Missive 5 - 2013

One thing that is slowing us down and is frustrating the life out of Malcolm is the Thai contractor for block laying, rendering and tiling who doesn’t pay his workers so they don’t turn up on site. Pawinee has therefore arranged for a team to come from Phetchabun to render and tile the dining room/kitchen/laundry and they are making progress. There is something quintessentially Thai about them and it is interesting to see how they live. They camp on the site in little tents and seem to live off the land as well. They have nets in which they catch small fish from the dam and they cook their meals over a fire behind the building they are working on. One of the women has already levelled a small patch near the dam and planted a few things which are no doubt destined for the cooking pot in a few weeks’ time. There are at least two families living there including a couple of children, one maybe four and the other only one. The one year old has a sleep in a hammock strung between two posts on the building and Mum, who mixes mortar for the tiling, dashes over every now and then to give the hammock a swing. There is no day-care for working Mums in Thailand! It was a delight to watch the father, as fathers do everywhere, take the kids for a ride around the site in a wheelbarrow and to hear the squeals of delight as he went through mud, over some bumpy bits and up onto the building slab. As we walk the streets around the site we come across a range of homes from the obviously wealthy to the obviously poor. Just down the street there is a family that owns a couple of cows and they are housed at night in the most ramshackle shed you can imagine with a drinking trough, straw on the floor, and a number of ducks bedded down with the cows. I reckon you could plonk the baby Jesus in there and have a pretty genuine nativity scene. Last Sunday I visited an Australian Dutch bloke and his Thai partner in a neat little house in a back street behind the site. I met Ben (75 years old) and Rut (in her 40’s) last year when I was out walking. I took Alan Baker with me and we were welcomed like old friends, given a cup of tea, and we spent an hour and a half chatting with them. As a result of my visit last year they came over to the site a few months ago, made themselves known to the small team that was here at the time (some Queenslanders with Richard) and cooked them a meal. Ben migrated to Australia in the 50’s, lived in Perth and trained race horses so we had a long conversation about drugs in sport! He is also an acquaintance of Brian Cousins, Ben Cousins’ dad, so that was more grist for the mill in our conversation. Just a little sideline here. We worked a bit late one night this week and there was a beautiful red and purple sunset and overhead were thousands upon thousands of white cranes flying in V-formations and taking several minutes to complete their “flypast”. It was a wonderful sight not to be missed. Now where are we up to with the building? – and this is pretty much the final report as we all pack up by the middle of next week. We have poured more square metres of concrete this year than last when we poured the four building slabs. We have poured verandahs front, back and sides on the 3 houses, verandahs on the front and side of the dining room, a basketball court size play area, a road through the middle of the site, and a path along the front of the buildings. The big pours, 4 and 5 truck loads, are proving quite difficult as the concrete goes off quite quickly in the heat and we struggle with our numbers to get it floated off while it is still workable. Without the helicopter we would have no hope. We have put ceilings in the dining room and bottom storey of the 2 storey house, flushed and painted them. The electrical work has been done in the 2 storey house, and a huge amount of plumbing has been completed – there are blue PVC pipes everywhere. A local Rotary Club has offered to put in a water filtration system so we have been working frantically (mostly Richard) to get another few hundred metres of pipe in under the paths before we poured so we could get the filtered water to each of the houses. All in all we have made a huge difference to the site in 6 weeks notwithstanding the comment at the head of this missive about the hold-ups. Our bodies are showing signs of weariness and there will be a certain pleasure next week in not having to get up and go to work shovelling dirt in the sun in 37 degree heat. But the sense of satisfaction is enormous and there is a real sense amongst the team of serving God as we give these special kids “Life, hope and a future” as Mercy International’s vision statement says. Colleen arrived in Thailand yesterday and today (Friday) she travelled to Phetchabun by bus and was met by Mum Whun, our Whun, and all the girls from the big girls’ house. On Sunday I travel there in time for her birthday – it will only be the third time I have been with her on her birthday in the last 9 years! The next missive will be of a different flavour as I change gears and spend 4 weeks at the Phetchabun Ban Meata and get involved in some admin work – as yet undefined! Until then God bless Ron The difference we've made in 6 weeks Manger scene The ramshackle cow shed The 3rd house going up Ben & Rut