the adventure I find myself in / das Abenteuer in dem ich mich finde

Category: Missions (Page 2 of 3)

Trip to the mountains

In a few hours I will get up for another trip to the mountains. I need to see if the Hui Ba Rai water project is finished. It rained so much lately that it was not an easy task for the villagers to do it. I will also visit Hui Kau Laam. So it will be a busy day.

Giving my Testimony

Today I will talk to a larger Christian group of Thai people at a cell group gathering. It is the first time I speak in front of a bigger group in Thai without a translator. Strange, because I used to lead worship in Thai for two years at a Thai church. Most of my sharing is with smaller groups or one on one. So I am a bit nervous. Especially with talking about what God has done in my life and how it came that I would go to Thailand. It is a long story and it seems such a long time ago. Every time I think of God’s gentleness in the way He led me and gave me directions touches me and gives me a sense of security.

My Thai has improved a lot since i went back to Thai studies and I am still motivated to go on. My goal is to be able to preach in Thai and to translate simultaneously. This was my goal back when I was 20 years old and went to learn English. After being here for 9 years I know that even when I go back to Switzerland part of me will be with the Thai people and South-East Asia.

Christmas outreach

Yesterday evening I came back from our last Christmas village outreach this year. Hui Ma Jom was our last  place we went.  Four villages in a row. Meeting people, singing Christmas songs, sharing the great story of the birth of our Savior. We were in Hui Kau Laam, Hui Ma Fueang, Ken Tun and Hui Ma Jom. We also supported Christmas celebrations in the Prao area and the boarding home in Prao. This is one of the busiest times and I am never able to attend all the village celebrations I am invited too. The only "official" thing we are going to have with the Lahu team is on Wedensday. I am going to take the Lahu team up to Doi Angkhan for an outing "pai tiau" as a nice finish of a busy year.

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Christmas outreach preperations

I have been in Fang on Wednesday to do the planing and shopping for the Christmas outreach in the villages. It became a tradition to use the Christmas time to go to the villages we share the good News during the year to have a special time. We will be in five villages in five days. One of them I cannot go because my own children have a Christmas celebration at the school. My oldest, Tanja, has a main part in a Christmas musical. I don’t want to miss that. So I will come back from the mountains for this occasion.

Monkey business

Today I went up to Prao. This is a town about an hour and a half North of Chiang Mai. Actually it is a whole Ampoe, or district hidden behind mountains. Driving from Chiang Mai I pass Mae Jo and then later drive over some hills that leads to Prao. It is mainly a farming district and has also some ethnic minority groups in the Northern mountain ranges. I go up there to see how the boarding home is doing and to bring them their monthly support. This time I also brought them some money for the Christmas dinner. Unfortunately I won’t be able to go to their big event. I will be up in the mountains around Fang at that time
This morning when I passed the hills I went into a long curve and in the distant I saw some animals crossing the street. My first thought was cats. But they all had the same color and there were so many. As I got closer I saw that about 30 monkeys wanted to cross the street. As fast as they came out of the jungle, they vanished on the other side.
On the road in Thailand I came across herds of water buffaloes, elephants and of course cats and dogs, but I have never seen a group of monkeys cross the road. So still after all this years driving the roads I get surprises.

Churchplanting the odd way

I always thought the church has to do something with people. I mean people come to faith in Christ and have then fellowship together growing into a community, learning, sharing and suffering together on their journey. Over the years I have seen and been in different churches and communities. I believe there are many ways to do it and actually I come to believe that there is no right ways. Because we people are so different.
I thought that the model to put up a building in a village and then call it church planting was something from past attempts to do "missions". There are no Christians or a pastor in the village but a building has to be put up. Some sort of a proof to the mission board of successful work. We already have one of those "churches" in Hui Kau Laam (on the hill) and now some Missionary wants to put a building up in another village where we labored fore the last year. I don’t understand this approach. It has absolutely nothing to do with the great commission, or am I missing something? Most of the villages we work in our places where Evangelists and Pastors tried in the last 10 years and failed and I think it is partly because of this kind of understanding of planting churches.
In the bigger Lahu villages (500 people or more) A trend for new church plants and church splits occurs. In one of the villages we worked early on with about 60 houses there are 4 churches now. Two Baptist, a Catholic and some other one. When we did our first project 6 years ago there was only one Baptist church there. Unfortunately the neighboring village is still unreached. I am not against new churches in a village. It just seems to me a bit odd the way things develop. There are still unreached villages that surely could use a little effort in that area. This is why we mainly try work in villages where no one wants or can’t go.

Teaching on worship

Mae_sotI just came back last night from a village 20 km. north of Mae Sot. I left last Sunday from Chiang Mai to teach in a discipleship school for Karen people. It is has been a while since I taught for a whole week. I think it went quite well and hope to get more opportunities in the future.
I want to work on teaching material on several subjects.So next time I have more of a selection to teach from. Specially when I teach for so many hours.
I haven’t been in the Mae Sot area since I went to the Karen villages and refugee camps about four years ago. This seems such a long time ago. Two Karen guys still remembered me from  when I taught at their high school and my Backpacker guitar I used for leading worship. (thank you Linda and Randy for this great gift).
I am back now and today I spent time with my family and just relaxing. I am quite tired and a busy week is ahead of me. But I feel very happy and am spiritually revived spending a lot of time God in between the teachings. Being with the Karen helped me also to see the work with the Lahu from another perspective. I also realized again how hard it is to work in a cross-cultural setting and that I’m not the only one who sometimes struggles making it work.

Thanksgiving in a Lahu village

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Yesterday I joined Mongkun and his family for thanksgiving at his older sisters village in the Prao area. We met at the boarding home we support and from there went all the way off-road into the mountains. The road would have been very difficult in the rainy season. But now it is quite dry. There were also tow new bridges built over the river coming down the mountains.
We spent the whole day in the village talking to the various leaders and pastors gathering. After the two hour church service we met a Lahu Lady who has another boarding home with 48 children. It was quite interesting talking with her. I was able to get more information about the Prao area and the problems they are facing with the changing times. I met other pastors and also a catholic priest visiting. As the only outlander I felt out of place at times. In all the years I have not learned the Lahu language and many don’t speak Thai very well, or don’t seem to like speaking it. So communication is rather difficult without a translator. Talking about their problems I also realized that coming from Switzerland I come from such a different culture and life. The development Switzerland experienced in the last two hundred years seems to just beginning in the villages in the mountains. Even though they have solar power and mobile phones. Globalisation is a strange thing. I have been in and out of Lahu villages for the last seven years. I have seen, heard and experienced quite a lot. I’m not easily shocked. Still I have moments when I feel overwhelmed and tired. Change does not come quickly. Switzerland took a long time to be where it is. It will take time for development. I don’t mean the destructive sides of the western world. I mean the long term perspective on developing a village, family or one-self. Where do I stand? I feel like a mere observer and perhaps I can throw a small stone into the pond to stir something.

Team from Australia

I will be gone for some days. We have a team from Australia I’m taking up to the mountains. At the same time Lillian is up at the women’s retreat playing in the worship band. We have quite a busy time. So I won’t be blogging till next Wednesday.
According to the weather report we are going to have some sunny days. Which I would be very glad for. We are planing to do some digging in the jungle. The rain is making driving in there sometimes impossible.

The end of poverty

Is it an unreachable dream? To end poverty? Or better say extreme poverty as Jeffrey D. Sachs writes in his book “The end of poverty”. I started reading it some weeks ago and try to fight my way through pages of economic change and explanations about the world with its one billion extreme poor people. Thousands of children die every day of malnutrition and sickness. Sachs says it is possible to stop extreme poverty till the year 2025. A very interesting read even for someone who doesn’t have much understanding of economics. It seems to be a very practical approach. I haven’t finished the book yet, but would really recommend it. It gave me some interesting insight into how countries develop.

In the west we are readily to judge so called “third world countries” and point out that it is their own fault and that they should help themselves. But if poverty is at an extreme end, there is no way to get out of it by one self. Millions of people find themselves on the bottom of a spiral without hope of getting out.

Poverty is the inability to choose.

Working with the poor here in Thailand taught me a lot. Still there are many factors I don’t understand. This is a theme that will be researching for months to come. I want to find out what it practically means in our work situation with the Lahu People. One thing that Sachs doesn’t address is the spiritual factor. The Christian Lahu villages seem to be doing much better than their non-Christian counter parts. On the other hand I think the villages who had help in starting their development were able than to develop themselves further out of poverty. Like the Thai Royal projects. I will explore this more in a future post.

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