Cliché I know, but it’s hard to believe we have nearly completed our first 6 months here at Ban Meata. As we promised ourselves when we began, we are “reviewing … our situation”, but unlike Fagin’s tortuous indecision we have decided to continue here for the 2 years we first envisaged. We will be home for Christmas if the political crisis in Thailand resolves itself sufficiently to re-open the airport. I will return in January (if the airport is still open!) with the building team and Colleen will stay for the birth of our 5th grandchild in early February.
Colleen was intending to avoid the hottest part of the year in Thailand by staying another couple of months and she now has the perfect excuse. We have received the wonderful news that Michelle is engaged and will be married in early May so I will be back in Adelaide to hand over my beautiful daughter.
Meanwhile our life goes on and a pretty good life it is – although we are facing a few crises in House of Mercy, more of which I will write later. We recently had a wonderful afternoon with the girls form the big girl’s house. Whun is the house Mum and we went to her parents’ place in a nearby village which is typical Thailand with coconut palms, ramshackle houses on stilts, chooks and chickens running around under your feet and beautiful hospitality.
Thais eat lots of stuff from the surrounding environment and one of the girls tore off a branch from a bush which was covered with little green berry-like fruit. We peeled off a few layers of husk and ate the tiny green centre – not much reward for the labour involved but it tasted OK. Whun’s father grows tobacco as a cash crop so we sat down and threaded dry tobacco leaves onto a long skewer so it can be hung on racks underneath the house. After this contribution to the tobacco industry we went fishing. We walked back down a track through the jungle, past a number of rice paddies ready for harvesting to a small creek. The girls had large nets on bamboo frames with a long handle and they set these up in the creek to trap tiny fish. For their efforts they caught perhaps half a kilogram with the biggest fish being about 4cms long. They cooked them whole in a fair bit of salt and brought them home to eat with their tea.
After their time fishing the girls got themselves thoroughly wet in a deeper hole in the creek and had a glorious time. The scene was idyllic and I was reminded of times when kids would muck around in a creek and get their clothes all wet and muddy. It may still happen a bit but we have signs on our creeks saying it’s not safe, no play without supervision because it’s not safe, and no going out on your own because it’s not safe. We walked past a weir where a group of 5 boys turned up on their bikes. They stripped to their undies and spent an hour jumping 5 metres into the water, doing back flips, pushing each other in and having a ball. Not a scrap of technology in sight and lots of kids having lots of fun – our souls were restored that afternoon!
It’s the time of rice harvest in Thailand and there are mechanical harvesters everywhere. Some travel on crawler tracks through the paddies dropping the trash behind them, others are stationary with crowds of workers feeding it and a rooster tail of chaff being shot into huge heaps later to be used for cattle feed. There are still lots of people bent over all day harvesting by hand and tying bundles into stooks waiting to be winnowed. All along the roads there are tarpaulins spread out with drying rice and bags of rice can be seen stacked up on tuk-tuks heading for the rice depot. We have a few rai (maybe an acre) of rice at the farm which is waiting for a harvester to be in vicinity. We hope to get few tonnes of rice which we will keep to feed our kids.
Feeding the kids has become a problem at Phetchabun over recent months. The economic downturn has not been kind to us in several ways. The growth of people taking up sponsorship is insufficient to take care of the cost of care, and the drastic drop in the Australian dollar against the baht has seriously affected us. When we came it was over 30baht and after bottoming out at 20.5 it has been hovering at 22 for weeks. Already insufficient funds lost over 30% of their value and after distributing funds to the other sites Phetchabun has had insufficient to meet the food bills. God has been good to us though and 2 significant donations have enabled us to survive over the last 2 months. We’ve also been greatly assisted by produce from the farm. We have been blessed by an abundance of paw-paw (papaya) which is also eaten green, shredded into a salad. Bananas have been plentiful, as have pumpkins and we have eaten a huge amount of fish from our dams.
We haven’t taken to eating the snakes yet but there are a few of them around. We have a young woman here at the moment who is helping at the school and on one of her first days here she watched a snake stalk a bird in a low shrub and with amazing speed captured it. On the way in to Phetchabun last week we drove up to a huge snake at least 2 metres long. He put his head up in the air, sensed us coming and did a very prompt U-turn (looked more like a pretzel turn actually) and narrowly avoided becoming two one metre snakes.
We have been enjoying our weekly worship here even though it is all in Thai. If Glom preaches we don’t find out what she is talking about although they will often give us an idea of what the testimonies are about. A few weeks ago one of the teachers got up to thank God for keeping her safe after her husband had lost her off the back of his motorbike and didn’t realise for quite some distance. She didn’t share how safe her husband was when he came back for her. (This is the couple who had the 2 killings at their wedding reception – I related this story in one of the epistles from a previous visit). We had another testimony last Sunday concerning Parnit, Glom’s husband, who was travelling back through the mountains from Khon Kaen with a friend. They had 4 motorcyclists form up next to them on the road trying to force them off. His friend got down on the floor fearing they may have had guns. They kept travelling and one of the motorcyclists yelled out “Now!” to one on the other side but he shook his head and dropped back, so the rest did too. When he related this to Glom they discovered that she was praying for Parnit at the time of the incident!
We have been delighted that two of the cooks, the lady who looks after the guest house, and the young son of one of the laundry ladies have given their lives to Jesus in the last month. God is blessing us in many ways.
Our house is nearing completion and we should move in before we leave. The floors are nearly all tiled and the blokes are swinging the doors today and tomorrow. The windows will go in in the next couple of weeks although the quote for them set us back on our heels a bit. Pawinee beat them down a bit, but 95 000 baht was a bit more than we were expecting. Let’s hope the dollar goes up before that bill comes in!! Colleen has been busy getting furniture and we have stores all over the place holding stuff for us and waiting for a phone call to deliver. Rob has been most generous giving us his unit for all this time and it will be good for him to get back “home” too.
The big event before we go back is the Christmas party. Preparations have been going on for weeks and the kids have been learning lines for plays and choreography for songs. 2000 people come from the surrounding villages to watch the kids, share a meal and listen to the Christmas story. The event will take place on Sunday 14th December. There is no such thing as Christmas of course in the Thai culture so on Christmas Day all the kids will be at school as normal.
After that we will pack our bags and catch a bus to Bangkok and hopefully board a plane at the airport. We can’t wait to see our family and catch up with our friends. We hope to see you soon.
God bless
Ron
