A Bunch of Burts

Move in, unpack and get busy!

That was clearly our theme for this last month.

Our new village, Don Haang, is a river culture. We have rivers on two sides of us. One small one runs through the village, and the main area river, the Nan River is just almost visible out the back of the rice fields behind us.

This time of year is boat racing time.

Our village team has been practicing nearly every day for a couple of months now. It is so important to the village that at the village meeting only a couple of days after we arrived, it was voted that participation is mandatory for men up to age 55. You either row or pay money to support the rowers.

Greg even had a chance to try out his skill at rowing. He is in the yellow shirt and in the big straw hat.

So far we have been to three races. These are multi-day events, sometimes with over 100 boats competing.

Our boat is the closest to the shore in the top left. The guys are wearing blue and red shirts and orange headbands. Go Don Haang!

It has been a great way to become part of the community, to show our identification with the people of Don Haang.

Even though I could barely recognize any of the rowers, and if I had to pick them out of a line up and say if they were from our village or not, it was hard not to get into the cheering spirit when our boat went by.

That’s us in the lead!! Faster boys, faster!
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A wonderful gift from a gracious God, giving us this perfect opportunity to work towards ‘becoming’ Thai Lue and a member of Don Haang

The words on our shirts are the names of the two boats. Petjambii and siisoontaun You can certainly see us a ways off in these shirts. And no, it was NOT cool enough to need long sleeves.

Wanna see the new digs?

Here is a reminder of what it looked like when we saw it for the first and only time before we signed our rental contract.

Ahhh, the wonders of paint and scrubbing.

Just getting rid of the very high flood line made it feel more ‘homey’.

The library was the first ‘room’ we got done, and it was lovely to sit and relax in a chair and look at organized bookshelves while the rest of the house was still all caddywhampus. You are welcome anytime to come, select a volume and relax with me in the library! I will even bring you a cup of cool water.

Our room doubles as Greg’s office. But look Kathy!! Blue paint on the walls. It has been a very long time since we lived anywhere that we could paint whatever colors we wanted, and I am very happy with my blue walls.

The kitchen was our big question mark. We had seen this place just once, and very briefly at that. The kitchen was just a separate building that was stuffed full of old wood and junk. Hard to imagine that it would be useable. We planned to redo it first thing. But, a pleasant surprise awaited us. The room, once cleared of everything, looked quite serviceable. Some good old-fashioned elbow grease, a coat of shellack and sealant, and a new roof to reflect some of the heat, turned it into a very satisfactory kitchen. We are very thankful that we did not need to replace it! Thank you Lord!

The cupboard you see out the door is the sink. Some friends graciously gave us a lovely sink cabinet that fits so perfectly in the available space, only the Lord could have arranged it.

The upstairs is home to the kids’ room and the school room. Here is a before shot.

The school room. You know it is everyone’s favorite place. :0 Hey! There are only two diligent students, where is Ema?

Keeping up the yard seems to be very important to the people here, and our yard needed some attention. Most notably, a dry well in the backyard. Can someone say DANGEROUS? We are still working on getting that capped.

The front yard was quite overgrown, but Ema is excited to put in a garden. Our headman’s wife came and helped chop it up one day, I think she is eager for us to get it in order as well.

I think that is probably enough for one post. We have been doing other things besides being at home. We have gone to several boats races with our village, helped make food for the racers, Greg and Rob have been out in the fields lending a hand harvesting rice, we are meeting more people than we can remember their names, and familiarzing ourselves with the village as much as we can.

Vistors are frequent and we are begining to feel like we live here, instead of just visiting.
One of the ways we will be getting to know people and developing relationships and contributing to the village is teaching English. The plan is to begin next month, so that will be a new twist to our lives.

I have lots more pictures to share, wanting you to be able to see into our lives here. Check back!

We have received the green light to move!!!!

Greg got the call yesterday! The decision was made on our behalf to send us off, out of Chiang Mai and into the countryside to begin the work of language learning and relationship building among the Thai Lue people. Why? To be able to bring them the good news of the Gospel of Christ.

Celebrate with us!!!!

I snatched this map off our co-workers page, it gives a good visual of the locality we will be moving to. (Thanks Rob!)

We will be towards the bottom right of the shaded area

We anticipate the move to take place towards the end of August.
That gives us plenty of time to sort through our stuff and pack it up!
We recently helped some friends move here in the city, just about 10 minutes away from their old house. They had so much stuff! Yikes.
I do not want to move that much stuff. I know we have only been in this house for just over a two and a half years, but I know you all know how stuff accumulates. We are no exception.

I showed some pictures of the new village here.

The Thai Lue people are very proud of their heritage and culture, and we are excited to begin to delve into it.

Of course they do not wear their fancy clothes every day, but this was a special weekend celebration and everyone was dressed to the nines.
Can’t wait to get my own beautiful Thai Lue outfit.

Are you ready to go over the mountains and through the woods rice fields to see the new village? Come along!

As we head North to Phayao province to meet our co-workers, we will see many many wats, or temples.

Of course the whole way, there are rice fields and corn fields.

If you look carefully, you can see a group of people on the hillside planting corn, I think.

Overpasses and roadway arches are often decorated with images honoring the king and queen.
These bird figures are holding lamps, and often decorate the long tailed boats as well.

Photos of the king and queen are displayed prominently many places.

We meet up with our partners and head out bearing Northeast to Nan Province, city of Thaa Wang Phaa. The boys and girls are wisely split up into separate cars.

Phayao is bustling as we make our way out of the city, stopping at the market for some fruit, both for us to munch on and to bring as a gift to the village headman.

The day is beautiful, clear blue skies with billowing white clouds, verdant hillsides, fragrant with the aroma of fertile earth and thick vegetation. If green has a smell, this is it.

This lady and her child become our traveling companions for a while. We take turns passing each other as we make various stops.

We need water and snacks and stop at this little shop. And yes, take your shoes off before you go in to browse around.

Ah, there is the sign for Tha Wang Phaa, we are getting close!

It is probably best to make a pit stop before we get to the village, so thankfully there are 7-11’s all over the place. This one even sells mangos conveniently at the gas pump!

We wind our way through a small clump of houses, follow the spit of road through the rice fields waiting to be planted, round the bend and finally, after waiting months to get a glimpse, we are here! Muubaan Don Haang, or Bee Tree Village!

Our co-workers introduce us to the headman and his wife, explaining that we too would like to come live with the Thai Lue in this village, and they welcome us warmly. After some time of conversation, we are ready to go see the two houses available for rent.

The first one is right across the street from the headman’s house.
It is a huge, old, wooden house. If we were to move into this one, seriously, we would use only about 1/3 of it. Especially since we hardly have any furniture of our own!

Leah will be our lovely tour guide to the big wooden house. Ready to go in?

This staircase is a bit scary. The stairs are very narrow, and at the top, there is actually a little rope help you not fall backwards!

Leah, is that a brave face you are putting on? Yes, this is the kitchen. There is a bit of clean up needed here. But the wooden windows are new!

One of the bedrooms upstairs.

I think we are in need of a case of Murphy’s Oil Soap!

The other house is cement on the bottom and wood on top. It shares a plot of land with another house, belonging to the son of the current residents. This is its own consideration, but really, our neighbors in Chiang Mai live just as close or closer.

The house we looked at is the one in the back, with the white lower half

Can you guess what the family grows? It smelled tantalizing!

This is the outside kitchen. I will want an oven and cooktop in the house, but it could be nice having somewhere outside to cook too.

Here is the indoor kitchen, sorry, the picture was taken through a screen. The walls are slats, which provides nice ventilation. The floor was newly done, I think in consideration of the new farang families!

The sweet grandma in this house told me she wants me to live in her house. When her daughter, the headman’s wife, introduced us, she told us right away how old her mother is, that she is very old. I told that grandma that it was OK that she was old, but that I was sure her heart was still young. Right away, I made my first friend.

Really, both houses are more than we expected when we imagined what a village house would look like, and now come the part of how to decide which family goes in which house. There are benefits and tradeoffs to each one, so we will pray about it, and discuss it as a team.

As we head back to Phayao, school is letting out, and the sun begins to cast more shadows. Finally, cool breezes blow in our open car windows and the quiet villages we passed in the morning are now coming to life as kids head home and parents come in from the fields or other work.

Travelling along we do need to be careful of watching the road as well as the scenery. Oops, only half a road here!

We now have a picture in our head of the people group we will be working with, a specific place to be praying for and looking forward to living in. The people of Don Haang do not know the Lord of Life, have no eternal hope, no Scripture in Thai Lue. This is the people group God is sending us to, would you pray with us for them?

Thanks for coming along for the trip, come back any time!

As promised, here is a blog about explosions, gunpowder and fire!!

While were were up in Chiang Kham for the Thai Lue cultural celebration, one of the events was a fireworks contest.
Lue from all over came to participate in this contest with the grand prize being 6000Baht!

The men, and you know this is a men’s event :), dug their holes deep in the ground with poles and dropped their sealed bamboo tube filled with gunpowder. The holes were then filled back in, tamped down, and marked by an upturned meal bowl with a candle burning on top.

This man is tamping the ground back in around his combustible. The metal tamping rod is the same thing he used to dig the hole as well.

This one is done, but does not yet have its bowl on it. You can see the small opening in the top of the bamboo where a lit candle is dropped to ingite it.

The upturned bowls are in and around the people’s feet. The one in the front looks as though those contestants were done early!

From our observations, it appeared as though each digging team had a monk around them, and when the fountains were lit, a monk accompanied the lighter out to the field as well. We do not yet what was going on with that, but will be an interesting thing to investigate later.

After everyone was ready, the show began!

One by one the fountains were lit. The bowl was removed, a new candle lit, and dropped down a hole to light the fuse of the big, explosive packed bamboo tube. As the lighters nonchalantly turned their backs and walked away, the fountain of fire and sparks began.

They were very impressive, the spark shower reaching up to 50ft away! (not an exact measurement, just my very amateur estimate.)

Not only was the display huge and very bright, it was extremely loud as well.

I love the sparks ’splashing’ in this picture. Don’t worry, I was under a roof when I took the picture. We kept moving more and more under cover as the rain of fire kept reaching us!

I know this picture is dark, but you may be able to just make out the outline of a large, old bo tree in the distance. We were walking back to the car and I turned around to get a picture of a fountain from a distance. Can you say Krakatoa?

As we drove off, we had to drive around the back side of the temple, and caught a couple more displays.

A sparkler just does not seem the same anymore.