It has been an extremely busy month in Thailand for Team Amala. A nice change of pace after having more low key months in Nepal and Cambodia. Pat, our host for the month, has a huge heart for simply being where the Lord needs him each day. He has taken us just about every where to serve and partner with what he is doing here. Below are some pictures and explanations of the different ministries we got to be a part of.
This is Pat, our ministry host. Pat is 40 years old and came to know Christ about 5 years ago after a really rough life of gangs and drugs. The Lord completely transformed him and is using him in crazy ways here in Chiang Mai. One of his main ministries is a prison ministry. Pat holds a bible study/church service every Thursday at a juvenile detention center that we got to be a part of. The boys in the prison adore Pat and several have come to know Jesus from the influence and discipleship Pat has given them.
Due to Pat’s love for prison ministry, he started up a halfway home for the boys who get out of prison and want to get their lives turned around. Here is a picture of us and the boys at church this Sunday.
To help support his halfway home ministry, Pat recently purchased a farm and is working to produce his own crop to feed the boys and to teach them how to farm themselves. His hope is to provide them with skills so that they are sustainable on their own after a few months. This is a picture of Pat watering one of the banana trees we planted.
We have also spent a significant amount of our time this month volunteering at a school. We have each spent time in different classrooms. I got the opportunity to teach 6 and 7 year olds one day.
Lastly, our biggest project this month has been transforming an old dirty, trash-filled room into a classroom. We cleaned it out and repainted it. The team that will be following us will be redoing the floors and bringing in furniture next month.
This is two pictures of the classroom before we began cleaning. You can’t tell yet, but hidden within all of the stuff was several termite homes, oh and one very large spider. It was quite the adventure cleaning it out.
Here is the room all cleaned out before we began painting.
Finally the finished product! We spent a lot of time in this room as a team and had an absolute blast doing it. Not only did we work hard, but we also had some fun playing too. Check out a video we enjoyed making during one of our breaks from painting.
