So the new fad in Chiang Mai is "Fish Spas". They are big aquarium tanks with hundreds of little skin eating fish in them. You drop in your feet and the fish swarm and eat. Frannie (who is visiting us on her Christmas break) and R.J. were brave enough to do it with me. I have to say my feet felt really clean and smooth afterwards.
It's hard to believe that Christmas is almost here. Joshua just informed me that today begins the twelve days of Christmas countdown. I had no idea we were that close.
That is understandable because if you live in Thailand there is very little to remind you of Christmas coming. It is still hot every day and most days I am in shorts (in fact it is never cold enough to not wear shorts, but for meetings I need to "dress up"). The weather is no indicator here that Christmas is on the way.
We are also (thankfully) not inundated with Christmas "marketing" to let us know it is on the way. There is a Christmas tree up in the mall here, but I have not been to the mall much lately.
For Thais, Christmas is just another day of the week. Nothing is closed, it is not a holiday. Most will have heard it is Christmas, and there is this fascination with things from the West (thus the Christmas Tree in the mall), but for the most part it is a non-event.
Frannie arrives on Wednesday from America to celebrate Christmas with us. This Sunday we will have a Christmas dinner at our house for everyone in our home church. So I am starting to get in the "Christmas Spirit".
I hope you enjoy your Christmas and its meaning wherever you celebrate Christmas in the world. We enjoy Christmas in Thailand!
p.s. If I make it to the mall before Christmas I will post some photos of what Christmas looks like in Thailand. Who knew that purple, pink and orange were Christmas colors? As we were looking at our "fake" tree we have up in the house we noticed our new lights on the tree include the color pink.
Should we decorate our banana tree?
Okay... for years at McDonald's in Thailand not only could you get Hot Apple Pies and Hot Fudge Sundaes, you could get Corn Pies and Corn Sundaes. I have lived here so long that the idea of corn as a dessert item has grown on me.
But now - Broccoli Pies? I can't stomach that thought. Given the choice I would even take the Pinky Milky (see the picture)
One of the cool things about living in Asia is we get to see and experience things that are very different from North America. Our house is on the edge of our neighborhood. Our backyard is only about six feet deep and then there is the wall that surrounds the neighborhood. On the other side of the wall are rice paddies.
Before moving to Thailand I had never seen a rice paddy. My only exposure to rice in the wild was through the dramatic backdrop of Vietnam War movies. Now I live in that backdrop.
This is our seventh rice season in Thailand. I am fascinated by every part of the cycle. I get to watch them flood the paddies each year and plant the one paddy that will seed all of the others. Then I watch in awe as scores of women march in line hand planting each rice plant.
During this time a small village of workers lives in our "backyard" under a large tree until all the planting is done. This takes a few weeks and then they travel back to their real villages in the mountains, leaving behind a caretaker or two who will monitor the paddies while they are still flooded. Eventually the caretakers will also leave as the paddies dry out in the final phase and the rice changes from tall green grass to mature golden stalks.
Today as I was working in my office when I heard laughing outside of my window. The workers were back and they were harvesting rice twenty feet from where I was sitting. I quickly ran upstairs and snapped a few photos to share.
Whenever I think my work is hard I only have to look outside my window to see what real hard work is all about. The acre upon acre of rice in my backyard is all harvested by hand. Families are out there as I speak armed with scythes cutting the rice, and this scene is being played out all throughout Thailand by hundreds of thousands of people working in the rice fields.
The harvest is ripe here in Thailand.
I found out about this book from our India team that is reading the book in conjunction with the online class offered by the Chalmers Institute. The good folks at Chalmers are the ones who put the book out.
This is one of the two best books I have read this year (I will review the other soon). Having worked cross-culturally and with the poor for years now I intrinsically know some best practices and try to keep things like dependency out of the picture. But this book pulls together some very good new thoughts on the subject.
The book begins with a story of the author saving a woman's life (a former witch doctor living in a slum) by purchasing $8.00 worth of penicillin for her. It's a great story with a great ending. But then he goes on to explain later in the book how that was a big mistake that hurt him and the community he was trying to help.
I was not able to find fault in what transpired until he unpacked the wrong in it and how it could have been done in a way to build up the community. The book is filled with teaching stories that change your thinking on how to help.
One of the most helpful ideas in the book is the realization that how I would define poverty as a Western person not living in poverty is very different than how a person who lives in poverty would define it. A major problem is people not understanding what is broken and then still trying to fix it.
The premise is poverty is broken relationship and we all suffer from it.
I found so many of the principles transcend working with the poor and are good practices for anyone working cross-culturally.Pick up this book and read it. You won't be disappointed.
One of the most important things we should do when we work in another culture is to spend a lot of time listening. It is not always easy to do, but it is worth it.
I want to share with you something one of my teammates in CH just wrote about their team's experience in listening over this last year -
“I already know what they need, and I’m gonna tell them!” was the gist of my words to Rich, our area director. We were planning our team’s 2009 strategy, and Rich had just suggested a survey to find out the needs of the church leaders in our city. A survey sounded like a waste of time to me, especially because it fell under “research,” which wouldn’t impress the readers of our newsletters very much. But as our team was beginning a new chapter in our ministry, it became apparent that it was silly to assume we knew the needs of those we were trying to help. So we developed a batch of brief questions that we’d ask the church leaders of our city, and we began to see great results long before we’d finished our research… 1. Our learning posture and humble willingness to listen moved the leaders we interviewed. One of our values as a team is that we are to be learners as we minister, and nothing communicates that attitude quite like asking the leaders, “What do you think we should be doing here?” It was a stark contrast to the typical tactic of deafly inviting leaders to participate in this or that training or program. Instead, they felt honored that we valued their words! 2. All of a sudden we were some of the most connected people in our city. We surveyed as many leaders as we could by asking all of our existing contacts for help in meeting with new leaders. We prayed for divine appointments and saw God arrange them. In a few months, we went from having a handful of contacts to knowing more leaders than the leaders themselves. Now, we’re able to come alongside new contacts and bless them with a simple phone call: “Hey, last time we spoke, you mentioned that your church’s greatest need was to share the gospel. How has that been going? Would you like to get together to talk and pray about that?” 3. Several of our questions were new to the leaders. For example, they’d think for the first time about what their church’s greatest resource was. “What’s stopping you from accomplishing your goals as a church?” was another question that was helpful to the leaders. We asked if they had a vision, and if so, what is it? The interview sometimes became an eye-opening time for the leaders that hadn’t thought about anything more than the fires they were constantly putting out in their congregations. 4. The actual findings of the survey are important, too, of course. For us, the main question we wanted to know the answer to was, “What is your church’s greatest need?” And we got a good group of answers, most of which were needs that the leaders themselves should be meeting (like teaching and discipleship). But the final question of the survey, “What do you think that foreigners here for ministry should be doing?” was perhaps the most important. Over and over the responses communicated a need for support, encouragement, and accountability – all roles of a coach. The leaders were giving us our marching orders, and we were excited to see that they matched up with our gifts and desires. Conducting a survey isn’t very “sexy,” but the benefits we’ve already reaped from this year’s survey have convinced me that it’s a step we shouldn’t skip. Not only at the outset of ministry, but years into it as well, preserving a learning posture bears fruit.
Thailand, my home, is known as the Land of Smiles. It is an appropriate tagline for this country as the Thai people are warm, friendly and always smiling. Smiling is infectious and I find myself smiling a lot more after living here for almost seven years than I did before moving here.
But sometimes the smiles are closer to a laugh then the warm and friendly variety. Take today for instance -
I was on my twice a month trip to the mall here in town to pay bills. There are no checks and no mailing in your bills here, you have to visit various banks, utility offices and even 7/11 to pay your bills. Fortunately, most of the people I need to visit on bill-paying day are at the mall.
Theresa and the boys are on October break so she and R.J. came with me today and we had a nice lunch together before attacking the crowds on four levels to pay the bills. The first smile we wore was of the puzzling variety. In the middle of the mall were some new vehicles surrounded by many signs announcing the "Hopeful to Miss Auto Show". I am not sure what they were missing our why they were hopeful about it, but it got us smiling.
Immediately after walking past those signs we noticed a new store called "The Beauty Buffet". It is a beauty products store but what set off the laugh disguised as a smile was all the salesgirls decked out in chefs hats. I am not sure who thought a make-up store with a food theme was a good idea, but it was packed.
There were streams of more smiling moments as we mingled with the crowds - it is just what happens here. So... in the interest of sharing our culture with you, I leave you with this picture - a Thai Elvis impersonator we encountered in a local hotel one night. You're smiling aren't you?
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