Here are various pictures from Pang Klang, a Lisu village in Northern Thailand where Craig and Rachel, a couple from our church are living. (I previously posted this and this from their village.)
Enjoying treasures from the U.S.!
Craig demonstrating how he teaches English in the “town hall”
Rosene’s darling little munchkin
Neighbors’ house
Josh explaining with his signature expressiveness
Cutting pineapple
Contemplatively surveying the village from his doorway
Visiting Craig and Rachel’s first home in Pang Klang
Standing in front of their starter castle
Craig and Rachel standing in front of their current home in the setting sun
Here are some more pictures from Pang Klang, the Lisu village in Northern Thailand where Craig and Rachel are living as workers. (I previously posted a picture of Pang Klang’s shaman.)
The reason there’s a whole post on cooking pictures is because that comprises a large part of Craig & Rachel’s day. Cooking over a cook fire takes just a bit longer than popping something in the microwave!
Picking some food from the garden for lunch
The shaman of Pang Klang, the Lisu village in Northern Thailand where Craig and Rachel (a couple from our church) are living
One of my friends, Gene, is co-worker to a Thai lady married to an American man. They live in Hutch and invited Gene for supper. Gene in turn invited all of us “Thailanders” (those who have lived in Thailand or are going to live in Thailand) plus a few random people. They were a lovely couple that were 5 star hosts. They met in Chiang Mai while both were attending Chiang Mai University. They also had a super-cute, highly entertaining 3 year old daughter. We had an awesome evening.
Craig and Rachel, the soon-to-be Thailand Lisu villagers
Listening attentively to Melody
Happily demonstrating how big Clifford the dog is
Showing off her sunglasses
Showing her *real* glasses
Our wonderful hosts with a succulent dessert of sticky rice drizzled with sweetened condensed milk, mangos, and fried bananas
Making Chinese tea for us
I’m sure y’all have heard about the unrest in Thailand including the shutdown of Bangkok’s two airports. I have only one comment on a paragraph in a CNN article that stuck out to me as blatantly wrong, having lived in Thailand for eight months:
In Chiang Mai late Wednesday protesters wearing yellow shirts pulled a 60-year-old man from his car and shot and killed him, Reuters journalist John Sanlin told CNN. Anti-government protesters typically wear yellow shirts, he said.
Yellow is the King’s color. The King has always kept above the fray of politics and coups and is the one person that everyone in Thailand loves. Everyone (including us foreigners) would always wear yellow shirts on Monday (the King’s birthday). On a given day (let alone Monday), it seems 25% of the men in Chiang Mai, Thailand wear a yellow polo shirt with the King’s shield/crest on the left breast pocket. For the Reuters reporter John Sanlin to say that anti-government protesters wear yellow is akin to saying that anti-government protesters tend to have legs. On top of this, both political sides sides wear yellow to show that their actions are patriotic–according to this travel blog, the soldiers that participated in the latest coup tied yellow ribbons to their gun barrels. It’s the equivalent of American politicians wearing flag pins.
We went to a very interesting choral concert Saturday night. It was at Chiang Mai University. It was a choir that was practicing to compete in the World Choir Games. They sang a diverse range of songs from madrigals to American folk.
The two baritones performing “Tell Him”
My favorite of the night was a tenor solo performance of “Why God, Why?” from Miss Saigon (a musical that ran for an entire decade with more than 8000 performance between Broadway and the Theatre Royal in London). It’s the first time a secular solo was done so well and feelingly that my eyes actually filled with tears. I could feel the deep soul cry of asking God, “Why?”
My second favorite was the baritone solo “Una furtiva lagrima” (from L’Elisir d’amore) by Mozart. My third was probably the baritone solo by the director, “This is the moment” (from Jekyll & Hyde). I also enjoyed the choir singing “Misty”, “You Raise Me Up”, and “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” was an unusual Broadway-style performance with drums thrown in and a touch of electric guitars. It also a quite depressing song that speaks of a very young man that threw his life away by murdering someone. It ends with a godless, hopeless cry of “Nothing really matters, nothing really matters to me”. It was quite sobering and sad.
I also enjoyed a very unusual arrangement of “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. We Americans were highly amused by the ensemble performance of “Tuxedo Junction” (Glenn Miller). To start with, the main soloist for this song was wearing a tuxedo, had a beard, and had dark glasses–he was the epitome of trying to look like an Asian pop/movie star. Definitely the Bollywood look. But the really funny part was they were trying to sing southern style (” Way down south in Birmingham, I mean south in Alabam’”) but their Thai accent just didn’t quite fit. They couldn’t quite get the “th” sound of south and it came out sout. Let me hasten to add that their English was *excellent* throughout–I was highly impressed. However, this was one place, one part of American culture, that they just didn’t replicate very well. The ensemble that did “The Boy from New York City” did an exceptional job of portraying that song. The subject matter of the song was somewhat less than excellent, but they portrayed the content skillfully! *eyes roll*
Their repertoire is below the fold:
Read more »
We were privileged (mainly due to Thai Airways’ order for a couple of A380s) to be recipients of a visit by the new Airbus A380, the world’s largest airliner. It landed at Chiang Mai airport in part to demonstrate that the A380 can land at secondary airports without difficulty.
We went out to a footbridge over Hang Dong road near the airport to watch it land. We waited in the hot sun for a long time while the schedule kept getting pushed back. The A380 had scraped its wing on a hangar door in Bangkok and finally they simply removed the vertical winglet on the wings.
Without further ado, here’s the hi-def video (taken with my Canon TX-1) of the plane landing:
2:44
Hi-def: MPEG-2, 1280×720, 376 MB
Hi-def: WMV, 1280×720, 9.5 Mbps, 153 MB
Hi-def: WMV, 1280×720, 3.6 Mbps, 58 MB (While I’m sure a videophile could, I can’t tell the quality difference between these first three)
Lo-Def: MPEG-4, 320×240, 1 Mbps, 22 MB (not recommended)
YouTube
Play the WMV files in something other than Windows Media Player. For some reason WMP squishes it down to 4:3 instead of properly displaying it at 16:9. (I recommend Media Player Classic.)
Here are some pics that my good friend Darren took with his Canon 10D:
Airbus A380 approaching Chiang Mai International Airport
Airbus A380 landing at Chiang Mai International Airport
We got up the next morning and had a wonderful breakfast of pancakes, cooked by our wonderful English hosts.
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The group of us with our English missionary hosts
We then watched a documentary about the underground church in China. While we were watching, one of the wonderful Karen Bible school students washed our filthy SUV for us! He left it shining clean.
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Driving through a mudslide that had slid across the road
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The terrified girls in the back seat as Gee flew around the curves
We then headed back to IGo! It was a several hour drive and as we got closer, the ladies go more and more eager to get back to IGo. When they found out that we were going to GTO to drop Gee off first, they were quite saddended. Then we began a nonsensical discussion about what we would do if God called us to go back to the Karen villages for another two weeks without going back to IGO. Nonetheless, we survived that intensely emotional time of reminiscing about Karen villages and looking forward to seeing everyone at IGo again. It wasn’t so much we were tired of Karen villages, but rather that we were tired of repacking every day, sleeping at a different place each night, and spending a bunch of time crammed into the SUV on the road each day.
We got up early, ate breakfast, shook hands with everyone and said “ta-bloo”.
Let me take a bit of a detour and tell you what “ta-bloo” means. It is the Karen word for “Thank you” but it also is the standard greeting. So it is a very useful word. We learned it fairly early in the trip. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible for native English speakers to tell the difference between an Asian “b” and “p”. We also learned “ta-ploo” means “crazy”. “Ta-bloo” has a rising tone on the second half. It sounds like “ta-bloop” with the “p” only barely suppressed. “Ta-ploo” on the other hand has a falling tone on the second half.
While I’m on the subject, Karen shake hands as a matter of course. This is more familiar to us than the Thai bow. However, they grasp their right arm with their left hand right above the elbow when shaking hands. This is more polite than leaving their left hand at their side. Also, shaking with both hands is considered even more expressive of love, admiration, eagerness, and politeness.
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Pro-Burmese guerillas (DKBA – Democratic Karen Buddhist Army) shot this hole in the church in a cross-border raid
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We hopped back on the boat and went back to the big border village. We had an extra passenger for the ride back: a large snapping turtle one of the villagers had caught. They put it in the boat right beside me. It had ropes attached to its shell, but the ropes weren’t tied to anything. I was a bit surprised it didn’t take a hunk out of my leg, but not at all disappointed. They were taking the turtle to market to sell it for meat.
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Yours truly. I haven’t shaved on this trip because mirrors, much less stellar shaving facilities, are in short supply.
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We got back to the truck, repacked our things in our backpacks, and headed back toward the main road. Before we got there, we stopped at a Bible school. The Bible school is for Karen students to learn theology, Bible, English, and agriculture. They have a four year program. It is headed by a missionary couple from the UK that have been missionaries since the 70’s. They spent many years in Laos, Hong Kong, and Thailand. They have had this school for three years now. They have Karen professors and they teach as well. They also have short-term two week teams that come in from the UK to help out and expose the teams to missions. There is a large community of students and Christian families here centered around this school. It’s an awesome place! School is not in session right now, but will be in a month. We are staying at the missionaries’ house for the night. They have toilet seats with tanks and showerheads with hot water. It’s the first hot shower I have taken in two months! We had a wonderful time sitting in their living room talking with them about missions. Also, a young lady from PA had just arrived that very afternoon to teach English for several months. She had spent time before teaching at Grace International School in Chiang Mai, the place we go twice a week to play volleyball.
That evening after a lovely supper (with forks!) with the missionaries, we went to a Christian youth hostel several miles away. We spent the evening singing and doing skits. The kids were very much into it and we had a great time. After the service they all lined up to eagerly shake our hands. Two of the giggling seventeen year old girls that wanted to shake my hand both stuck their hands in at once and I had two hands in my hand! Most of the kids were in the 6-12 age range, but there were a number of high-school’ers as well. They left their parents in their village (which has no school) and come to live at the hostel. Six Christian staff take care of them. There is a “dad” and “mom” that are in charge of the hostel. They go to school each day, then come back to the hostel where they have study periods in which staff assist them in learning their homework. All but two of the students living at the hostel are Christians and come from Christian homes. However, students in the past that have come that aren’t Christians have gone home Christians. They have devotions and Bible studies on a regular basis. The parents mostly support the children, but Compassion International also pitches in support in cases where the parents can’t afford it.
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The view from our bedroom
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We got up very early and left.
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After a while, we got off the main road onto a paved road that soon became intermittently paved. It soon began to climb over a mountain range. We got to the top of the range and began to ascend into the valley below. As we were going downhill around a curve to the right, the driver miscalculated the sharpness of the curve. To our left was a steep wooded hillside. To our right was a cliff face going up. It had been raining earlier that day and the pavement was roughly paved with lots of gravel on it. He slammed on the brakes and we began to slide straight toward the small concrete pillars that stood between us and the tree-studded embankment. The ladies were shrieking and the men were gasping. Weirdly enough I was doing neither. Time slowed down and I analyzed the situation. When we were only a meter or two from the pillar, my mind cranked the wheel to the left toward the pillars and the embankment. Unfortunately, the driver did not and we lunged toward the towering rock face to our right as the wheels finally regained traction. He overcorrected several more times, whipping the skidding vehicle back and forth, coming to a gradually straighter, gradually slower heading. Most of the people were gasping for air, but apparently I was too stupid to be scared. I wasn’t breathing hard and my heart wasn’t beating fast. I’m still trying to figure out if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
We continued on until we came to a large village on a river that is the border between Thailand and Burma. Just as we got there, Thai soldiers and U.N. personnel were escorting a truckload of Karen refugees that was leaving, beginning the long journey to Canada. These refugees had been displaced by the ethnic cleansing by the Burmese government against the Karen tribes. Also contributing to their refugee status is the guerilla war between the KNU (Karen Nation United) and the Burmese government. Part of a platoon (8-10) of Thai soldiers sat in a little sandbagged enclave overlooking the river.
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Refugee bus getting ready to leave
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Riverside
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I took a change of clothes and other necessities out of my large backpack and put it into two of my purses, one of which I slung over each shoulder. We boarded a wooden boat and headed up the river. The boat ran on a converted car engine and its propeller shaft stuck 3-5 meters out the rear. It was also deafening. My ears were numb 3-5 minutes after exiting the boat. Apparently the river is full of sandbars because the driver zigzagged all over the river. At one point we were only a meter from the Burma shore! I guess I’ll have to add that in gray to my list of countries visited. We took the boat to the night’s village. The village is accessible only by boat or motorbike during the rainy season (which it is now). (During the dry season, only a few very rugged trucks attempt the journey.)
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A wat (temple) up on the mountainside along the river
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When we got there, the boat driver took us up a steep path to the village. As we were walking along the concreted roads in the village, I slipped and almost ended up flat out on the ground. Algae were growing on the road because it was so little used because the roads into the village are nearly impassable!
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We relaxed that afternoon. Many of us wrote in our journals and read our Bibles. (This is the first time I have mentioned this, but we have done quite a bit of both on this trip during the relaxing times.)
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That night we had a church service. We had a special treat in that the pastor played bass guitar along with Gee playing guitar and another musician in the church played drums for us while we were singing “Lord, I Lift Your Name on High” and “Here I Am to Worship”. We had a fairly normal service except Katrina was sick and wasn’t able to participate. Also Gee had a really bad cough and wasn’t feeling very good. Katrina gave him some echinacea, but surprisingly enough, it didn’t fix his problem in the 2 hours before the service. But Gee soldiered on (not that he had much choice unless he wanted to cancel the service; he was the only one that knew Karen and English), coughing and hiccupping through the service.
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That night, we sat around a candle and talked for a while. It was really cool. We talked about the trip and about myriad other things.
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.
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Craig with doo-rag
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A rice tractor–it’s designed to work in a foot or so of water
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The cave entrance
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That evening we had some deer skin for supper again. Tasty!
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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!
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We had a good and fairly normal service that evening. A couple of things stood out:
“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
We had a breakfast of requisite rice and toppings. An added delicacy of which I partook was dried deer skin. It tasted just like one would think deer skin would taste: hard, chewy, and rather like leather. It was impossible to entirely break down into comfortable pieces, so at one point one had to merely take a drink of water and swallow it.
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Gee playing with a dried deer head that was laying around the place
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Me, examining my badly sunburned hand (from the motorbike trip around the mountain) and subsequent peeling
We then went around to people’s houses and prayed for them. When we got to one person’s house, he asked us to change the language on his satellite TV receiver from English to Thai. We located that setting in the menus, but it inexplicably refused to change.
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The family from the house we stayed at
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Unique set of doors they had
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Gee changing the batteries in this old man’s treasured possession–an old, little, pink clock. He didn’t know how to change the batteries and get it to work again and he was so delighted when Gee got it working!
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A young lady who spoke English
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Right before they left, they gave each of us a Karen shirt. We were really kicking ourselves then that we had asked to buy shirts at the other village! People in this village had been visiting the other village, had seen that the other village had given gifts, saw that were interested in shirts, and then gave us shirts! Needless to say, we thanked them profusely.
We then bounced back through the atrocious roads (they thanked us specifically for coming to visit them in such a hard to reach place) to the main road.
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On the way out, we stopped at the village’s fields
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We drove at a dizzying rate of speed around the mountain curves on the main road with tires squealing. Gee has driven the entire time. Katrina has been taking her daily dose of motion sickness pills. We also listened to several episodes of Adventures in Odyssey (which we have been doing throughout the trip). We soon came to top of a mountain pass and with a little lookout, so we stopped to take pictures:
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We soon came to a good sized town (Mae Hong Son) and looked for a restaurant to eat lunch. It was already 2 in the afternoon and some of didn’t feel like eating just before supper. So, some of us ate and some of us didn’t. I recharged my prepaid cell phone and the two star-struck lovers called their girlfriends in the States, waking them from a sound sleep. We then visited a Buddhist temple (Phrathat Doi Gongmoo) in the area (of a more Burmese style). We also went to a market to restock food and stopped at an internet café to check our email.
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Phrathat Doi Gongmoo
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View from Phrathat Doi Gongmoo
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Me, taking pictures
We then resumed our journey on the main road, out of town. We passed a lady whom we asked for directions to the village. We went to the village and she arrived about 5 minutes after us. The village was just on the main highway, only several kilometers outside of town. She happened to be a Karen path-follower who was our host for the night. We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the rice mats in their house. We firmly entrenched the Karen word for shampoo (which we were giving out in large quantities) in our minds that afternoon. It sounds just like the English phrase “Some will be cool.” It is sub-woo-bee-col. They were quite amused by our repeating the word “shampoo” over and over again. They soon fed us supper and off to the meeting we went.
This organization definitely felt the urban influence of being so close to the city. The women were not as modestly dressed and one of the y@rp requests was the youth wouldn’t get into drugs and alcohol.
One of the nicer effects of urban influence was the modern improvement of having an electric light in the bathroom! Very modern! The house that the ladies stayed at was even more advanced! They had an in-house-outhouse! It was an outhouse that was a lean-to the house.
We guys stayed at the shepherd’s house.
“It was a privilege to be with. Keeping elder brother first! Y@rp forus. Dad bless you!”
-Craig’s very scatterbrained entry in the organization’s guestbook (“Dad bless you!” was his only complete sentence with correctly spelled words. What made it funnier was that it was so totally unlike him. He is very intelligent, a good speller, and fairly meticulous with grammar.)
Today was Sunday, so we had five services at this village! The first service was at 5:30. We were not required to come to the first service, but Huber was quite insistent the night before that we should definitely go. When morning came, he was the only one that didn’t go. That service was basically a y@rp and logos reading service. However, they asked us to sing a choir song, which we did.
Then we went back to our house for breakfast. Gee tricked us and told us that the only breakfast we were having was some roasted peanuts, some pork rinds, and other snacks we had along. So when the real breakfast of rice and various other foods came, we weren’t very hungry. We gave him a hard time, but he explained that if he was grinning when he said something, he was only joking.
School started at 8. Katrina, Darrell, Craig, and Gee taught school. They did several skits (David and Goliath was so convincing that one of the children started crying) and sang songs and told word stories. The regular school teacher (who was there assisting with logistics) is the daughter of the M shepherd who first came to the village. School was 2.5 hours long! After an hour, at 9, Kelly, Huber, and I left for the ladies’ service. The service started with two ladies sitting up front behind the two tables that flanked the speaker’s stand. They read the book, shared, and led singing. Then Kelly taught/shared (Surrey Chai translated). After that, Kelly, Huber, and I sang a trio.
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The cute little girl who passed the hat
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A piece of candy for answering a question
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A young lady with a sweet hair-do
–
Here are some of my thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of speaking through an interpreter:
Disadvantages:
Advantages:
–
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The shepherd’s house which the village built for him
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The new meeting place that is under construction because the old one is so small
At the main service, which was around 11, Gee spoke and we sang more choir songs (which they absolutely loved!). We then had lunch and then another service in the afternoon. It was called the “youth” service, but everyone came. One of us spoke and we sang more songs.
After the last service at the village, several of the organization elders gave us each a Karen “purse”/bag (which is used by both males and females). Later we asked if we could buy some of the awesome, red shirts that the Karen men wore for dress shirts on Sunday and some of the lovely white dresses (edged with red) the Karen girls wore for Sunday. They had some of the shirts which we purchased for the smaller guys in the group. However, the big guys—Darrell and I—found no shirts which fit. As we were driving out of the village, the pretty young lady who is the school teacher came to our vehicle and insisted on giving us another shirt. We felt badly because we did not at all want to hint at more gifts, we wanted to pay her for it, and we tried, but she insisted.
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The school teacher is standing to Katrina’s right, your left; Katrina is the one standing right in front of me
Then off we went to the next village (about 6 km away) with one truckload of villagers from that village in front of us and one behind us.
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As we pulled into their village, we drove right past the school. Several teenagers were playing what they call lacrosse, but which is nothing like what is called lacrosse in America. After we unloaded our things, I went back to watch. It’s like volleyball, only the net is neck-high, they can’t use their hands, the ball is a small, hollow, woven reed thing, and they spike with their feet and heads. They are amazing! They did standing flips to spike the ball with their feet!
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Karen lacrosse
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Karen lacrosse
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Karen lacrosse
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I then went back to my hosts’ place (who had been visiting the previous village while we were there, so we kind of knew them already) and ate supper.
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Supper
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I then went out and took a shower. While I was in the shower it began to rain and I then heard the meeting place bell ringing. I hurriedly finished my shower (in the dark!) and ran back to the house. The others had already left. It was raining fairly hard by then and I hoped against hope that they had left the SUV unlocked because my word, notes (I was talking that night!), and poncho were in there. Fortunately they had, and several minutes later I was standing in the back of the meeting quietly struggling to remove my poncho.
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The shower is on the left, the toilet on the right; this was a fairly typical Karen outhouse/showerhouse. It worked great! 
This was another village in which they had no grid power, and the church’s solar panel/battery had a quite limited amount of juice. Taking up much of that juice were the electric guitar amps (this was a first for us in Karen meeting!) and the large sound system which had a bull horn that broadcasted the service to the entire village. There was only enough juice left to power two bulbs. Unfortunately there were three bulbs. They did some rewiring, with requisite sparking as they snipped wires, unscrewed screws, and moved alligator clips to make so that only the two front bulbs would be powered. They were all fluorescent bulbs, of course, so when the one circuit with two bulbs had juice, neither of the bulbs would light.
After we got the power issues straightened out, we began our service. We did our normal service and when we came to the end and took y@rp requests, it was our turn to give out a y@rp request. Huber was very sick. Several men came up to lay hands on him and y@rp for him, but just about then he bolted out the door and nearly emptied his supper on the ground. After some walking around outside and after we y@rped for him, he was able to throw it all up which made him feel much better.
When we were teaching them the songs with motions, Gee chose two grandmas (as was his standard operating procedure) to come up and help us with the motions. He did the motions faster and faster. One of the grandmas was totally crazy. She had fried her brain on betel juice and wasn’t all there. But she was incredibly hilarious. She would do rough imitations of whatever Gee did and did all sorts of crazy moves with a very serious expression on her face. People were rolling in the aisles.
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In the morning we went around to people’s houses, y@rping for them and singing. Y@rping for the sick, singing, and encouraging/sharing have been the three main emphases of this trip.
We left quite early and bounced out to the main road. We flew around the mountainous curves at a high rate of speed (inducing some motion sickness in Katrina). We then came to a main town where we stopped at the market to replenish our food and to eat lunch at a restaurant.
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A sweet macro shot I got of my glass at the restaurant.
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A weird, kinda cool macro shot of the ever-present Germ-X bottle with brother Craig in the background sipping his strawberry shake
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On this picture Gee was confused whether he was supposed to look serious or smile
Then we got on a side paved road and drove through a valley of strange beauty. Lush, green mountains were juxtaposed with a nearly desert valley of blackened stumps and sparse vegetation.
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Lunch!
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Stopped beside the road for a bathroom break and photography break
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Shooting beside the road
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We then went back in and up the mountains on a dirt road. This road was entirely incomparable to previous bouncy, dirt roads. Huge craters marked the path. It twisted through the mountains at steep angles. Heads hit the ceilings at four times the frequency of before. It was also a very long trip. After several hours passed, we reached a river. We crossed the river on a bridge that had a sign in front of it saying: “Danger! Mine. Blasting.” We proceeded past a bunch of miners and twisted up the mountain through a confusing set of redoubling, splitting and joining set of steep roads. We finally came to a dead end: a mine shaft. We turned around and took another Y. It ended in a steep drop off to the river below. We turned around and went back and Gee asked the miners for directions. When he told them the name of the village we wanted to go to, they burst into laughter. We had gone 15 km past the village! All at about 20 km/h. So we turned around and bounced and jounced with a vengeance as Gee made up for lost time. We stopped and asked two men (who were stopped beside the road doing inexplicable things with water barrels) for directions. They gave us directions and off we jounced again. We discovered at one point, when we got out to push, that our SUV was not all-wheel drive as we had thought, but was rear-wheel drive!
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A common impediment
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Gee looking through a leaf at me
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The mine at the end of the line
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We finally came to the Y at which we should have turned left. It had the name of one village on the arrow pointing down that branch, but it didn’t have the names of the two villages beyond the first village. When we finally crested the last rise, we saw a beautiful plateau spread out before us. It was nestled in a ring of higher mountains surrounding it. What was also quite beautiful to us Americans was the huge corn fields that adorned this plateau! Corn, squash, and many other traditional North American crops covered the very steep hillsides. It felt much like home. That evening when we got to the remote village itself, it felt even more like home! Several children cheerily called out to us, “Good morning!” (Even that small level of English had been rare in the other villages.) The village seemed incredibly clean and civilized. Everyone was happy and clean. We saw one man with a yellow “Livestrong” bracelet and another man with a Kingdom Book and Music (a path-follower bookstore in Chiang Mai) t-shirt.
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A little girl climbing a tree
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Exhausted after our long drive (including our extensive detour)
It was only later that we learned that everyone in the entire village was path-followers. 15 years ago, there were no path-followers in this village. A native Karen M shepherd moved his family to the village and began to tell people about elder brother. Six years ago, he ordained a man who had grown up in that village and moved on to another village. There were actually several newcomers (two or three families) to the village who were not path-followers. Another very small village had fallen on hard times and was merging into this village and they were slowly moving in.
We met a young man by the name of Surrey Chai who had attended logos school in Chiang Mai for several years. He spoke excellent English, actually a bit better than Gee’s. He had lived in Australia for six months doing language study. We stayed at his father’s house. We had a great time hanging out with him.
No electrical lines reached this very remote village, but many houses had solar panels and batteries to run a light or two and a TV/VCD player. Throughout all these villages, there were always 5-10 houses with satellite TV.
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A view out the window
I went to use the standard-issue outhouse/shower house. The door was closed so I knocked and waited. Hearing no answer, I pushed the door open. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw a lady squatting there (fortunately her dress was surrounding her!). I gave a little surprised yelp and slammed the door. When she came out, I apologized and bowed repeatedly. When I asked Gee later, he said I had done the correct cultural thing in knocking and it was her fault that she didn’t say something. Needless to say, that added to my “joy” at using bathrooms without locks.
That evening’s service was somewhat subdued as both we and the villagers were quite tired. Two truckloads of path-followers from a neighboring village came to the service. After we had done our normal service (sang songs with motions, sang “choir” songs, someone spoke, took y@rp requests and prayed, ended official service, taught them “Boogy, Boogy”, etc, etc) and were walking home with Surrey Chai, he remarked, “You can dance!” in relation to the Boogy, Boogy song.
