Our trip started on a note that was a portent of the rest of the trip—that note was minimalism. We were all packed up, but when our rental vehicle arrived, its trunk was too small to carry all our things, so we shed pairs of clothing from our belongings and combined bags to reduce our baggage. After a great dint of squeezing and pushing, we packed everything in the trunk. However, it was packed in such a way that an avalanche was sure to ensue at the reopening of it. A flight attendant’s warning to “be careful while opening overhead compartments as contents may have shifted during flight” was quite applicable.
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Let me take this opportunity to introduce those on this ministry trip. Darrell Hershberger is from Stuarts Draft, VA (Pilgrim). He is a computer programmer who has spent some time at Faith Builders. Craig Miller is from Partridge, KS (Center) and is somewhere between my 2.5 and 3.5 cousin. Ryan Huber is from an urban organization in Redding, PA. Katrina Nisly is from a native American organization at Sioux Narrows, Ontario (Believer’s Fellowship). Kelly Shenk is from the urban organization at York, PA (Tidings of Peace).
I was still suffering from a very severe sunburn on my hands, arms, and face from spending the entire previous day on a motorbike. So I was very sensitive to the touch of others. Peoples’ slightest touch in my tender areas elicited a yelp.
We drove our rented vehicle over to GTO Center where we met our guide for the trip: Geerasak—Gee for short. He is the youth secretary for the Karen Baptists and travels around visiting Karen Baptist gatherings in villages located in Thailand. We added his luggage to our already voluminous load and started off.
However, before we started, I had to explain the concept of an automatic transmission to him. He had never driven an automatic before. Throughout that day and the days following, he was the recipient of little bits of (mostly solicited) coaching.
We drove for a while and then stopped at a town with a market. We added food to our load: rice, chicken, dried fish, vegetables, fruit, and a couple of hunks of mystery meat cut especially for us.
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Some of the neatly arranged stacks of fruit in the market
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Our meat being custom cut for us. The device above the meat that rotates with an electric motor is a contraption to keep the flies away.
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Darrell!?! Tired already?? We’ve barely got started! We are going to see many more hours on the road than this!
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A somewhat more chipper bunch driving along.
We ate lunch at a park an hour or two from our village for the night. We sat in the grass and ate sticky rice and fried chicken. We met Gee’s shepherd father at the park. He is a very little man—his legs barely reach the pedals on his motorbike. He is also a very sweet, joyful man. We then continued on to our village for the day. It was moderately back in the bush—most of the several hour trip from GTO Center was on paved roads and then another hour or so on intermittently paved roads (about 1/6 of it paved).
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We arrived at the church and met the shepherd and the single family that is a path-follower. The shepherd is an M shepherd that moved to the village from another village to do do M work in this totally Buddhist/Native religion village. There was already a place of meeting there on the hillside and two houses—the shepherd’s house and the family that just became path followers. These were located a small distance away from the village.
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The dear old local shepherd
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This little girl was incredibly cute and we had fun playing with her. However, after some time, her favored means of recreation became to throw the tennis ball as hard as she could at one of us that was least expecting it and then she would giggle with delight as we quickly ducked.
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The place of meeting
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Native shepherd reflecting
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After relaxing there a bit, we hopped back in the SUV and headed down the steep, rutted road to a neighboring village in which nobody was a path-follower. We went hut to hut visiting people, singing for them, talking to dad for them, and giving candy to the kids and shampoo to the parents. An older dude came out with a huge knife (looked just like a machete, but I don’t know what they call them over here) and cut three roses and gave one to each of the girls and me.
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The neighboring village
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Threshing rice
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Sifting rice
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Hogs
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Satellite TV is amazingly common in Karen villages
We then went back and visited people in the village in which the meeting place was located. We saw a most unusual sight: a cross between a pig and cow! It was so absurd and amazing we just stopped and stared. It was pink all over, had a pig’s nose, and was rooting in a pit of sloshy mud. However, it also had horns! Gee informed us that we were looking at water buffalo! Somehow they look a bit different than the Serengeti Africa water buffalo on National Geographic films.
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The pig-cow–Thailand’s water buffalo.
We then went back to the shepherd’s hut and ate supper. We ate sitting on the floor on rice mats. The dishes sat in the middle and everyone used their own (Oriental style) spoon to serve themselves. We had rice, crispy dried fish, and a broth to go over the rice.
That night we had the meeting in the shepherd’s house because the meeting place didn’t have lights yet. Darrell spoke for 10-15 minutes about being the light of the world and a city set on a hill (the meeting place is on a hill overlooking the village). We taught them some English songs: “Building up the Temple” and “He’s Got the Whole World”. We also sang some “choir songs” (as Gee called them) including “Have you been to [elder brother] for that cleansing power” which they sang back to us in Karen in 4 part harmony!
That night we slept on rice mats on the floor. The ladies slept in the next room with only a thin wall between us. That night there was a ferocious thunderstorm that shook the whole hut on stilts.
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