Wow! First off I would like to appologize for the weird spellings and cliche names, but we must be careful what we write.
Talk about hitting the ground running (seems to be a common place thing for the world race!). Since we have started manistry, we have only spent two days in which we were not driving in the back of a truck for at least two hours. We are getting the royal tour of north west Thailand. Doing amazing things for free on our days off (two separate waterfalls and tubing the rapids without a tube) and having some amazing prayer ministries at the half a dozen villages and towns we have stayed at. The one we started off at took us two and a half days of traveling to get there from Chang Mai. We got there the Thursday night before Good Friday. We painted a whole church, inside and out, in two days! We did work! It was nice to have it done for Easter Sunday. For Sunday, we did a few songs, two dramas (the doctor’s office, and the sin chair) and Tim and I both did mini sermons through translators.
Speaking thus, we have a great ministry contact named “John Smith”, who is in league with a local married couple, Pastor Jackie and his wife Chan:) Chan is our translator, Thai chef, and loving mother figure who is also trained in Thai fighting (no joke). So, anywho, after Easter lunch we played with the kids for a couple hours, doing balloon tag, sharks & minnows, and a drawing contest with Matt as the model. It was crazy how good some of those kids can draw with just crayons. At the end, we gave all the kids about 10 little wafer cookies a piece! Poor kids mighta’ gotten sick. So after that we left the small mountain village (small enough that we were only the 2nd American team that has ever been there) and stayed the night in a guest house in one of the bigger towns near by. We left Monday morning for the “Brrrrr Mese” border. It just so happened that Monday also marked the beginning of a three day festival in Thailand AND Brrr Ma in which people can splash anyone with water at anytime for no reason at all. Oh, my gosh. We got SOAKED. People would put their trash cans out in front of their homes and businesses, fill them with water, and stand there with small buckets just waiting for a poor sap to utterly douse. By the time we got to the border, we looked like we’d just got off a water ride at a theme park. So we got to the border in Mae Sot, and even the border guard squirted us with water! So we went across for 2 hours to go to a church there and pray and play worship songs. It was awesome. There was a spy sitting in the back trying to act all friendly and stuff just trying to get info about what was going on with the church, but we just kept singin and prayin. And here we are, totally okay.
The place we’re at now is a village just a little bigger than the first one. It has 2 shops that wouldn’t pass for a warehouse in the states, and it has like 2 paved roads. Livin it u
