* My Trip to Thailand

What an amazing experience! We got to travel with 4 missionaries during our trip, and met 11 all together—all amazing people. The missionary hosting our team, John, is a young Navy vet who lives in Bangkok with his wife and three little girls.

We first stayed in Bangkok with John as our tour guide where we received a crash course on Thai culture, got acquainted with the country (and the food), and learned about their religion (Buddhism), and even went to several temples. I can’t even explain the eerie feeling of being in such dark places, guarded by Thai militia, with people performing their acts of worship all around us--it was so sad, and yet I felt so helpless. At first I wondered why we were even going in those types of places, but I later understood—it gave us a true taste of what these people believe, why they believe it, and what they do with it, which was very beneficial later on in our trip in relating to the Thai people—“We’ve taken the time to get to know your religion, now let me tell you a little bit about our religion; His name is Jesus.”

While in Bangkok, we met up with a missionary woman who does a ministry for children in the slums each Saturday and Sunday, and holds a mid-week Bible study with the adults. The slums were the most disgusting thing I have ever seen, and the worst poverty I have ever seen. Though they had shelter, it was wet, sticky, gross, with rats and sewage everywhere. A family of 10 or 12 may live in a one-room shelter the size of my bedroom. Never have I smelled such horrendous odors. We gathered all the children together and sang songs with them and played some silly games, and watched as the missionary reviewed them on the English she had been teaching them, and told the kids the Bible story about David and Jonathon, then prayed with them in Thai. These kids understood praying and prayed themselves because the same kids come week after week. This takes about an hour and a half, then we loaded up in the vans (or walked) to the next location to do it all again with another group of kids, and repeated until all of the slum locations were covered. We didn’t do much here as this was mostly an observing experience to learn how to run our own sessions later. We got to interact with the kids though, which was amazing.

We traveled about 11 hours to Bua Yai where a tiny local church hosted us, cooked our meals (which were often rather interesting; they waste no part of an animal and find nutritional value in all bugs, etc.). The pastor of this church (a woman) had scheduled for us to teach in 4 different schools. We were in teams of three and had four teams Each lesson was 45 minutes and our teams just rotated between the grades. The kids were so fun—so precious. The school administrators then treated us to a home-cooked lunch each day after teaching, and then we changed clothes and had the whole school assembly for 3 hours in the afternoons for big fun and games! We were expecting about 70 kids; our first assembly had over 500! But we managed and it went well.

Sometimes during the assembly the school would have prepared “Thai Culture” performances for us. This was rather enlightening—Thailand is one of the prime places for people to go to have gender changes. Thus, it is completely acceptable to be gay or if not gay, a cross-dresser—and we experienced many confused little boys. One school decided to not only show us Thai dances, but dress up the American girls and have us perform. They spent over an hour dressing us. I felt like a little girl playing dress-up! We were able to use these school assemblies to share the Gospel through an interpreter. They were very receptive, and the pastor would follow up with each of the schools’ children later in the week to invite them to church, etc. Because they were so eager to share their culture with us through their performances, it really opened doors for the Gospel for us to turn around and do the same thing—share with them about our culture/religion. It was hard only being there for for a short time. But we did what we came to do, planted some seeds for the local pastor to water over the long haul and offer discipleship.

During the evenings in Bua Yai we went to the night street market to pass out tracts and play with the children whose parents were selling things. We couldn’t speak their language, but somehow we made friends, played soccer, rode their bicycles, played tag, etc. Some of the Bua Yai church members took us to a waterfall which was so beautiful!

We left Bua Yai and headed to a little village in the mountains called Mae Ramat where we held an English camp at the largest high school with 100 students. This was more camp-style; the kids were sleeping at the school and we were sleeping on the floor of a local church. Since we were with them all day long, each of the 10 on our team had a team of 10 students. My team was the Peacocks! We had to work with them to make an English team cheer, create an English skit/performance, and they had to teach us a Thai skit/performance. My lessons were on body parts and animals. It was so funny because the animal sounds we make in English like “quack, quack” for duck are very different for the Thais; “Gap, Gap” for duck. We played lots of games, had lots of performances, and again, many confused boys. The last day, we had the “Amazing Race Asia” like the TV show where our teams competed and we had many different destinations such as the post-office where we had to write a letter and mail it to the school, and the police station where we had to find out 2 traffic laws, an officer’s name, and how long he had been a police officer. The catch was that the instructions and clues were in English, and the tasks had to be done in English. This was complicated because we team leaders understood, but had to communicate it to the kids. I had an English-Thai dictionary, and they had a Thai-English one. The race spanned this entire mountain village, about a 2 mile diameter with winding roads and hills. They knew their way around—I was completely lost! Being there for several days we had lots of opportunity to share the Gospel message and personal testimonies through interpreters to the assembly, but more importantly, being in our small groups we got to build relationships with our group of teens and share personally with them as they knew enough English to understand us generally. I fell in love at this camp—these campers, 16-17 years old, became my friends, and we talked (very slowly!) and laughed and joked so much. This camp was the highlight of my trip. Again, the pastor we were staying with who ran a girls’ home in the church would follow up with the ministry to this school. At the end of the camp a representative from each team shared with us in Thai to the big assembly—they expressed much thanks to us not only for the fun and English, but for telling them about our God. Many said they had never heard of such a thing. This is what we went there to do, and hearing them express their thanks for learning about the Lord was our most victorious moments.

On the way to Mae Ramat I had been sick and missed the drive in the mountains, which I got to see when we left Mae Ramat to head to Malinoi to run another English camp. It was so beautiful! But our Thai driver, Pa-pote, was going 100 mph it seemed around curves on cliff edges with no railing, and often times half the road had fallen off the cliff. It was so amazingly beautiful though! The mountains are woodsy, but tropical which was an interesting mix, and scenery like I’ve never seen before.

On this 8 hour drive we stopped by a Burmese refugee camp. Our plan was to make a day of it and go in, but the UN was there doing something and had the camp closed where no one could enter and no one could leave (though the refugees are always forbidden to leave). So, we had to just stop on the side of the road and see these people from the other side of a barbwire fence. They looked so sad, and had to live in shacks off the land, and build with what they could find on the land. The Thai government and the UN do not provide anything for these people except food and water when absolutely necessary, and occasionally clothing. It was truly heart wrenching to see so many beautiful faces stuck behind a barbwire fence for their entire lives. Burma is Marxist and they have several tribes in the country. A few of the tribes became openly against the Marxist government and so every person—man, woman, and child of those tribes are to be killed. So those who can escape to Thailand, but they are not allowed to work, or become part of society. They just have to exist in these camps until there is peace in their country—which will be years. What is extra sad is that Thai men, or “pimps” come into these camps and lie to parents of young girls saying if they will sell/give him their daughter, he will take her to Bangkok and provide her vocational training so she can make money and a life for herself. Parents blindly give these men their little girls in hopes of the girls being able to come back to help the family and rescue them, or if not, at least become infiltrated into the Thai society. These men then put the little girls in brothels, sometimes in Bangkok, but often times selling them to brothels in other countries, where they live their lives in forced prostitution. Seeing these types of situations, and knowing what is going on behind the scene made me feel so sick, so fortunate, so burdened, yet so helpless.

We finally reached Malinoi and held our English camp. This one was our greatest because we had the top elementary English-speaking kids (which was not very good English-speakers at all) from seven schools in the surrounding villages. English in Thailand is a treasure, and something they long for, yet so few people to teach it. Economically, it does not makes sense for westerners to go to Thailand to teach, so the English teachers at schools are Thais who were taught English by a Thai, who was taught English by a Thai, etc.; so Thailand English has gotten so distorted that we cannot communicate even with the English teachers. This is why we were so welcomed because what we were doing was unprecedented: native English speakers teaching English—for free! By the time we had gotten to Malinoi (a tour that stretched almost the entire length of the country), government officials had heard about us from the schools, and showed up to meet us at this camp! We had to stop our lessons to take pictures, dripping in sweat and all, with these men in fancy suites who had come to meet the Americans. They invited us to come back yearly and work through the government! I was so amazed that God allowed us to find such favor in the eyes of even some of the high authorities, and to have the privilege of meeting some! We were not expecting any such thing, and such favor was a huge blessing—especially for the long-term missionary’s ministry.

This one was definitely camp-style. I slept in a tent and took showers with more bugs than I’ve ever seen at once before! ...and I loved every bit of it! What was so weird to us was the kids were running around like maniacs at all hours of the night, and no one made them go to bed. They were climbing a water tower, running up the mountain, etc. It’s definitely a different culture! We ran this English camp much like the previous one where each of the team members had our own team of little Thais who we taught a cheer and skit in English, and competed against each other in games. My team was the Pink Team. “One—we are the Pink Team! Two—A little bit LOUDER! Three—I still can’t hear you! More, more, more MORE! ...We’re #1, We’re #1—PEACE!” Basketball cheers helped me tons, my team was always the best cheerers and most team spirit!

At this camp we also did an Amazing Race—1 mile steeply uphill to a cave, with activity stops like “build a pyramid at the edge of the cliff” (crazy people!) and then back down to the camp. What an adventure! It was so beautiful!

At our evening campfires when we performed our cheers, skits, etc. is when the team shared the Gospel message through an interpreter. We would share personal testimonies of what our God has done in our lives, and the missionary would follow up with a little lesson, and pray with the kids in Thai. The entire mass of children, though restless and inattentive during most of the assembly, always calmed and quieted and paid close attention with eager ears when we shared about the Lord; it was so neat to see their unexplainable hunger and interest.

Without being their long-term, it would not be smart or right for us to go in, share a little Gospel message, have the whole mass repeat the sinner’s prayer, and then leave them. Would they truly understand? Truly believe? Truly be saved? This is what was the hardest part of our trip. The kids at each school and each camp were so interested in the Message we had to share, but we couldn’t in such a short time see the fruits of our labor, of what we ultimately went to Thailand to do—to help further God’s Kingdom. We had to turn the follow-up discipleship and over to the local pastors and missionaries who would be there long-term with these kids. Our mission was to open the doors through English for the ministers/missionaries/pastors to get into the schools and build relationship with the schools through their hosting us, and to share the basic Gospel message for the Thailand ministers to then follow through with long-term. We accomplished our mission—we built relationships and planted seeds. It just made leaving so hard because we did not get to see how the churches/ministers followed up, how he Lord worked in their hearts. At times it felt like a job half-finished, but we had to remind ourselves that there are people there long-term who are in contact with “our” kids.

Leaving Malinoi was bitter-sweet. Our work was done and it was now time to head back, but I had fallen in love with each of these kids, especially the ones on my Pink team. But we headed 5 more hours down the mountains to Chang Mai where we stayed a few days to REST—and, we got actual beds for the first time since Bangkok, and American food for the first time since...America! We enjoyed riding elephants through the mountains and across a river, and riding a bamboo raft down a river.

Over all this was truly a life changing experience. It opened my eyes not only to another culture and another religion, but to the true state of spiritual desperation an entire nation can be in as a whole (99% Buddhist, less than 1% Christian). While I was there I fell in love with the Thai people—they are such a precious, smiling people though poor and dirty. Yet they are so confused, they live in fear. They have spirit houses on every piece of property in the country for the “spirits” on the land to live in so they won’t bother the people. They place offerings on these little houses like flower lays and orange soda pop to keep the spirits appeased. At our camps, when a ball rolled too close to one of these spirit houses, the child who threw it would have to “Y” (press hands together at their head and bow down) to the spirits. It was cool to teach these kids they do not have to live in fear such things, but that there is a Protector and Savior, a God who loves them and wants to know them intimately. It was also amazing to see the innate hunger God puts in humans for Him if we humble ourselves like little children. When we shared about God, all other noises and distractions these kids had the majority of the time seemed to diminish and fade completely; it was evident something was going on inside their hearts and minds. We planted the seeds, prayed that the seed would go into good soil, that God would create a place inside their hearts to harbor the seed. Now is the time to pray that something would happen with those seeds, that they would be watered, grow, and be harvested for God’s Kingdom with the help of the local ministers and missionaries. This is so hard—I love each and every soul I encountered and my heart is so heavy for them that I’m almost uncertain as what to do with such a burden. Because I love them and have seen their faces, it breaks my heart to think any one of them will never accept my Jesus as their Lord; it hurts to think of any of these precious people not being able to live and know the freedom in God that I know, to grow up without having the strength of God within them to get through the many trials in life they will inevitably face. I’m not there to finish the job, and it is so easy to underestimate the power of prayer. But that’s just it, that’s what we do have—prayer. And I pray as often as I think about them that God will fill these kids’ hearts with memories of our team and the love that we had for them, and above all, of the God that we serve. I pray that God would strategically bring people into each child’s life to further direct them in His ways; that as they grow up in a Buddhist culture, they would never harden their hearts; that somehow God would bring Thai Bibles into the hands of these children that they would not have to solely depend on the churches and pastors; that the Lord would continually draw them to Himself. I believe that these prayers are being answered, and I hope that each child that I love so dearly, though I may never see them this side of eternity again, will be sensitive to the tug of Jesus on their hearts to turn to Him, that I may see them someday in Heaven.