Day in a Life of a Missionary

This morning went with my son to the Pattamasaevi (ปัทมะเสวี) Mini Summer Camp to teach English for an hour. Taught Colin Buchanan’s song “Remember the Lord” with the message that God is always watching and working for the good of his children. It’s a very “Aussie” song with lines like “miss your breaky” and “busted for something you didn’t do”, “dad is crusty and your mum’s in a flack”. Anyone wanna “av a go” at trying to explain “your mum’s in a flack”?

After English teaching went home to drop off my son and then went around town to do some jobs. Stopped off in front of the post office for lunch and ate this great noodle and dumpling soup for all of 35 baht (just over AU$1. Would have been 30 but I asked for the “special” - which means you get a bit more than normal, much more than the extra 5 baht you pay). Add a bit of dried chilli and fish sauce ... yuumm.

Collected the mail and then back home to prepare for tomorrow’s lesson.

Prayer night at our house tonight.

Funny Kids

Our kids are a handful some of the time (no most of the time). It is the long summer break now so they won’t go back to school until mid May. It’s not all fun and games though as they are catching up on homeschooling during the holidays. Our middle son will change schools for the third time. The last school he watched a bit too much T.V for our liking and he was in an international program so not picking up as much Thai as we would like.

Meal at Phii Jee's

Our Lighthouse team and some other English students at a lovely dinner at Phii Jee’s (front row 3rd from right) house on Monday. We had a great time with lots of food, eating and chatting.

Unfortunately, our daughter vomited up most of her lunch just as we were getting ready to go so she and Lisa couldn’t make it.

Our Son's Kindergarden Graduation

 Our son's kindergarden graduation class

 Yes, its really me from 30 years ago!

Can you pick me out?

Our son had his kindergarden graduation ceremony on Friday. Here are some photos of my graduation 30 years ago.

Simply the Story

 Right now I'm in Chaing Mai attending a "Simply the Story" Workshop.  The first part of the training is learning how to be a trainer and the second part of the week we will be training people in how to use Bible Stories.  They say that even in place like North America which is a highly literate, over 80% of people prefer an oral learning to reading something.

Unfortunately, the main presenter (Dr Larry Dinkins) has lost his voice after doing two workshops already.  He still has another 2 workshops to go!  Larry Dinkins was a missionary in Thailand with OMF for over 20 years.  He has a PhD and helped setup a Bible College in Chiang Mai and was lecturering there before he had to return to the US.  In his opinion though, "storying" has been the most effective means of commicating the Gospel and it is going to be his main focus until the end of his days.

OCF team in 2 local Lampang Newspapers

The recent OCF team ran programs in 3 Universities in Lampang as well as one college. The team had photos in two local Lampang Newspapers as well as the website of the college (see here: http://www.lcct.ac.th/office/english/photo_10_11/lighthouseactivities/index.htm).  The website photos include those of me trying to teach cricket.

Translation of the photos captions:  Bottom photo: English activities ... On 19th January 54 (Buddhist calender) which just past, the Rajaphat Suan Dusit University, Lampang joined with a university of Australia for activities practicing English conversation with 1st year students.  There were many different kinds of activities, to create fun amongst the students.  There were two periods of learning 10:30 - 12:00. 

Facebook helps the Student Night

 Facebook invitation for the Student Night at The Lighthouse

The OCF Australian Team at the Yonok Idol Final Event

Last night we had our Student Night with the help of the OCF Australia Team. We had a great time with lots of eating, talking, playing board games, Nitendo Wii, playing music and dancing! (I’m sure photos will be up on Facebook soon!) Normally we have no idea how many people will come to an event such as this. Sometimes we buy lots of food and not many people turn up. But this time we advertised the event on Facebook and we had 27 say that they were attending. In the end we had closer to 40 but we weren’t complaining. It was a great night and I think most people enjoyed themselves.

We were all sad to see the OCF team leave this afternoon. They made lots of friends in Lampang in their two weeks here and worked very hard. They are all certainly welcome to come back.

OCF Australia Team in Lampang

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 Yonok University, Lampang with the OCF Australian Team

 Tomoko our Japanese Teammates demonstrates making Sushi (what else!)

Teaching guitar

We are into the first week of the OCF Australia Short-term mission in Lampang. Here are some photos from this afternoon where we are running a Yonok Idol (a.k.a American Idol) competition and cooking classes. So far things are going well but as with all short-term teams in Thailand a lot of last minute planning.

Broken nose photo

Well, Lisa wanted a photo taken for posterity reasons, so I guess she wouldn’t mind posting this photo which was taken last night. The cast came off this morning so you won’t be seeing her with it today. We had a bit of a scare last night when she had taken the cast off before going to the shopping centre. When we returned to the car we couldn’t find the cast and her followup appointment was early next morning! We had already got in trouble with the doctor while in the hospital for accidentally removing the gauze in her nose (and not telling the nurses until the next day!) and we thought “oh, no”, he is going to think that she is even worse a patient. Fortunately we found it and it wasn’t broken. Lisa feels a bit wary around the children right now. The Dr has stressed that her nose can be easily broken if hit again and to take care the children don’t hit her nose. In the last couple of days the children have accidentally hit or bumped into her nose twice!

We were a little hesitant about going into the public hospital here in Lampang (we normally go to the private hospital) but generally it has been a good experience and Lisa’s nose looks normal so she’s happy. I don’t think we’ll be forgotten to quickly as they rarely have foreigners as patients.

Christmas Day 2010

It wasn’t a typical Christmas for us this year. Normally in Australia we’d be at least one of our family’s houses with lots of relatives celebrating Christmas together for much of the day. This year we got up early (6:20am) not to open presents but to get ready for the boys school’s sports day. It was quite an event with all the children dressed up and then with a big band they marched through the streets of Lampang until they reached their school.

Our eldest son had been chosen to give a short welcome speech in English. The other two children in his year gave a welcome speech in Thai and Chinese. I was reflecting today that in Australia our son would be just a face among the crowd in his school. He wouldn’t stand out one bit. Here, being the only native English speaker in his year, he will always stand out and be chosen for tasks such as these. At the moment, I think he enjoys the attention, but there may come a time that he doesn’t.

I remember when I was a little older than he is now, I went back to Korea for a few months and had to go to a local Korean primary school. I can still picture in my mind the time when the WHOLE class got out of their seats when I wrote in my exercise book for the first time to see if I could write Korean (having lived in Australia - at that time very few Koreans lived abroad). Even though I looked like every other child, I was yet so different. I can still remember how embarrassed and afraid I was when one day my brother wasn’t there to read the daily English lesson over the school’s speaker system and I had to read in his place. It was so embarrassing trying to hide my tears.

Fortunately, my eldest son is more of an extrovert than me. His speech went off without a hitch in front of hundreds of on lookers. We were so proud of him.

We had a couple of hours at home when we could open the Christmas presents which had been waiting under the tree but then our eldest son had his piano lesson, then off to dance practice for our local church’s Christmas recital and finally for his Taekwondo Christmas party. We arrived home around 8pm exhausted!

Not a typical Christmas that’s for sure.

Merry Christmas and happy new year to everyone.  Thanks for continue the journey with us on this blog.