Missive 12

I’m back to my keyboard after a pretty frantic month of preparations for our regular executive meeting. For nearly 2 years now we have been restructuring the work here and have identified over 20 different project areas which have a schedule of tasks and deadlines. The executive meeting is our time for the leadership to report on progress and make decisions about future directions. One of my roles is to manage the meetings which means making an agenda, chasing up progress reports for all the projects, summarising them, putting all the information for the meeting into a Powerpoint presentation, arranging the venue, chairing the meeting and preparing and distributing the meeting summary. Add to that the need for all written material to be translated into Thai, and everything said at the meeting has to be translated as well. It takes hours but is worth it to keep everyone on track with achieving the vision for Ban Meata.

Seven or eight of the projects are my responsibility (finance, assets, information management, communications, marketing in Thailand etc) so that keeps me out of mischief for a fair bit of the time. I have just realised that in past blogs I haven’t really said much about what I do with the hours in the day – and maybe you are none the wiser even now! Besides all the above, most of which can be done in the air-conditioned office, there are countless other things which by necessity or interest I end up doing. I’ve taken on the recording for the cow project (and thankful for how wide and long an Excel page can be), I help with instructing and monitoring the building and outside staff (although Chris Stolte has been here for a couple of months and he is doing a great job with that for the moment), I do a bit of translating (into English of course!), I sometimes help kids with their homework (English and Maths) and I preach every few weeks.

Anyway, our executive meeting was last week at Khon Kaen and because there are some building alterations happening at the Ban Meata centre we had the meeting in the conference room at the hotel in which we were staying. It was a great venue with a sound system and a data projection set-up so we really thought we were in the lap of luxury and should make sure we put a capital on the word “Executive”!

You may be able to get a bit of a picture of life here if I tell you about a couple of parties we have recently had. The big girls have been keen to have a karaoke night at our place so we had them over on a Friday night. Even though they had had their dinner they spent a lot of time preparing food, some of which was really nice and some which we could take or leave. We had one of the BBQ buckets on our verandah (a charcoal fire in a concrete-lined bucket) so they could cook some pork balls on a skewer, a big pot of very sweet soup with unpronounceable bits in it (that was the take it or leave it stuff), the inevitable rice and with due deference to technology, microwaved popcorn. With 2 microphones being passed around they then spent 2 or 3 hours singing Thai pop songs (mostly about unrequited love it seems) although they had a DVD of some English songs that we were able to make a suitable hash of. Later in the night the marshmallows came out and we introduced them to toasted marshmallows on the bucket BBQ and they took to them with about the same enthusiasm as we take to deep fried scorpions.

The other party was Meow’s (one of the carers) birthday. We were invited down at 8.30pm after the kids were in bed and the trusty BBQ bucket was fired up. Lots of little bits of beef were cooked, bowls of chilli were provided, the sticky rice came out and we sat around in a circle on the verandah picking out handfuls of sticky rice and dipping the meat in the chilli. Out of deference to age and infirmity they gave us chairs but everyone else sat on the tiles which is pretty normal for eating in village homes. I’m not sure if the ants were invited but they came anyway and kept us on the hop. At the end a cake appeared with candles and we all sang the song which seems to transcend culture and language barriers. The cake was sent by one of the farm workers who is a bit sweet on Meow but it’s not the done thing in such circumstances to actually come to the party. We left them to party on and then all the kids, who were supposed to be asleep, came out to give us a hug goodnight so it took a while longer to get away.

We had a very interesting occurrence here a few weeks ago when the mother of all storms hit us. It began with a very heavy downpour of rain and was followed by a shrieking gale that caused a bit of carnage at Ban Meata. Trees were blown over, tiles torn off the rooves, ceiling tiles blown every which way, rain blown inside the buildings, many of our fruit trees on the farm blown over, and the power to the site interrupted when a tree fell on the line and snapped it.

And now for the miraculous……….
The wind firstly blew from the north and a huge tree at the back of Glom’s house fell away from the house where her baby son was sleeping on the verandah.
A tree by the staff quarters fell away from the building and into the dam.
Several huge branches outside the visitors’ centre fell on the lawn narrowly missing the building.
The wind then howled in from the south and blew trees down the other way. A large one away from one of the front houses and another away from the new bike shed we have just built.

And now for the “coincidences”………
The storm hit at the very moment that the man who sold us the land on which the village was built was being cremated at a nearby temple. He had been a thorn in the side of our organisation for 20 years, opposing many developments and bad mouthing us in the community. A couple of nights before he had been invited by his Christian son to accept Jesus and he had done so. Pawinee and Glom (both relatives) were at the “burning” (funeral) and were expressing their own forgiveness for the past difficulties.
The storm hit only 2 places – our village and farm, and this man’s home, a few kilometres apart. Surrounding villages were almost unaffected and suffered no damage.

And now for the conclusions……..
Spirit worship is common amongst Buddhists and Satan has a hey-day. We believe that this was a final stoke of anger against God’s people and the last minute loss of one of his people to the Kingdom of God. One of our carers, Kampat, who has been with us from the early days and was demonstrably delivered from demon possession, was looking after Glom’s child when the tree fell not 3 metres away. She immediately said “It’s finished”, referring to the debilitating animosity that had existed for so many years.
In the middle of all that we were grateful that God had his protective hand on the people here. Potentially it could have been disastrous but the damage was relatively minor although it took the blokes a week to cut up all the trees and drag them away. We have a fair pile of fence posts available which is timely because we have to build new cattle yards in the next few weeks.

Colleen has been making steady progress over the last few weeks and by the time this is posted we will be in Phetchabun for the last (hopefully) doctor’s visit. She has much increased mobility but still finds it painful sitting down and suffers a bit when she has been standing too long.

We have enjoyed Chris Stolte’s company over the last couple of months. He is a long time member of the South Aussie Building Team and has given 3 months and possibly 6 more next year to work here. He has done a great job working with the Thais on a new workshop and then will build 2 more accommodation rooms for the Thai workers. He is loving the responsibility and has been worth his weight in gold.

At the risk of making this missive overly long I want to tell you about the “burning” we attended today. One of our carers, Kallum, has been off work for a month or so caring for her dying father. On Thursday he died and today (Sunday) they had the burning ceremony. It was as hot as all get out today and the tradition is to wear black so we lost a bit of weight I reckon. We turned up at the temple and sat under an erected shade in front of the burning house. The coffin, highly decorated, was up on the steps and we sat through a good deal of chanting from the monks over the inevitable PA system. Next, various people took gifts up and put them in front of the coffin and the monks then filed up, chanted something and then took the gifts away. This happened several times before we all went up and put a bamboo floral token in front of the coffin. At the end of the ceremony a bloke threw some fire crackers which just about burst our eardrums – they are meant to break open a passage for the departing spirit, so if the passage is through my head it went close to working! They also threw out handfuls of what looked like lollies but were apparently wrapped numbers and if you scored a certain number there was a cash prize. A strange custom for us but the enthusiasm of the crowd scrambling for the brightly coloured wrapper indicated its popularity.

As people drifted away the burning party cleared all the decorations and trappings and put them on a fire, whipped off the top of the coffin and dropped in some food and splashed in what we think was an accelerant, and pushed it in to a furnace just behind where it was sitting. They shut the door and we sat there watching the smoke pour out of the top of the chimney – all a bit traumatic for Kallum who was sitting with us at this stage.

All this happened in the most stunning scenery you can imagine. There was a blue sky with some fluffy clouds as a background for a number of coconut palms, green rice paddies and the distant view of the surrounding mountains – just beautiful. Kallum is a lovely Christian girl and it seemed strange to us to see her participating in a Buddhist ceremony, but not so strange when we remember that she still lives within her Thai culture. It was a privilege to share in her experience of grief and to be able to comfort her.

Well this time I am definitely going to close and thank you if you have persisted this far.
God bless Ron