Ron in Thailand: Missive 3

Let’s start with our trip to Phetchabun last weekend. It was a flying visit as we left on Saturday morning and came back on Sunday afternoon. One of our neighbours here at the building site runs a 12 seater minibus so we hired that for the journey and we did the 200km journey in about 3 hours with a stopover at a huge service station with shops and food outlets. The toilet stop was made interesting by some new signs which we have not encountered before - there are now 3 choices, Men, Women and LadyBoys! Our arrival at Ban Meata was hugely anticipated by me as it was the first time I had seen my Whun for nearly 12 months. It was worth waiting for and we both shed a few tears over each other’s shoulder. Teams that arrive there receive a rapturous welcome and this was no exception – those who have come for the first time are always impressed, fall in love with the kids, and find it hard to leave. It was the Australia Day weekend so on Saturday night we had an Aussie BBQ Thai style at Pawinee’s house. We got out the little earthenware buckets the Thais use as a BBQ, loaded them with charcoal and a couple of us sat over them for most of the evening with hamburger patties, pork pieces, chicken legs and some prawns. It was idyllic – sitting outside on a warm evening, eating our fill as it came off the BBQ, consuming many bottles of Pepsi Max and a few of the blokes had some bottles of Leo, Thai beer. The older girls joined us (Mum Whun’s house which includes my Whun) and they sat cross-legged around the BBQ’s as they love to do and polished off any of the food we hadn’t eaten. As I said in an earlier missive, this is Thailand and I love it! We had worship on Sunday morning and it was wonderful to be back with our Thai family. I was preaching (4 days’ notice which is pretty good) and spoke on listening to God, using the story of Samuel and Eli. I dramatized the story and they responded well. After lunch Richard and I took the big girls (13 of them) to the Than Thip waterfall for a swim and it was great to spend some more time with Whun. We were back by 4 o’clock and left for Khon Kaen ready for the working week. A word about the Dutch. We met the Dutch team of four at Phetchabun and they came back with us. Annetta, Adelbert, Hennie and Corrie actually raise our average age. Corrie is 78 years old and is up a ladder painting, and when the concrete trucks came in she grabbed an implement to drag the concrete around! She stays with us on site and the other 3 stay in a hotel and travel out daily, much to her scorn. But they do a great job and later this week before they leave there will be an unveiling ceremony of a plaque on the “Dutch House” with all the Ban Meata kids out at the site for the occasion. There has been great progress on the site in the past week and a panoramic view in an accompanying photo will hopefully give you an idea of where we are up to. We have a concrete road that comes from the back gate and is now nearing the dining room. The third house is beginning to go up and concrete is coming again on Tuesday for the verandah. I have spent the entire week (with time off when the concrete trucks come) chasing walls in the upstairs house for conduit. This week I will chase walls for co-axial cable and then I will chase walls for the plumbing. I have been going to bed with the taste of dust in my mouth it looks like that will be true for this week as well. Our 2 young girls, Jade and Tori, have been putting up the ceilings in the first storey house on their own. Great progress from never having done anything like that before. They are anxiously watching for any untoward muscle growth! They will gain some notoriety through a journalist friend in Kingston who is publishing their story in the Kingston Leader and a couple of other SE papers. Some of you who have been reading this blog for a number of years now may remember that our first impressions of chicken being BBQ’d between bamboo sticks was that it looked suspiciously like flat rats. You will be delighted to know that when we visited our local market to get our evening meal the other night we came across the genuine article. Two rats, skinned but complete with head, ears and giblets were laid out on the slab. We didn’t ask what they were worth because nobody in our group had any desire to buy them. The accompanying photo shows Richard looking a bit interested. Right next door to the rats was a sort of porta-cot teeming with what looked like cockroaches but were obviously edible because the deep fried variety were for sale in a basket along with grasshoppers and other insects. There was a piece of hard plastic fixed around the top of the “cot” so although these bugs swarmed up the sides they couldn’t get out. Not wanting to be a latter-day John the Baptist (no honey available!) we gave all this a miss. And to finish with some news about Murray. Those of you who know him know that he has a huge bushy beard, Ned Kelly style. On Sunday he went down to a local hairdresser and said he wanted nitnoy (little bit) off. He came back with nitnoy left on! He just looks as if he hasn’t shaved for a few days and I don’t think he even recognised himself in the mirror because it hasn’t been that short for 25 years. He thinks he’ll have stay in Thailand for a while or they won’t let him out with his current passport photo. Enjoy the read and until next time God bless Ron