Makin' Books

We went to the children's home again last night. After last week we found out we won't be able to work with the older kids because they leave for a month to go to their villages starting in March. To explain that a little better, these kids who are called orphans are often really from families that are too poor to support an other child. The family figure that the children will be better fed, have better medical care and schooling and have a better chance of getting a job that makes enough to send money home when they are older. Because this happens so often some children's homes have started to encouraging children to go back to their villages, which we think is a really good thing. So we found out about this last week though, so we are disappointed that we won't get to work with the kids (we spent a while getting ourselves excited about the projects we were going to do with them), but glad that the older ones have this kind of opportunity to go back to their villages.

Anyway, the little kids are great. They were all over us the minute we came in, giving us hugs and climbing all over me in particular. They range in age from 2 up to about 9. Over the next couple weeks we're going to be making books with them that contain pictures they've drawn of their favorite things (food, plants, animals, places, etc.) and a picture of them. If I get it approved by the home, I'll post a couple of them. I'm not sure the gist of our ideas and directions will completely get through the language barrier, but we're hoping some of it will... at least the kids seemed to enjoy it last night. By the way, if you ever need help with ideas for kids art projects, ask Joyce Miller, she will give you lots of really great help with ideas.

Here is a picture of one of the littlest kids drawing:

Mailings

Just so everyone knows... labeling and stuffing envelopes for mailings is exactly the same here in Thailand as it is in the States, except that you can't read the addresses because they're in Thai.

This past week we started working with Partners, http://www.partnersworld.org, and the Free Burma Rangers, http://www.freeburmarangers.org. They are both doing some really interesting work with refugees on the border and IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons). Wednesday we labeled envelopes with some FBR guys for the Global Day of Prayer for Burma (March 12th) and Thursday I fixed computer issues and Catherine helped with the mailing of the Partners newsletter. It was good busy work for us since we've been feeling a little under-productive recently. However, we are slowly learning the reality that we can not derive our self-worth from what we are doing and must look to something else... that something else hopefully being God. Waiting is difficult though and I realize how little I actually believe that my worth comes from God and not my own plans and actions. Monday we go to work at Partners again. They are thinking about switching to Mac and want to reorganize (or just organize... :-) their computers, network and backup solutions, so I will help with all that over the next month or so. We also have the possibility of going down to the border for a couple weeks with Partners to work in schools for migrant workers' children and we're considering how we might work that in to our plans.

Also, in reference to the Global Day of Pray for Burma, you can check out the website for it: http://www.prayforburma.org.

A little bit of Thailand

We moved back in with Garrison's last friday and today we got DSL finally giving us all the necessary tools for blogging. So we should now be posting more frequently again. I haven't taken as many pictures here in Thailand, but I wanted to post a couple now that we can easily. We took a lot of pictures while at a conference in southern Thailand several weeks back, but due to the sensitivity of the work that the people are doing and the countries they are working in, I won't be posting many of those pictures (only ones where you can't recognize people, etc.). We had a great time work with teens while we were there though.

Catherine and I dressed up in traditional Myanmar clothes for the last dinner of the conference

The view of the the Gulf of Thailand from our room

One night we took all the teens out for pizza at The Pizza Co. I don't think they were used to groups of 25.

The Jomtien strip along the gulf from the top of our 42 story hotel

More recently Catherine and I went up to Mae Sai to renew our visas. On the way we stopped at some hotsprings. The water was so hot that vendors boiled eggs in them. The whole place smelled like hard boiled eggs and mineral water... not so nice. This picture looks across the river from the springs.