Boo!

No, this post has nothing to do with Halloween – though you could draw some parallels if you’re a parallel-drawing sort of person:  1)  It could be said that my blog is pretty dead since I don’t write in it much, haha! or 2) my posts are so infrequent that this one actually took you by surprise!  There, there, you can relax.  Happy Halloween everyone!

It’s been a good vehicle week:  The Rover now has matching (though used) rear tires and mudflaps to keep the garbage dump mud (which is a rarefied and stinky variety of mud, let me tell you) from getting everywhere (including completely filling the hollow rear bumper with putrid goo) every time we go.  They are just about the coolest mudflaps EVER, too, because they say “TURBO” on them in huge letters that positively scream “British Dignity” befitting a classic Land Rover.  At least they don’t have the playboy bunny on them or Hello Kitty – wouldn’t be surprising in Thailand at all.  And, the Mazda pickup runs!  I took the battery to a fellow on the corner with a charger, so now we have spark, fuel, and air.  A guy came by to look at it late last week, so maybe we’ll get that thing sold before too long.  It started right up today, so hopefully it will still start on its own tomorrow…now if I can get the driver’s door to open (both the inside and outside handles are useless now), we’ll be in business!

I’ve started into the rotation that feeds baby Su Su – you may remember from my letter that she’s got a bad skin disorder and is in need of special attention.  My day is Sunday, so I went for the 10-12 time slot to feed her, hold her, and love her.  Though her skin is damaged, she is still beautiful.  The condition kind of prevents her from moving her mouth very much – it’s kind of stuck open in an oval shape that makes it hard for her to seal around the bottle, but she’s doing better at it and it’s great to see.  I swear she smiled at me several times, too!  The hospital administrator stopped in again to show me the bill, but since I am an unintelligible, monosyllabic caveman she gave up on me.  Please pray we can resolve the bill and that Su Su continues to get the care she needs – frequent baths, better lotion, and lots of Compasio people coming in to love on her.

Thank you!

A Compasio Summary

I’ve written some people on my initial experiences in Mae Sot with Compasio, but hadn’t yet started this blog.  Partly out of laziness, some parts of this next post will look familiar to some of you.  Probably all of you.  Why include it, one could wonder, but it seems to me the blog would be lacking without some kind of summary on what Compasio is about, and how much I think they rock.

Compasio strives to show Christ’s love for women and children at risk, mostly displaced Burmese.  There are a lot of Burmese refugees here in Mae Sot, fleeing or kicked out by one of the more brutal military-run regimes on Earth.  Thailand isn’t perfect either, so a lot of these people, mostly women and children, are exploited for labor and the sex trade and trafficked out to Bangkok and other places.  Compasio runs a few shelter homes to try to help them tangibly and show Jesus’s love for them, and I spend some time supplementing the regulars helping out at each.  The safehouse is a home for Burmese kids whose parents are very poor, missing, have abused their children, or some combination of these.  It is always our goal to keep families together, but sometimes there are safety or other concerns at home that lead us to take children in.  A couple of the mothers work there as well, taking care of the children alongside some very giving Thai people on staff.  I’ve spent many great evenings there learning worship songs or games, playing with and cleaning up after the kids, and being climbed on!  The Baby House is a home for kids whose parents are in prison – sometimes for being Burmese around a grumpy Thai cop, sometimes for theft or for violent offenses – and otherwise don’t have a place to live.  The aim of Compasio is to reunite these families, but if the parents fall through after their sentences the Baby House is sometimes an orphanage too.  Another awesome Thai couple admirably and selflessly watches after them, teaches them about Jesus’ love for them, and provides them a family.  We also run a Drop-In center downtown for street kids to get a meal and play some games at lunchtime before heading back out to the streets again.  These kids sometimes have homes and guardians but spend their days foraging and begging to survive, sometimes at the direction of their parents.  My favorite thing is to visit the garbage dump, though – there are a couple hundred people who live there in homes they’ve made of garbage, covered in dirt and teeth rotting away, making their meager living sorting through the mountains of trash for recyclables they can sell for pennies a kg.  We have a medical role there, bandaging wounds and changing dressings (everything gets infected when you live at the dump) and taking people to a small clinic in town in an old Land Rover that used to belong to the Swiss Red Cross.  My role is simply driving, holding limbs or squirting saline solution, or occupying other curious children while the real talent does the work, but it is phenomenal to see the healing happen and watch the trust develop.  In addition to the rotations at the shelters, I have the opportunity to help out with some of the nuts and bolts type things that need done around here – roofs, lights, vehicles, that sort of thing.  It’s fun, challenging, and rewarding, and I have yet to do any permanent damage.

Organizationally, that is a quick summary – there are other ministries at work, such as our Monday evening soccer games with the street kids, but I’ll touch on those later.  J

Compasio is looking at expansion in the next year as a possibility.  There are other border towns with similar needs…please pray with us on if/how best to expand, the timetable, and the people that would have to make it happen.  Thanks for reading!  For more, see http://www.compasio.org/. 

9/7 - 9/9 Travel Time, Part Deaux

Went through customs, no problem.  They didn’t even ask about all my heroin. =)  Rounded the corner, and whose face was smiling and waving and towering above all the Thais?  Her face wasn’t technically waving, let’s be clear.  Face = smiling, hand = waving.  But yeah, Krystle was there!  Awesome!  The van to their retreat would leave at 9:30 instead…and I don’t know what sort of trouble they were in for making it that way.  We had a good, if quick reunion and I delivered the non-pink laptop to an anxious P’Yu.  Any tiredness I’d had was gone, and the three of us got to visit for a little while until no kidding, they had to hop into a taxi and get to their retreat.  Krystle brought me a chai tea she’s found addicting, but it was slightly completely frozen and served as more of a joke than a beverage for the moment, taking the form of chai chunks in a bag.  P’Yu brought me a small band of great smelling flowers as a laptop thank you and Krystle assured me this was an honorable thing, and not the ones the monks have.  Probably a good thing, as I would not want to be mistaken for a dishonorable monk!  =)  We didn’t have much time to plot and scheme for my visit to Bangkok in October, but we’ve got the basics down and it’ll be sweet!  After a year of frustrating failed Skype video calls, to see her and hear her laugh in person was awesome...she introduced me to ministry opportunities in Thailand and I’m extremely thankful for that!

I sipped on my thawing chai out of the bag (which was delicious, and I would learn later that Thais all drink out of plastic bags so no worries there) and had a great lunch and visit with Ake at the airport (which was also delicious – sushi!) before she saw me to security for my next flight.  And that was Bangkok.  My flight to Chiang Mai was smooth and uneventful, the Song Tau (truck with benches in the back, one of the many types of taxi you can take in Thailand) trip a little more roundabout.  I recognized landmarks from my map a bunch of times, but had no way to tell my driver to stop, give up, and let me out so I could hoof it the rest of the way – he insisted on getting me to the door of the Compasio office in Chiang Mai.

I spent one night in Chiang Mai, and met the Browns who founded Compasio – Allan, Joane, and their seven awesome kids, plus Katie a long term Compasio staffer and two of her friends in for a long-weekend kind of visit.  These were really great, really welcoming and fun people…I could tell already I’d made a good choice coming here!  We had fun getting acquainted, playing games, sorting through new schoolbooks, and shoplifting.  Seriously.  The next morning I took a bus with Katie and her friend Amanda to Mae Sot, where Ashlee and Stephanie (more Compasio people) picked us up in the Land Rover of Abundant Character…more on that beast later! 

That wraps up my travel days, so if you hung in there for the whole story you probably need to go take a break.  Thank you to everyone who has prayed for me and supported me – this really was a very smooth trip!

9/7 - 9/9 Travel Time, Part 1

I enjoyed very much my “Last Meal That Won’t Burn Your Mouth for Days” with mom and dad at a small diner near DIA (called “Moonlight”, I think).  A diner where the staff are all a bit larger than average is a good sign!  We won the heart and mind of our waiter when mom recalled the name of Marisa Tomei as the car-savvy heroine in that movie where Ralph Macchio and his pal are jailed somewhere in the south for murder… Herman Munster was the judge, Joe Pesci was the lawyer…little help here…anyway.

Denver – LA, no problems.  I sat next to a nice guy who was on his way to Tonga, then Australia, then New Zealand, taking his first international trip.  We agreed we both had a pretty long day ahead!  We arrived in LA on time.  At LAX, it was a little difficult to find a departure board that wasn’t all United all the time.  It turns out, you have to exit security, exit the building, and walk a couple blocks to another building to actually not fly United.  Ahh, the LAX international terminal.  It’s super inviting.  The international terminal is where they don’t have any shops or food, and where they have about six chairs for every gate.  You would think that for all the enthusiasm in the US for getting foreign people out, the international terminal would be a more pleasant place.  If I was foreign I would let my visa lapse just to not go there.  I camped on the hard tile floor with about ten thousand other people, mourned the tragic and brutal beating of a plum in a sack lunch my mom packed for me (plums, it would seem, are not tremendously durable) ate a couple yummy sandwiches (peanut butter, jelly, and plum juice – thanks mom!!), and watched as all the other flights departed on time.  Mine to Bangkok was delayed, and my window to see Krystle and her roommate P’Yu at the airport in Bangkok the next morning dwindled and then disappeared:  She had to leave at 8AM in order to catch the van as it departed for an MTW staff Pray and Plan retreat.  I hoped somehow we’d “make up time” in the air, but when I checked the plane it was not, in fact, a Concorde.  Instead of landing at 6:40 AM, it was scheduled for 8:20 or so, Bangkok time.  Drag.  The delay was caused by some lavatory vandalism on the plane from the previous flight (I heard later it made the news?), and everyone on board had to be questioned and frisked for Sharpie pens.  It appeared that I would be hauling P’Yu’s new laptop (I was a courier) up to Mae Sot for a few weeks which would disappoint her a lot.  P’Yu, for the record, is well aware of the English meaning of her name and goes by “Stinky” among close friends now and then =).

The flight itself was great, actually, in a Really Long Flight sort of way:  seat-wise, one other guy and I had the four middle seats to ourselves so I could stretch out into the neighboring seat and got some good sleep.  Ok, decent sleep.  Ok, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t awake the whole time.  Thai Air decorates in a pretty loud purple and pink scheme, but I can’t really blame it on that.  I watched a movie on my personal little screen in front of me (Date Night – love both Fey and Carrell but the movie left me wanting a little more) and read from a well-loved (and puppy-chewed) copy of Greg Mortenson’s Stones Into Schools (thanks Dawn!). Towards the end of the flight, I spooled up some worship music on the Ipod and nearly killed the battery on “Grace Like Rain” by Plumbline.  Love that song, and that’s one of the inspirations for the blog name.  The food on the plane was good, too, so that when I landed I wasn’t very hungry and wasn’t very tired.  I did however, smell bad.  Nice.

At about two hours late and doubting Krystle and P’Yu could be there, should I bypass my transfer gate to Chiang Mai and exit the secured area into the public area of the airport?  Of course not!  I was pretty bummed about how late I was, but remembering conversations about ‘Thai time’ I figured there was still a pretty slim chance they could be hanging around a while longer.  Plus, I had a laptop to deliver so P’Yu would want to stay as late as possible!  I also had another friend to meet:  Ake, one of Graham’s friends that I’d met a few times back in the states is Thai and lives in Bangkok, and there was a good chance I could meet her for lunch.  If only I had a phone that worked...

Grace Like Rain - Introduction

And so, without further ado, this is my blog.  It’s about Thailand and my ministry and adventures there in the Fall and Winter of 2010, but I may revive it in future years to recount future trips.  It’s started very slowly, and I’m terribly behind, but with some work I’ll try to fill it in as best I can.   I won’t drag out too many boring details I hope, like say packing.  On that topic, let’s just say that people may notice at some point that I keep wearing the same stuff over and over =). 

So how did this trip come together?  It started with a leap of faith, when I quit my full time job in Aug 09 as a civilian working for the Air Force in order to have extended periods off to do mission-y type work.  It was a great job, with great people, but I was maybe a little too at home in my cubicle and wanted better chances to serve God as well as serve my country.  I have always been very risk averse when it comes to my job – very conservative, and sticking with what I know is there, so this was a big move for me.  I managed to secure what amounts to part-time employment for particular months in 2010 as an Air Force reservist.  This would do a couple things:  one, it would free me up those months I was not on duty to volunteer locally and overseas, and two, by working for the reserves more than the minimum “one weekend a month, two weeks a year,” I would be able to serve my squadron more effectively.  God's plans for me might be different though, so I'm praying to stay open to whatever he puts in front of me.

Why Thailand?  I got reconnected with a friend (through Facebook, no less!) Krystle, who was trying to raise support and funds for her yearlong internship in Bangkok through Mission to the World (MTW).  Through spending time with her and helping with a fundraiser here and there, I became very interested in Thailand and the opportunities to do some pretty cool stuff over here.  Another friend Sarah was (is!) on the board with Compasio, and she really sold me.  It is with Compasio’s mission on the border with Burma, working with displaced Burmese women and children, that I really clicked.  Their mantra is “See. Feel.  Act,” as in see a need, feel compassion, and act on it without concern about “Does this fit my mission?” or “Do we have the budget for this right now?”   They believe strongly in acting for the good of families and children here first, showing them the love of Jesus, and figuring out the logistics and the details second.   I applied, and in a gross lapse of judgment on their part they picked me up for three months.  So there it is:  I’ll be in Mae Sot, Thailand, until mid-December this year.  Hope you enjoy the posts here and there, and please email me and keep in touch with prayer requests or anything else.  Cheers!