizard which runs around unabashedly scaring people like me who take them for man-eating alligators….It was super-hot but fun to show these guys a beautiful slice of life near our home. They also got to meet a handful of Andrew’s former co-workers when we went to meet them at Starbucks. They were so curious about meeting “Andrew’s dad” after spending 2 years working with Andrew! Having visitors like Bill & Cartee was very encouraging to us. We appreciated their presence and their tolerating the Gao Wao Bird!

We recently were able to go back to Nong Khai for a week and taught some more English to the church staff among a few other things….like going to the “beach” in Nong Khai, which I had no idea existed until this trip, being that Nong Khai is 100s of miles away from any ocean. The pastor, Samran, and his wife, Kannika, mentioned to us that they would like to take us to the beach on Saturday night for a fun dinner. “The Beach” turned out to be the Maekhong River’s sandy bottom exposed to yahoo vacationers during 2 months of the year while it is dry from lack of rain. Many restaurant entrepreneurs have camped out in this sandy basin, cooking up some yummy Thai food for the Thai & Lao vacationers off for school summer break between March & May. The Maekhong separates Thailand from Laos on its northeastern border, so we were able to wade in the water and say “I’m in the Maekhong!” which I eagerly did while Samran & Kannika laughed at my hysterics. These 2 women with me are from France – they lived in Laos when they were younger but fled the Lao government in the 70’s. They are Christians and were fun to get to know while they stayed with us at the church this past week.

Anyway, I had no idea the Maekhong was so swimmable! There were people everywhere, tubing and enjoying their summer vacations. You can see that on the Laotian river edge, on the other side, there is no sand exposed, so no beach. Day-vacationers have to cross the bridge (overhead) to Thailand if they want to have some fun in the sun. Or, fun in the shade, I guess. Thais don’t like to get sun at ALL because it makes their skin “blacker”, therefore suggesting they are poorer, lower class laborers that work in the sun all day. Most Thais don’t even put on a swimsuit to go swimming either – partly because they are extremely modest and partly because they don’t like to make their skin any darker. Usually Thais just swim with all their clothes on!

Andrew managed to teach the Assistant pastor, Paituun, and his 2 children Emi & Tim, how to play football in the church parking lot. It was a bit tough to explain “first downs”, “put your hand on the laces” and “yardage” in Thai, but we managed to explain basic rules and a game of 3 on 3. Football is not played or watched here, while soccer, badminton, and ping pong are the big craze. Even the international TV channels carry mostly just European & Australian soccer & cricket – so it was fun to explain a foreign game to them.

The neatest thing we were able to do while we visited Gennesaret Church this time around was visit some of the Lao Hmong refugees being kept at the Juvenile Detention Center in Nong Khai. They have been there now for 3 months, after the Thai government decided to deport these “illegal immigrants” back in November/December. (News is unclear why, after many years of these refugees living in NK – some of them even fought in the Vietnam war alongside the U.S apparently! – that they were driven to round them up and deport them). In total there are about 150 of them, including, as you can see, TONS of children. The woman on the top left has SEVEN! They are part of an ethnic minority group in Thailand, the Hmong. These people are awaiting some kind of resolution and decision on the part of the UN and the Thai government. If they are returned to Laos forcibly, no doubt they will be persecuted!

Our church in Dallas’ Lao congregation, the Lao Presbyterian Fellowship, raised some money for this group to buy some more personal items for the 15o people being housed there, about 20 of whom are Christians. We were able to go buy shampoo, toothpaste, baby formula, instant noodles, a fan, and laundry detergent to cover almost everyone! Thank you to PCPC LPF in Dallas for providing the means to give them some necessities while they are in such a tough situation. For more news on this, visit: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/UNHCR/5404d6f61c631db9acfa673cc813b4cc.htm

No, we didn’t go to see the eye doctor recently, but they came to us! All the way from America. Lee, our friend from college, and his wife Helen and friend Angela, (all optometrists) came to visit this last week!

We were so excited to have them here….we shopped and ate downtown, showed them our neighborhood, office, and home, travelled to the beaches near Krabi, and ate alot of sticky rice and papaya salad, which seemed to be Lee’s favorite (and is always mine by far.) Krabi offered us the opportunity to rest (most importantly!), go kayaking, see some prehistoric drawings in some caves, “secret” lagoons, stalagtites and stalagmites, and work out our biceps with our smooth canoeing strokes. The boys played kidema (sp?) to their hearts content (no horseshoes in Thailand!), while the girls overheated in the relentless sun.

And…once upon a time while I was in Krabi, sweating off the bottle of water I had just drunk, I took a long walk down the beach, and spotted some gray dogs running through the rocks at the dead end of the beach (Krabi’s famous rock formations cause beaches to be cut off from one another, because the rocks jut out into the ocean). There were so many of them, I couldn’t count them all…and as i got closer, I saw that they all had really long tails. As I got even closer I realized they weren’t dogs at all, but monkeys! Sweet, playful, mischievous Curious Georges all over the place!

So I decided to play tug-of-war with some of them, who were super-friendly even when they knew you had no food.

I appoached them with a leaf…. then let them grab the other end,

let them take it,

then played the game all over again.

It was a blast; as you can see I got a huge kick out of their playing with them! One of my favorite pictures I took of the 30 was this one, of this little guy who took someones milkbox and was squeezing out every last drop from the strawhole.

For those of you who are not fanatics already, Thai food happens to be extremely yummy and some of the most flavorful, rich food out there. Thai food is famous, in fact, for it’s extreme flavors – the quadfecta of cuisine, if you will: sweet, sour, salty, and spicy. Aside from the group of women that occasionally meet to cook Thai/American food, I’m no expert in Thai cooking – I have always reasoned by walking 5 minutes I can buy pretty much any dish I like for any meal, any time of day for less than $1 USD. BUT, thankfully, those days are over (maybe) because I got to try my hand in Thai cooking with my cousin Dana and Tim, passing through Bkk a few weeks ago. They graciously invited me to join them at a delectable cooking class at the Oriental, one of the nicest hotels in all of Bangkok, and we all gobbled it up – both the experience, our excellent teacher, and the food. Some pics from the experience (aren’t those aprons cute?) –

We fashioned Bananas in coconut cream, Pork with Holy Basil (Graprao Muu for those Thai food lovers), Chicken Satay, and Gaeng Som, a delicious soup with shrimp and acacia leaf omelette.

Our instructor was an entertaining chef and excellent teacher and English speaker. We loved him!

Here we are on their first day in Bkk, at a downtown restaurant, one of our favorites! They were sweet to lug around a humongous pile of books, magazines, and (of course, my favorite) nuts that they brought for us. It was so fun to have them here!