Stickywrites

English Camp was a great time for our team, and thanks for your prayers. We had some short-term teams here from North Carolina and Florida, and they helped us put on the English camp, where we had competitions, English lessons, songs and dance and tons of fun activities at a resort on the River Kwai (of literary fame) in Ganchanaburi. We took these massive double-deckers!

I even did a North-eastern style dance with Dana, Jan and the other Thai staff girls! It’s very hard…I’m sure we looked pretty silly but it was cool to learn some kind of traditional Thai dance. At the Camp there were all kinds of team-building exercises and courses- Spiderman Web, a Ropes Course, a Tarzan course, a Bridge of Suspended Steps, Flying Fox Trapeze, etc.

Dana and I taught the 10 & 11 yr olds, so we played ALOT of pictionary! The weather couldn’t have been better during rainy season. It was neat to be in a different setting a dn a beuatiful place with English students, our team, and our Thai staff.  Here’s Andrew with baby Asa Mills.  It cooled off because we had a good storm or drizzle going constantly, which here is a huge blessing! The camp even had barking deer, which go “Arff! Arff!” when the’re eating or when you agitate them, I couldn’t figure out which.   Please pray for our team as we follow up with all our current students that went to the Camp and non-registered students and families that came. Pray they would be curious about us, want to spend more time with us, and that they would be open to coming to other ministry activities and Thai worship on Sundays!

One thing I have learned since coming to the mission field, and am still learning how to deal with, is the constant fluctuating state of the team and ministry around us. What I mean is, people are constantly coming in as interns for a few months, or weeks, or a year, people are constantly leaving and coming from furlough (MTW calls it HMA – Home Mission Assignment), and the ministry needs constantly are shifting as the Lord moves in our church and changes the needs and demands of our start-up church plant. So the only constant is that nothing stays the same!

One example of this is our recent teary goodbye we had with Fred and Jean Depp, an older couple that came here to work for 5 months – and did they ever! They taught English classes many nights a week, taught computer classes through a translator at the Mahathai community, wrote a curriculum for the computer training, and helped by babysitting numerous times at team members houses, in addition to encouraging us all through their godly example of prayer and life experiences! (They have 10 children, by the way, all grown).

Yet another example is our recent welcoming of 6-week intern couple Logan & Melissa Keck, who are in seminary and have been married a few months.  We got to host them for their first week here – so it has been fun as we get to know another young couple without children.

Here are some pictures from our goodbye party for the Depps and the computer training thank-you ceremony for the Mahathai teens. We miss them so much already – they were a wonderful example to many that you can never be too old, or past retirement, or whatever reason – to serve on the mission field. They did it faithfully and were amazing in what they reaped in the short 5 months they were here – a group of us serenaded an Ode to Fred & Jean to the tune of Gilligan’s Island.  We also got sticky rice and mango for dessert…!