Quick Update on the Weekend

Time for an update and I'm not too sure what to share. I haven't been feeling amazing since after Friday night's party. Saturday was a day of rest so I pretty much just slept all day. I think I left the room once. Sunday was church in the morning, which was great. Dr. Martindale from the Evangel team spoke and was then translated into Thai by P'King, so we could understand the whole sermon in its original language, which was very nice. Sunday night one of the students at the English center was going to take us to the “Walking Street” market so that we could experience it, however, it rained. It poured, actually, but it had mostly let up by the time we were supposed to meet up. But, apparently the market can get rained out and a lot of vendors won't come to sell in the rain. So the student, Rainbow, took us to the mall instead. It was a lot of fun! We also got to see a movie and get our fix of laughter for the week (Kung Fu Panda 2, amazing).

And today we took a prayer walk around the university campus, ate lunch in their cafeteria. 15 baht (about 50 cents) for a half decent meal. Gotta love it. Then we had a nice long meeting to plan stuff out for this week since Lauren (the missionary) is going to be out of town until Friday. There is a team from Evangel, I can't recall if I have mentioned this already or not, but there was a team from Evangel in Cambodia and they are coming to Chiang Mai tonight to spend a few days here before they return to America. I don't quite understand all the logistics of it or anything, but they are coming. And that means this week is gonna be full of “fun stuff” with them, such as riding elephants. I have to say, I am definitely looking forward to that one (though not the smell so much). Reminds me of Camels in Petra, Jordan. Good times. :)

Anyway, this week is gonna be a little crazy, so please pray that I start feeling better. I don't know what's going on, but hopefully I'll be back to normal before Wednesday (elephant ride). So, yeah...

Oh, yes! On Sunday we will have our first “Quest” event, which is an opportunity for students who want to learn more about Christ can come, learn, ask questions, and be introduced to more Thai believers. Please help us as we cover this event in prayer and advertise it for our students this week.

Thanks all.
Much love,
-Kristen

Backpain, "TH" Tongue Twisters, and Coconut Ice Cream

And with tomorrow comes a much needed day of rest. My body is in exceeding amounts of pain, specifically my back and my neck. This, as far as I can tell, is the result of sleeping in a new place, on a bed that might be slightly less comfortable than the bench I slept on in Bangkok airport... Honestly, I think the bench was softer. And also from carrying my backpack around constantly with water and, often, my laptop in it. So, yeah, enough complaining for now, would appreciate some prayer, though. (Also, please pray for Laurin (from the Evangel team) who is not feeling well as was unable to teach her class today or come to the end of week party, and please keep my parents in prayer. Lots of craziness going on there in good 'ol SoCal. Thanks)

So, today I learned, for the first time, that there are, in fact, two different "TH" sounds in English. As a native speaker I was completely unaware of this until I began preparing my lesson (last night) for today and over half of the lesson plan was on the "Unvoiced TH" sound and the "Voiced TH" sound. Even when I woke up this morning, it still didn't make an ounce of sense to me, but maybe it was God, but as soon as I stood up in front of my class and began teaching it I was able to make sense of it and finally figured it out. The "Unvoiced TH" sound is the "th" in birthday, thin, tooth, and thumb. This is all opposed to the "Voiced TH" in this, these, the, and worthy. Not that many of you reading this actually care about voiced ad unvoiced "th" sounds, but still. I was excited to learn something new today. (There were three "tongue twisters", in which every single word had a "TH" in it, only two of them were not at the beginning of the words, and the students had to identify the voiced and unvoiced "th" sounds.) It was seriously a lot more fun then any pronunciation lesson should ever be. ;)

After the classes we had a Friday night party (which we will have every Friday night of the course) for all of the students to come and enjoy themselves and get to know one another as well as to build relationships with the team and the Thai Christians involved in the Center. We had an ice cream party tonight and, since we have an Evangel team member from Alaska, we kinda made it all about Alaska and ice cream. Don't worry, it wasn't as cheesy as it sounds, these are university students after all. (Before classes started we made snowflakes out of paper, like I used to do when I was little. It was so much fun teaching my students who came early how to do it and getting them to help us put them up all around the room.) Everyone was broken into teams for the games we played at the beginning of the night. We played a game in which the students had to make as many English words out of the letters in "ice cream" as they could, then we had each team chose one person to be a "snowman" and everyone else on the team had to "decorate" their "snowman" with toilet paper. Then we had a game with True/False facts about Alaska, a race involving a bunch of winter clothes, and an igloo building contest with marshmallows. Then we just had time to hang out and chat. A few of us played Sequence, which my students love and two of them are very, very good. Teamed up I think I have only seen them lose once.

So, yeah. Fun times. Tomorrow will be a day to sleep in, if all goes according to plan. But, then again, when has it ever done that?



My student "A" as a snowperson. Her glasses were my favorite!

Thai Word I Have Finally Mastered: kaao niao (Sticky Rice)

One week in Thailand. It's been 7 days since I arrived. And, I am happy to report that I am still healthy and loving Thai food. There's this little place down the soi (street) next to ours that sells a barbecue chicken and sticky rice that is absolutely amazing. The kind of thing I could eat for lunch every day for the next 45 days that I am here. While I'm on the subject of food, I'll take a quick trip over to beverage lane to share an amusing story from the grocery store at the mall yesterday. We stopped by the store to get stuff for breakfast since nothing near us seems to open early enough for breakfast, unless you want meat skewers from the street vendor, which I have been told by the Evangel team is not a bad option, though I haven't yet tried it. Anyway, while at the grocery store I saw a refrigerator with canned sodas in it, like we would have in the states. There was Coke and Pepsi in it for 13 baht (30 baht = 1 U.S. Dollar, so less than 50 cents). That's the standard price around for canned soda and cheap large water bottles. I wasn't even thinking about grabbing a soda... But then, I saw it. Among the red and blue and green of Coke, Pepsi and Sprite, all with their Thai names inscribed on one side and their English logos printed on the other, the angel of light and civilization, the beverage of heaven. Yes, for the first time ever outside the United States of America, I found Dr. Pepper! Ice cold and on the shelf next to Pepsi and above Coke, right where it belonged. I was no longer in Asia, I was home!

Why all this dramatic build up, you ask? What is the punch line? It was 48 baht per can. Yes, that's right, more than 3 times as expensive as a Coke or Pepsi. More than $1.50 U.S. The price tag for Dr. Pepper was right next to the one for Pepsi, and I was torn. My heart sank for a moment as I realized I wasn't “home.” But we had just come from Starbucks where I found the Chiang Mai city mug for my sister-in-law, and I didn't get anything to drink there, so I deserved it. ;)

I bought myself a Dr. Pepper, and it's still sitting in my fridge, waiting for a special occasion to be consumed. By the way, the average meal in Thailand costs between 30 and 50 baht, equate that Dr. Pepper with a meal. It was so worth it, just to have it in my fridge waiting for me. Tomorrow morning I think I will drink it and be glad.

;)

Anyway, on to much more important things. Today was our third day of classes and I got another student. I teach two classes that are the same level just at different times. It feels more like tutoring because I have one class of 4 and one class of 2 students. It's amazing. It was so much fun today, because today's lesson was about the weather, so we had all kinds of vocabulary about the weather and we discussed the seasons and things like that. The lesson was really short so we had time at the end for a game of, for all intents and purposes, pictionary. I wrote out all the vocabulary words (ex. hot, rainy, humid, stormy, partly cloudy, etc.) on pieces of paper and the students came up one at a time to pick a paper and then draw that weather on the board for everyone else to guess. The girls (all my students are girls) loved it. It was especially funny, because I had no way to help them understand “humid” as a word. “Not dry” just wasn't cutting it. So when A (one of my students) got humid to draw she started writing it phonetically in the Thai alphabet, which still took the classes just as long to guess as most of the other pictures. It was very funny. (I finally got out Google translate and showed them the Thai word for “humid” and it finally clicked for all of them.)

Fun times. Tomorrow is Friday so we have our first end of the week party (every Friday at 7pm we will have a party for the students after the last classes get out). It's going to be very fun, and hopefully we will have all of our students stay for it, because we want to be able to build relationship with them outside the classroom. Pray that we continue to get more students coming in (Classes at the university started on Monday and out class started on Tuesday, so we expect to pick up a few more students over the weekend) and that the party goes smoothly so that we can connect with our students and be able to build relationships with them during this short time we are here.

Love you all,

-Kristen

Charity (Lauren's friend from Missouri), and three of my students: Sigh, Sigh and A, playing Sequence.

Sawatdiika! (Hello)

So, catch up. Yesterday was Sunday and our first church service in Thailand. It was a great experience. The congregation prayed for us as we are beginning classes tomorrow (Tuesday), and after the service we went back to Wat Umong to a “monk chat” where we met with an English speaking monk to talk about Buddhism and Thailand. The farang (white foreigner, think “gingo”) monk was very thorough in his answers and only answered about 4 or 5 questions in the hour and a half we were there. I had some more questions when it was time to go, but they have the monk chat every Sunday afternoon, so I might go back next Sunday if I'm not busy. We'll see.

Today we got up dark and early to go for a prayer walk around the Chiang Mai University campus, since it's right across the street and we will mostly be working with university students in out English classes. It has been a very nice day all day; it was raining a little during our walk this morning, but it's stayed “cool,” if you will, all day. It was a little bit of a bummer that it was so nice today since it was a day of training for teaching and all that jazz, so we were inside all morning. Getting everything set up and squared away for classes starting tomorrow.

I am actually a little nervous about this first week of teaching. I don't know how everything is going to go and how things are going to work out. Just praying and hoping it all goes smoothly; there's not much else to do. I'll be teaching 3 classes tomorrow from 4pm to 7pm. 4 days a week for the next 4 weeks. For the first time this is really starting to concern me, but I'm sure that everything will go smoothly.

The team is going to meet in about 20 minutes to plan things out for the first Friday night party at the English Center, and that's all we have planned for the day. Maybe we'll go down to the phone store to see if we can unlock my phone and get me a Thai SIM card for it so that I can stay in touch with the Evangel team. I don't really feel like doing much today after the early morning, but we'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll see if the team wants to take a sahng taw to another Starbucks to find the Chiang Mai mug for my sister-in-law. Oh, random side note, went to a Starbucks last night to see if they had the Thailand country mug or the Chiang Mai city mug and they were out of both. I was kinda bummed, but it was an amazing 2 story Starbucks! I think the Starbucks on Beacon in Lakeland needs to invest in a second floor. For real.

So, that's all for now friends, gotta go meet with the team and then figure out how things are gonna go for the rest of the day. Pray for us as classes start tomorrow and all the students have to be placed in class levels and we have to be assigned what level of students we will be teaching for the next month. Much love!

Images of the upstairs of the Starbucks in Chiang Mai we stopped at last night (didn't get anything).

Day One Done

I woke up yesterday morning in Bangkok airport. And then I did it again. And then I woke up in Bangkok airport again. All in one 6 hour period. I landed in Bangkok at 10pm and then flew out again at 8am, landed in Chiang Mai around 9:30am and met Lauren at the airport. I got to ride in a Speed the Light truck (on the left hand side of the road, sitting where the driver seat would have been in America) back to the hotel where I finally got to take a shower after some 36 hours of traveling. :)

Then I got to meet with Zack, Kregar, Laurin (not Lauren Becker) and Dr. Gary, the team from Evangel to meet with the local pastors P'King and his wife Apple to hear their heart for the ministry here at the coffee shop at their church. Then we met with Lauren do some training on teaching and understanding Thai culture, and then Zack, Kregar, Laurin and I headed out to downtown Chiang Mai in a sahng taw (a pick-up, usually red, with “two benches” (approximate translation of sahng taw) in the bed of it) to eat lunch and visit a wat. Zack, Kregar and Laurin have been in the country for about a week already so I just followed their lead to get around for a little while.

Then we headed back to the church for a Thai lesson, which we are going to have twice a week while we are here. I am very excited about learning more of the language here. I keep reflecting back on how much Arabic I learned during the one month I spent in Jordan so the idea that I will be in Thailand almost twice as long has me really excited to see how much more Thai I will be able to learn. After our Thai lesson we walked up the road to another wat.

It was amazing to compare and contrast the two wats. The one downtown was very commercialized and filled with people come to “earn merit” to help balance out their bad karma by leaving flowers and food for the spirits and by leaving money in the temple (wat) there. The top part of the huge chedi behind the temple was partially collapsed a long time ago in an earthquake before the current temple was built in front of it. The other wat, Wat Umong, is up near the base of the mountains behind the Chiang Mai university and it is in a very natural setting. In doing a little reading about it I found something that said that Wat Umong was unusual in its setting out in this wooded area, but regardless of how it was built it was beautiful. I don't know how else to sum it up.

At Wat Umong there was a building filled with painted murals; it was hard to understand the meanings behind them, especially without knowing Thai. But from what I could gather they were representations of significant events in history and sayings of great teachers, things from around the world. There were paintings of Jesus on one side of each column with sayings of Jesus from the Gospels painted on them in Thai and English. These were the only sayings in the building painted in English, another example of how set in the Thai mind it is that to be Christian is to be Western, just as the Thai saying says “To be Thai is to be Buddhist.” Our goal in the English Center is to show the Thai people that one does not have to be western to be Christian; we want to connect the students who come with Thai Christians so they can see that to be Thai does not mean one cannot be Christian.

Pray that hearts would be prepared and open to understanding this as we begin building relationships with out students in classes on Tuesday.

Eating Lunch in a sahng taw.


Wat Chedi Luang in downtown Chiang Mai


Chedi at Wat Umong, Chiang Mai

A Beautifully Gloomy Day in San Francisco

I walked out of my first plane to the wonderfully overwhelming smell of Coffee. For a minute I thought that my plane had mistakenly landed in Seattle, not quite sure why. I have made my way to my gate and am enjoying the 45 minutes of free internet that SFO airport so kindly offers their travelers. In a little over an hour boarding begins for my 11 hour flight to Japan. I'm excited that I get to be in the same country as my "Fire sister" (Amanda) for 4 hours, even though we won't get to see each other. I didn't look at my itinerary until this morning to discover this beautiful fact. After 4 hours in Narita Airport in Japan, I will be flying the 6 and a half hours down to Bangkok Thailand. Yay!

Don't know what else to say at this point, so I'm gonna run and Facebook for a bit before my free 45 minutes of wifi runs out. :)

Stressful much? Nah...

The time for sleeping has arrived. I will be heading down to the airport in about 2 and a half hours to leave for Thailand. I did not realize how stressed I was until I got back from youth group tonight with a completely empty suitcase sitting on the floor of the living room. But, fortunately, the suitcase is packed (and hopefully under weight), and it is now time to sleep for a little bit. I will be leaving CA at 6:50am on June 1 and arriving in Bangkok at 11:05pm June 2. So trippy (pun unintended).

Love you guys, thanks in advance for your prayers and support.

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