Lighthouse Shirts

It was months in the making as the team discussed the finer details of the shirt design, but our Lighthouse shirts have been printed and they look great. We are already planning a second printing only 2 weeks after the first one. There will be some minor modifications on the second printing. We’re going have a small Lighthouse logo on the front of the polo shirt (but not the T-shirt). In Australia I’ve been involved in making a shirt, logos, signs but here the team has had to do it all. Great experience. Our students have asked for the shirts too.

In Thailand you have special colours for each day of the week. Last Saturday I happened to wear by purple Lighthouse Shirt (I have a navy blue one as well). And the colour for Saturday - purple! I matched. Now I intend to buy a yellow (Monday), pink (Tuesday), green (green) ,orange (Thursday) shirts and red (Sunday) for the second printing to add to my blue (Friday) and Purple (Saturday) ones. Unfortunately, the rest of my team mates don’t share my enthusiasm to fit in culturally with Thais in wearing the right coloured shirts on the appropriate days.

On the back is the Bible verse from John chapter 8 verse 12.

Jesus said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

Our Girl with Curls

We don’t know where our daughter got her curls from as both Lisa and I have straight hair (though it must be from Lisa’s side of the family as Asians don’t have curly hair right? I think Lisa’s brother had curly hair as a child). But it is definitely a point of interest and conversation with Thai people we meet. Is it natural they ask? (Yes, it is. I don’t think she’d be patient enough anyway to sit while having curls put in).

Having children can definitely make things harder living cross culturally. You take longer to learn the language as you have less time. They get sick. They can be very tiring.

However, (apart from being a great blessing) people usually are more open to talking to you if you have a child with you. Thai people generally love children. We had a young workman at our house when it was being fixed up and he loved just playing with our daughter. I can’t imagine that she’d have the same reaction back in Australia.

Also, our children have opened up new relationships with parents at school and at Taekwondo. They are great at breaking down barriers.

So there’s some of the bad and good of having children on the field.

Water Tank & Pump installed

For the last two years we’ve endured varying levels of low water pressure in our house, especially upstairs where during the evening when we want to bath the kids, the water pressure is too low for the water heater to work. So this has meant using the downstairs bathroom (which is smaller) and going upstairs to get the kids clothes. Somedays, the water only trickles during the day throughout the house (during the dry season).

Now that we’ve decided not to move house, it was time to get a water tank and pump installed.
On Monday the installers came in the early afternoon and at 5pm they said that they’ll be back tomorrow to finish the job. They hadn’t finishing installing the pipes or connecting the pump with electricity. I told them to come at the same time as I was busy in the afternoon. So the next day I’m waiting at home for them to come but they still haven’t come at 3:20pm so I give the store a call. “Sorry, the installers are busy with another job. They can’t come today”. I thought “you could have at least called me” though I didn’t say it.

The next afternoon they came (late) and when they had finished the job, the pump kept turning on every 10 seconds even though none of the taps were on. “There’s a leak in the pipes under the ground somewhere”, the installer said. So they would need to come back tomorrow to install new pipes.
Anyway, by the end of the week, everything was done and now we don’t have to wake up and go downstairs to have a shower which is nice. The water pressure is greeaaaat!

As a point of interest, the installers had this bag full of joints for the pipes. They dumped them on the ground and whenever they needed a particular joint they would search for it. I didn’t think it was a very efficient way of doing it really. What if they use up a couple of the joints and then forget to replace that particular size. They would need to go back all the way to the store to get another one.

Son's Birthday Party

Just before our son’s 4th birthday party was due to begin it started to rain which is not good news. Thais don’t like to go out in the rain for the fear that they will get sick. At 4:15pm (the party was schedule to start at 4:00pm) there was only our team mates there and I was starting to get worried as we’d bought quite a bit of food already. Soon after that people started to trickle in. By the end we had a decent turnout, with about 4 of our son’s friends from school, our neighbours and English students.

The dinosaur cake was a hit, so much so it was hard to get the kids away to take a picture.

We had fun games such as pin the horn on the dinosaur and carry the the dinosaur egg on a spoon. Thai children have never played such games so they had great fun.
Birthday parties take up a lot time and effort so we’re relived the next one in our family isn’t until November. They are a great way though to meet the parents of your children’s classmates.