Pictures

Here are some pictures that I've taken over the 7 weeks we've been here. I hope they communicate some of the beauty of this country.

Chaung Tha Beach

My Beautiful Wife Catherine at Chaung Tha Beach

A Hut on the Paddies

Mon Countryside

Ox Cart

Plowing with Oxen

More Plowing

Rice Paddies

Sunset at Chaung Tha Beach

Twilight at Chaung Tha Beach

I hope this gives you a little more of an idea of what the country looks like.

The golden country

I want to describe this country to you all. I had very little mental image of what this country would be like prior to our arrival and I think this is because Myanmar is a very hard country to find pictures of, mainly because the government is afraid of journalists and photographers and won’t let them into the country. But I have now made three trips outside of Yangon and want to share some of what I have seen.

Myanmar is a beautiful country. I have been amazed by the many colors here. I have seen many shades of green that I never knew existed. Rice paddy after rice paddy of slightly different greens, some a darker and more mature hunter green like a mango leaf and some younger and brighter. As the rice grows old, ready for harvest, yellow mixes with the green. Black water buffalo thresh the yellow harvested rice and are then lead to the canals where they cover themselves in cool mud that dries gray-brown. The golden husked rice is then spread out beside the road on tarps to dry. Deep pink blossoms on trees overhanging the road make me think of spring in Ohio (however the temperature here does not). The white sand on the beaches is brighter than I’ve seen, and as the sun sinks into the blue sea it grows huge and crimson and then melts away into the water leaving a gently shaded orange and purple sky which soon turns midnight blue. On clear nights outside Yangon, the night sky is pierced many more times by starlight than it is in America. This country has evoked in me a greater assurance that God did indeed create our Earth than I have had in a long time, and I am once again amazed by his intricacy and artistic creativity in doing so.

However, Myanmar is also a country of much destruction. On our recent trip to the beach I saw hill after hill deforested except for a lone tree towering a hundred feet above the scrub of young trees that have grown up to replace a canopy that once covered the entire hill. I also have seen streams clogged with plastics, bags, wrappers and other trash and trash blowing across the ground, in search of a resting place. Chickens eat styrofoam packaging and people throw their trash out the windows of the bus. I believe this is perhaps a result of an influx of consumer, non-biodegradable products into a culture that makes almost nothing which is not biodegradable. This part of my experience, has made me aware of our responsibility as stewards of this earth that God created and how far that stewardship extends beyond “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” or even “donate to your favorite ecologically friendly charity.”

Thanksgiving at the beach and other news

While many of you were celebrating the US holiday of Thanksgiving, we arose at 4:45 AM to head to downtown Yangon, board a bus, and travel to Chaung Tha Beach for a church retreat!

Our adventure began when we woke up and realized that our electricity was out. Try getting 8 people ready for a trip at that hour in complete darkness! There were few mishaps though, and no minor injuries from the lack of light. I laughed when I realized this was the first morning I was actually out of bed before the sun was up (we start getting daylight at about 6 AM). Our projected time of departure for the beach was 7AM, and we left at 7:10! This was a miracle in and of itself with 140 people on the trip!

We arrived about 7 hours later, after covering only about 150-200 miles. The bus was not quite as luxurious as tour buses that I’ve been on, and our air conditioning fritzed out an hour or so into the trip. Steep hills and an old bus sometimes made our speed drop to under 15 mph, which doesn’t create much of a breeze in the windows. This made our mid-day trip along bumpy one-lane roads quite uncomfortable. We were more than ready to arrive after that journey.

The beach was beautiful, and we had a fun time of eating Burmese cuisine, except breakfast which was “Western” style and consisted of a fried egg and toast with jam. Craig, Ben, and I led some mixers and ice breakers, and we had sessions of praise music and speakers. Ben and I rented some bikes and took a ride down the beach, which was practically untouched by people except the small settlements of 2-3 dwellings where local people lived by the shore. We practiced our Burmese skills with a couple of children who approached us, and were pleased that they could understand our inquiries of “what is your name” and “how old are you”. They giggled a bit at us, but answered nevertheless.

Last week we began a regular visit to a small “children’s home” in northern Yangon and taught an English class. I worked with the younger (primary grades) and Ben with the older children (secondary). We both really enjoyed our time with them, and are excited to return to them again and build upon what we’ve already done. Everyone here is taught English. However, We have found that their pronunciation is often unintelligible. This happens because neither they nor their teachers, or their teacher’s teachers actually learned the language from a native English speaker. Imagine how distorted the game “telephone” is. Well, this is how our Burmese friends’ English skills are - distorted! They are so excited to have the opportunity to hear and learn from us.

In other exciting news, our friends Angie Pyle and Daniel and Talinn Phillips just arrived in Yangon on Sunday. We were so excited to see them, and so excited that they came with gifts from home. Thank you if you were a part of collecting things to bring us. I saw more coffee than I’ve seen since I got here - which was a pretty good treat for me!

The Garrisons, Phillips, and Angie went on an overnight trip to our friend’s farm. We saved this trip to do for when they arrived, but Ben, Sarah G. and I weren’t able to go because Ben and Sarah have been sick. Luckily, they both seem to be on the upswing of things. We were disappointed to miss this trip though!

Ben and I are in the process of planning a trip up north to be tourists. We are going to go the week before Christmas and will visit Kalaw and Inle Lake in Shan State and Bagan, an ancient historical region along the Irrawaddy River where there are many untouched ruins. We are pleased to be able to spend some time in a part of the country that will be a little cooler than here!

I’m listening to some Christmas music right now, trying to get in the Christmas mood. Palm trees and air conditioning don’t really evoke Christmas feelings though. It’s funny isn’t it - I’m envious of you who have cold weather, and there are some who are probably envious of our warm weather.

First Week of a new Month

I spoke at MCP’s staff meeting this week (MCP is the organization we are doing most of our work through). I haven’t done a lot of prepared speaking like that so I was quite nervous. Of course it just happened to be the largest MCP staff meeting ever. I was also speaking through a translator which I had never done before and therefore somewhat difficult. However, several people told me they thought it went well and I felt ok about. So that was good. I found that I very much wanted to figure out what I thought the people at MCP needed to hear, but after a while I realized that it is not so much about what they needed to hear as about what God was leading me to speak about.

Thursday we visited a large children’s home north of Yangon. 150 children all together. Catherine and I worked with the little ones which was really great. The children here are beautiful. Catherine jumped rope with the kids (I never knew that she was such a crack rope jumper) and we played ball games and taught some english vocab. Their favorite game though was “Dit, Nit, Thoeng” (One Two Three) and then we would lift them in the air.

Here are some pictures:

New Church

We went to a new Church today. We had been going to a
heavily ex-pat influenced church which is where the Garrisons go. Unfortunately we felt the
church was not particularly alive in some ways. It seems to be a
church that was trying very hard to be like an American evangelical
church but not doing it particularly well. Today as we visited this
new church with a Norwegian couple we are getting to know, I realized
what bothers me about that. I feel like churches should be trying to
emulate God's church, not the American or European or South Korean or
Myanmar or any other church type here. It just seems like with any
system of copying each subsequent copy will be worse unless you go
back to the original. So in the case of Myanmar, there are churches
that are copies of American churches which are copies of European
Churches which are copies of the Early church. I don't doubt that
there has been some going back to the original at different times
(perhaps the reformation, rise of evangelicalism, etc.) but on a whole
it seems there is a lot of copying of people, methods and styles and
not a lot of looking to God for direction within the church.

Anyway, this new church was a little more alive it seemed from today.
It had problems, but it seemed like people were excited about their
faith and doing something about it, even in the face of oppression.
They've been meeting in their youth center since the local authorities
closed down their 200+ person english class/sunday service that used
to meet at a hotel. The church has broken down into cell groups of
about 10 people and there are about 20 groups. I talked to one of the
leaders of a cell group to day and the only thing he wanted of his
group was that less new people would come and there would be a bit
more continuity to the group.

Now I think we're going to go swimming and eat american food.

Digestive Blessing

I am realizing how blessed we have been by a almost complete lack of
digestive issues on coming here. I've gone all over the place and so
has Catherine, eating at orphanages, churches local's houses and
plenty of different restaurants, all with no problems other than some
gurgles and gas. I think the Garrison's have been a help, but even
with that I have been amazed over and over at the grace of God in
small yet important issues such as this.

Teaching English

We have been teach English at a local Christian resource center, CMC. We have between 6 and 8 students from within the staff at the center. We work mostly on pronunciation and a topic every week. Last week the topic they asked for was "going to the zoo." Walrus is an extremely difficult work for Burmese to say for the record. Here are Pictures of our students:

Mon State

I went to Mawlemyine, the captial of Mon sate about a week ago. I
took some pictures on the way. The trip was beautiful and we
distributed many Bibles and conducted a training seminar with people
in the Mon ethnic group. Here are some pictures:

Adoniram Judson's (First American Missionary) Church

Little Mon Girl in Thanbyuzayat

View over Mawlemyine

A Pottery Guy that asked me to take his picture

A bunch of kids from the seminar

First Contact

We have been here in Yangon with the Garrisons for a week now, and are
slowly adjusting. Life here moves at a much slower pace than in the
States. Things take a long time to get done. We have determined
(with some difficulty) that we can use this (lachmans@gmail.com) email
address while in Myanmar - please direct communications to us at this
address. As with most things in Myanmar all this may change. The
government may block our access to this account tomorrow for all we
know.

The picture included is of us riding in a 'tuktuk' in Bangkok, the
last night we were there. We enjoyed most of our time there, although
culture shock hit me (Catherine) pretty hard. Those of you who know
me well probably aren't surprised at that! Compared to Bangkok,
Yangon is quite a bit more shocking, and although where we are living
is much calmer the poverty is much more obvious.

We have found out that we can only get a 10 week business visa to stay
here, which means that we will need to leave the country twice (at
least) to be here as long as we intended. Initially we had not
planned to leave at all, but this is a turn of events. We are trying
to determine the best way to handle this, as leaving 2 or 3 times will
eat up most of our budget for our time here (with airfare out,
purchasing new visas, and staying in Bangkok or Chiang Mai while we
apply for visas). We are still committed to being here for roughly 6
months as we originally planned, however we are not sure how that will
work.

It is wonderful to be with the Garrisons. A couple days after we
arrived here, we realized that Ben had only been given 4 weeks on his
visa. We went to immigration and got it worked out (with a little
fretting and prayer first, and a complete change of plans for the
day). At any rate, when Jake Garrison heard us talking about Ben
perhaps having to leave in a month, he piped up that Ben could take
him with him and he wasn't going to let him go (or go to Thailand with
him). We are so thankful that it was worked out. We would've had to
drastically cut our time here if we had to leave every 4 weeks!

We have spent the week hanging out with the family and getting
acclimated to being here. It's very different than anything I've ever
imagined. We desire to meet the Myanmar people, but language is such
a difficult barrier at this time. We will begin next week doing more
work in the community (teaching English, helping teach basic hygiene
to children with MCP at some of their sites). We are also pleased to
help the Garrisons some with the homeschooling of their 4 kids.
They've only recently had all four at home, which makes it difficult
for them to do their ministry. We hope we will be a help to them
during our time here. We have begun language study with a tutor that
comes twice weekly; my brain is a little rusty in language
acquisition. It's been a few years for me. Hopefully Ben's recent
Swahili studies will have his brain primed for Burmese.

We are at the end of the rainy season here, and it is hot and humid.
We're told that it will be hot for about a month, then cool down for
"winter" for a couple of months before the real heat starts to kick
in. I am not excited to see what that's like! We miss home in
Athens, knowing that fall goes on without us. It's hard to miss your
favorite season. It's disconcerting when the weather isn't what
you're used to. The passage of time and seasons is hard to
understand.

We are well, rested, and pretty content to be here. In some ways I
feel a bit guilty that our adjustment has been so smooth. But hey,
I'll take it I guess. Thank you for your prayers. Please continue to
pray as we really start to invest here in this community and country.