Ups and Downs

Tuesday PJ and I traveled down to Bangkok after my langauge classes. Whew, what a trip. Paul was flying back into Bangkok from Malaysia late Tuesday night and then Wednesday we had all this business to take care of. Wednesday morning we woke up tired but ready to go to Thai Immigration. I had my visa extended and so I was back in Bangkok to have my passport come under Paul's new long term visa. It turns out they declined to do the paperwork for it yesterday. So, they extended my visa another 10 days and I have to go back to Bangkok on the 10th. Thankfully the trip wasn't totally wasted. I also had a doctor's appointment. You know one of the things I love about Thailand is that every time I go see my doctor he gives me an ultrasound and we get to see the baby! It's so exciting, month after month to see the little life forming and to see it's heart beating and it's legs kicking... what a wonder and what a miracle. That made up for the disappoitment earlier in the day at Immigration! So we traveled back to Lopburi and returned home around 4:30PM. We were both exhausted (PJ was doing great!).
We are supposed to go to Chiang Mai the middle of next week for a conference but we have decided to stay here and study instead. All this travel is taxing and not good for langauge study...plus we have to go back to Bangkok the day after the conference. We're not sure we made a good decision but it seems like we have. The conference would probably be good as far as spiritual revival goes but if we're only thinking about language and being stressed with it then we probably woudn't enjoy it much anyway.
So, this is life as a missionary. Flexibility and trusting in God to do His work in and thru us...these things don't come easily...in fact the lessons come quite hard sometimes and sometimes, like last night, there are many tears. Tears of frustration, tears of tiredness, tears of knowing you are failing every moment because you are a human and yet tears filled with the great understanding that God is here and hears my cry and His grace IS sufficient. I thank God for all of our supporters who email at just the right time and say, "It's ok, we're praying for you" and one supporter even gave me permission NOT to cook! I loved that! How wonderful it is to be part of the body of Christ.
Well, I better get some studying done before PJ wakes up from his nap. Oh, by the way, he is doing much better with potty training again! We are thankful that he gets excited to go on the potty again!

Just seeing if this will post or not

The good 'ol days when PJ would sit on his potty and go! 

This is our "hong naam" or bathroom. Notice the water holder along with the dipper with which we flush the toilet with...no running water to our toilet. I thank God that it is a Western style toilet and not a squatty potty!

Another orchid plant. These bouquets sell for 10 baht (Thai currency). That is equivalent to ABOUT 25 cents!

Beautiful orchids are everywhere in Thailand (and they are cheap!). This is one in the garden across from our house.

This is the orchid garden on our compound that happens to be located just across from our house.

This is the spirit house on our compound. In Thailand just about every home and business has a spirit house of some sort located on their property to keep away bad spirits and to appease the good ones. Fruit and incense and glasses of water are often placed on these ornaments as an offering to the spirits.

This is me standing at the foot of our teak wood staircase.

Paul posing in our dining room. Through the door behind him is our Thai kitchen.

Our Thai kitchen...notice the stove with an oven! Notice the kitchen sink is not built into the wall.

Inside Thessabaan House (Front)

Now that you have seen the outside of our house, here's a peek inside. Most Thai homes have a "thai kitchen", that is a kitchen that sits off of the rest of the house. This is where our lone sink, oven and pots and pans are. Our bathroom, "hong naam" in Thai, is located off of the kitchen. In the dining area is where our fridge, cupboards and table are located. Ants are a common pest here in Thailand and so the cupboard where we keep food has special plastic rings around it that we fill with water to keep ants from getting into it. If we keep anything in the trash or on a counter, etc for too long, the ants find it and begin their fast work of carting it off to wherever they cart stuff off to. We find ants EVERYWHERE...from time to time we see them walking out of our computer key pad. I am hoping they aren't eating away at the inside of it. Just the other day, I opened a brand new pack of white undies for PJ and there were ants, many ants eating away at the cotton undies. There are actually holes in the undies! I have killed them all off and am super aware now that this is a problem here!
The living room is situated beside the dining room as you might be able to tell from the picture. Thankfully we have a high powered ceiling fan in the living room that keeps it pretty cool. Any time we turn the oven on though the thai kitchen gets very hot very quickly. It seems the heat is sorta trapped with no where to go.
Our house is called Thessabaan House. Thessabaan is the Thai word for government. And from what I've been told there are some government buildings located just behind our compound so they (they being OMF*) call our house Thessabaan House front. Our neighbors who are missionaries from Hollland live in Thessabaaan House back. Unfortunately for us, our house is situated right on the soi (Thai word for side street). This is unfortunate because all the soi dogs (aka stray dogs) like to bark and fight often under our window. And there are many stray dogs here in Lopburi! Of course it is the Thai way not to kill off the stray dogs because it might mess up that spirit's karma or rebirth.

A quick word about OMF. OMF stands for Overseas Missionary Fellowship and used to be known as China Inland Mission...the mission of Hudson Taylor. We are studying here under the direction of OMF though we are MTW missionaries. OMF has several churches planted here in Lopburi though we have only visited one so far. It is very exciting to see the Kingdom of God expanded here in Thailand and to see these Thai believers worship the true God.

Hello Birdie!

I have been trying to potty train a two year old for five days now. Some days it goes much better than others. One nice thing about Thailand is that NO ONE has carpeting so if your kid goes "wee" all over someone's (or your own) floor it's not a big deal, you just wipe it up and move on. And they start potty training really early here...like six months old (maybe even younger than that). Today has not been a great day for the potty and PJ. This morning as I was preparing our breakfast of scrambled eggs and leftover biscuits that I made last night (woo hoo, I am starting to cook here!), PJ walked into the kitchen and I promptly smelled a horrific odor coming from his cute little monster truck underpants. Yep, he had pooped in his underwear. So, as any good mother would do, I sent him straight into the bathroom. As I was taking off the poopy undies I heard a fluttering. This is not uncommon in our bathroom and so I didn't think anything about. The roof of our bathroom is made out of some sort of plasticky material so we hear birds all the time. I continued to clean PJ's behind when I realized the fluttering I was hearing was inside the room and not outside! A bird had somehow made it's way into our "hong naam"!!! Since Paul flew to Malaysia this very morning to do some visa stuff I was without my fearless other and better half to catch the bird. (And yes, I recall at least one other instance where we had a bird stuck in our house in Pennsylvania and Paul fearlessly caught it and released it back to it's natural habitat...that not being OUR house!) So, what to do? I needed to get the bird out of the bathroom in case I needed to use it before leaving for church. There's something freaky about being in a small space with a bird who is scared because all the sudden it isn't free. I decided to call on Phii Denaii. He is our landlord and we couldn't ask for a better man. So, I walked over to his house (he lives in the same compound) and asked for him. He came out and asked me if I wanted to go to the market...in Thai, and I said no, in Thai, but I started acting out what I did need him for. (I had made plans to go to the market with his wife before church as well). Then his lovely wife, Phii Lina, came to the door. Phii Lina is our house help as well as PJ's caretaker while we are in language school. Her English is pretty good, so thankfully, she translated. We walked back over to our house and there was no bird! I think Phii Denaii thought I had lost my mind but then he saw the hole at the top of our bathroom ceiling and said, I think, in Thai that he would patch the hole later. About 20 minutes later, the bird appeared again. I shut the bathroom door, checked a few minutes later and it was gone. I don't quite understand this bird...you'd think it would get the hint. I would have posted a picture but Paul has our camera.

Just a cultural note, you may be wondering what the Phii in Phii Denai and Phii Lina stands for. This is a very Thai way of showing someone who is older than you respect. It is a family term meaning older brother/sister. Even though they really aren't our brother/sister we still call them our Phii because it is like they are our brother/sister. This is true in Thai relationships as well. For example, at the language center all the teachers know who their Phii is (based on age) and they call each other accordingly. So, when a Thai person asks you your age, don't be offended, just know that they are trying to figure out if they should be showing you respect by calling you Phii or not!

Our Surroundings

So, this is our home in Lopburi, Thailand. It's a two bedroom house with lots of cracks and crevices for roaches, ants, geckos and other lizards to enter through. As you can see we live in a gated compound. There are five other houses in our compound. We have one air conditioner in our bedroom but that is it, and it does get HOT here! We have one bathroom (hong naam in Thai) and one sink in our kitchen. Oh yeah, there is no hot water here either. I am actually getting used to that but I am a little nervous about the cool season when the water in the water tank won't be warmed all day long by the hot sun and warm temperatures. In Thailand it is polite and cultural to take a shower at least twice a day, during the hot season it is suggested you take three showers a day! Especially for the farang (foreigner) who is living in Thailand this is important to heed. We smell to the Thai folks and to be polite we must shower often!

The picture to the right is of the flood we had last week. There was a tropical depression situated over most of Thailand and so Lopburi got dumped on. It's hard to see it here but that water is about knee deep in the center. Our house was the only one not to flood in our compound. I was most happy about that but only a few more inches and the water would have been in our house as well. We had to bike to language school in this water...and we even spotted some fish swimming in the streets, the water in the streets was midway up our bike tires! It was difficult peddling and keeping balance with the wake from the cars and trucks passing by.



This is Lopburi Language Center (LLC). This is where we are learning to speak Thai. We have been here now for 1 1/2 months learning Thai. It is quite challenging but it is also exciting when a Thai person on the street understands what we are trying to communicate. We are one on one with a Thai teacher for two hours a day and spend another 2-5 hours studying and listening to cds and tapes and practicing in the market, etc. One really great thing about learning Thai is that there are no verbs to conjugate like in English, Spanish, French, etc. But, there are plenty of other things that make it difficult such as the tones and sentence structure.
LLC is made up of the center two aparments. One side is four storey and the other is three. There are air conditioned study rooms here and our teacher's rooms have air conditioning. We are very thankful for the comfort of those a/c units!

A New Adventure in Blogging

Well, I did it!!! I have been thinking about starting a blog for three months or more now and I finally got enough nerve to sit down and do it.