Beginning 2012 with the Venture Thailand Team

We started the new year off with lots of good and exciting things.

-Made new friends at church
-Played badminton for 3.5 hours with some hard-core Thai badminton players from church
-Drank lots of fresh coconut water
-Rode elephants, played with large tigers

-Taught English to kids at the center and played lots of games
-Painted the fence and built a basketball hoop at the center with the kids’ help.
-After working, we took the kids out for lunch
-As we started to head to a church in a Mung Village up in the mountains the 5 kids begged us to take them with us, so we did.
-At the church we did some testimony sharing and talking about Christ. I talked with the kids about using the gifts, talents, skills, and passions God gives us to serve, honor, and glorify Him and to help and love other people. We also handed out comic books in Thai about the birth of Jesus. The kids from the center had not heard us talk about spiritual things before, except for the Christmas presentation they did about the birth of Jesus before our team arrived in Thailand. So this was a wonderful opportunity to build on that and was a total blessing for us to be able to talk about our faith and Christ around them. They even took the Christian comic books we were handing out.
-I made a delicious fruit smoothie for the guys and enjoyed some delicious mangosteen fruit.

-We taught English lessons at Ban Pong Primary school and then did more water games and English teaching on sports at the center after school was out.

For our last weekend together as a team we headed to the border town of Mae Ramaat. We worked at the site of where Venture Expeditions is building a school/storage building to hold food to be snuck into Burma to help the victims there. For more info on that go to www.ventureexpeditions.org We visited the Mae La refugee camp where over 100,000 Karen people live in small bamboo huts with no running water and very few have electricity. It sounds bad but it is actually really good for them It’s a lot better than the situation they were in before. They were being starved, raped, beaten, tortured, and killed back in Burma. Now they are safe and together. The people there are about half Christian and half Muslim. There are schools, churches, a Bible School, small stores, etc. there. There is a giant open field with soccer goals that is used by the entire camp. Several kids were running around with nothing on but a shirt. Many bikes the kids were riding had no pedals, only bars where pedals used to be, and the kids were pedal around furiously on them without any shoes, only feet that must be tough as nails. The people there were smiling, joking, and seemed happy. Some said they would like to go to America or Australia, but many liked it there. There is a great movie called The Road about the situation in Burma. Go to http://roadofresistance.com/ to watch the movie and learn more. There is also an article by CNN about the refugee camp here: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/27/thai.karen/ It’s from 2008, but is still pretty accurate.

We also went to a village of Karen squatters who lived in Thailand illegally in small bamboo huts by a river, where they get there water….for everything. We played a bunch of games with the kids including a water balloon toss, relay races, bracelet making, face painting, paper airplane making and throwing contest, and soccer. We did a short devotional and handed out snacks, toys, and gifts. We took 6 girls, who stay with and are being cared for by a local pastor, to visit a national park and climb through a giant 9 room cave that took 3 hours to tour. The cave was surprisingly hot, humid, and full of bats and a couple spiders. We also saw a Thailand Redneck Keelback snake by the cave. If it bites a person and latches on, its venom will destroy the kidneys and can be fatal. Sunday morning we led the church service. Aaron presented a good message on Psalm 37:4 about delighting ourselves in the Lord and being given the desires of our heart.

The next few days consisted of teaching English in schools, playing games with the kids, and dropping off the other guys from the team at the airport so they could head back to America. On Thurs I did my first run up a 999 stair mountain to a beautiful view on top where they are constructing a giant Buddhist temple. Friday we had a booth at the Ban Pong Childrens’ Festival to celebrate Children’s Day. Sat I ran the 999 stairs again, on very sore calves, and still beat my previous time. Then I played with the kids at the Center. They love badminton, Jenga, and soccer.

Sunday I went to church with my roommate, P’ Doi to hear him preach his first ever sermon. He spoke on Colossians about Christ being our head. In the afternoon we took our oldest kids, who have been practicing a dance for months, to Rise Up Thailand to perform their dance and compete with many other kids. Their team, Step-Up 9, did great and won the “Funnest Team Award.” After the Pastor gave a message about Christ and salvation, two of our girls went to the front to be prayed for. We aren’t sure what they wanted prayers for exactly, but it was still very exciting. We did find out that they are interested in learning more about Christianity. None of our kids accepted Christ that night, but 13 other kids did! And fireworks were going off in the sky (from another event in the city totally unrelated, but still very cool!) All of our kids went to the front and danced a lot when the band played and were clapping, smiling, and having a great time. What a huge breakthrough opportunity!

Our girls being prayed for...