• Thailand – Karen Village Trip Diary – Day 7

    28Jul
    Categories: Personal, Photos Comments: 0

    I took a shower this morning despite the fact it is better to take them in the evening (because you smell not so rank for church and your towel has time to partially dry before you have to pack it the next morning).

    We ate breakfast at the pastor’s house. We had a really good, sweet pastry for breakfast for the first time. It was a nice addition to the requisite rice.

    Next we visited people’s homes and prayed for them.

    They gave us scarves as gifts. Craig promptly fashioned his into a doo-rag.


    Craig with doo-rag


    A rice tractor–it’s designed to work in a foot or so of water


    Craig had a little… um, “accident”

    Next we visited the fields where this village worked. They were planting corn, so we helped them plant for a while. I think that is only the second corn field we have seen. After we helped them awhile, we visited and prayed for some more people.












    Elephant transport

    And then we were off. And off we were! At a high rate of speed! One time we got into a construction zone, only it wasn’t really marked as such. They were repaving and doing it only one lane at a time. However, there was one lane (the opposite lane) free. As we came tearing down the mountain around a curve, all of a sudden there was the hopper end of a paving machine standing meters from our front grille. Gee slammed on the brakes and swerved into the other lane, narrowly missing the distinctly SUV-sized maw of the black paving beast of a machine. Fortunately there was nothing coming the other way.


    A herd of water buffalo walking down the road

    We soon arrived at a Karen village quite close to the main road. It was paved road all the way. We met a good friend of Gee’s who is involved in youth ministries, like himself. We had a lunch of sticky rice, fried chicken, and COLD water! It was also around a table with benches!! It was amazing! The house also had a leather piece of furniture that was a cross between a recliner and a couch. The bathroom was an in-house-outhouse with a SHOWERHEAD! It was amazing! It also had a hot water heater attached to shower head, but I declined using it. (Maybe it was latent shocking fears from Costa Rica?) But the most amazing thing was a Western-style toilet seat! It had no water tank, but we didn’t care. We were happy to dip in the barrel to flush like “normal”.

    In the afternoon, we visited a cave nearby. It was a tourist cave with lights, steps, railings, and admission prices.


    The cave entrance


    That evening we had some deer skin for supper again. Tasty!



    When the church bell rang and we left for church, it was raining. So we all gathered our umbrellas and walked to church. When we got there, the only people that had arrived so far were a bunch of children and their Sunday School teacher (Gee’s friend). I befriended one little tyke and persuaded him by hand motions and encouraging noises to sit beside me for the service. I thought about it early in the service that I really should put my arm around his shoulder to give him some attention and love, but I didn’t because I wasn’t sure how he’d react. I later nearly regretted having him sit by me when he proved to be an absolute terror throughout the service, running up on stage, showing off to the congregation, giggling, and running up and down the aisles. I had no idea what level, if any, of disciplinary action I was supposed to take. I suspected that he was experiencing an attention deficit disorder—attention being shown to him, not him showing attention—and that if I showed him a bit of love, he would not try to garner it from the audience. One time when he ran past, I tried to smoothly transfer his kinetic energy into a smooth swing up onto my lap where I could lovingly hold him and prevent his roaming. However, my smooth, fatherly move turned into him digging in his heels and me not moving him an iota (let alone gracefully and smoothly swinging him into my lap). I quickly gave up, because I had no parameters for the encounter. Later in the service I persuaded him to sit in my lap (due to the translating SS teacher sitting behind me) and I held him for a while. When I had to go up on stage to sing and left him in his seat, he behaved wonderfully!




    We had a good and fairly normal service that evening. A couple of things stood out:

    1. The bad singing on our part. For some reason we did awfully. We could not harmonize for anything!
    2. The shirtless man who came up to help us do the motions to a song. Gee told the audience that this man had a “special shirt” on.
    3. The guy with the teeth that matched the brown shampoo bottle. Gee was sure to point this out to the audience too, holding the bottle up for comparison.

    Quote of the Day

    “You have to strategically aim the water in order to cover the entire appendage.”
    -Hans, defending the greater rinse effectiveness of dip showers versus shower heads

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