A Bunch of Burts

Earlier this year, the small house church we had been attending closed down. Since at this time we had no vehicle, we depended on some friends to take us to church. We had been to church with them a few times before, and knew the pastor and his wife from other interactions. Greg has been fishing with the pastor, obviously a good man if he likes to go fishing!, and his wife was our inital culture guide when we first arrived here in Thailand.

Last Saturday was their annual children’s outing and we went up to a waterfall at a national park. The kids had a mini-VBS of sorts and the ladies prepared green papaya salad for lunch. Before you wrinkle your nose, this is one of my favorite foods here, it is delicious!

The wind was blowing and some clouds gave us some shade from the sun, most welcome!

It was a nice chance for me to sit and ‘chat’ with the ladies. At church on Sundays it seems very difficult to engage people in conversation. Of course that may be that I am not the most easy person to talk to yet. They have to talk slowly and at a toddlers level. haha. But in our traveling and moving around, I found this to be true at churches all over the US as well. People are friendly, but on a very surface level, and it is not easy to move past the “Hello How are you”, into more satisfying conversation. That always made me a bit sad. It seems at church, as fellow believers, we should be able to find some common ground quickly, if no where else than our mutual identification in Christ and membership in His body. But I digress.

Beth, the other falang in the picture, and I joined the somtam preparations and had a lovely time talking with the other ladies. They asked us about America, some of the differences in food, climate, and living. At least the topic was something I knew about!

It is easy to bash our own country and see all that is wrong with it, but living overseas has given us at least a new appreciation for what our country does offer. We have so much, and I mean more than material things, although that is a major part. When we arrived at the park, we (meaning Greg and I and the kids), came with the whole group which was nearly completely Thai. The entrance to the park is 20 Baht, if you are Thai. All of us falangs were 200 Baht.

After lunch we made a small hike up the waterfall, and just being near it made the air cooler! Since it is dry season, the pool at the bottom was not deep, but definitely deep enough for some paddling around and soaking! I noticed in the pictues, that the water looks muddy, but it really was very clean and fairly clear. There are alot of us splashing around in it though!

It really was a wonderful way to spend the day and very refreshing. We will definitely need to find some waterfalls closer to home. This one was about an hour away. We would be happy to take you if you want to come too!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 12:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.