So what am I doing here?

Its 11:11 right now according to the clock, that special time of night when the ones align according to their twelve hour orbits. I should be in bed. I’ll be the first tomorrow morning in Thai language school to give directions to a fictional Tuk Tuk driver, and I am anything but ready. But here I sit on the steps outside our room, with Brandan’s laptop on my lap. I’m here to finally answer an irksome question I was always asked back in the States—the question that would always show up like a bad penny. “So um… what are you doing in Thailand?” If I had a penny for every time I was asked that. The problem was that I didn’t really know. Eventually I kind of ended up with a script to not answer, but at least respond to it.
“Yeah, I’m gonna be doing some media work on health and drug awareness in Bangkok … but actually every SM I’ve ever talked to said that they went expecting to do one thing and ended up doing something entirely different… so you know… I’m just keeping an open mind I’m not sure what exactly I’ll be doing.”
What was really exasperating was the fact that no one would remember what I said. Members of my immediate family would ask the question at least once a week each.
“So I’m still not really sure… what will you be doing in Thailand?”
When I met Brandan in LAX to fly to Thailand we laughed as we realized both of us had been going through the same thing--not really knowing what we would be doing, but being asked over and over again. We were sure that when we finally arrived in Thailand we would know.
Upon arrival in Bangkok I started asking the other SMs what we would be doing. They didn’t know. Our boss, Pastor Doug Venn was gone on vacation and we would need to talk to him to figure out exactly what was going on. “So what have you been doing?” I asked Kelly since she had been at the church plant I would be at (Thonburi) for five months or so. “Oh you know… just hanging out,” she joked. But it was one of those jokes you say that are half true. My last two weeks I’ve been realizing that full truth of that half truth.
Being in a new culture has been a little bit like going back in time. Brandan, Cory and I are all eight years old again, and Kelly’s been babysitting us. We tell her what we want and she orders. We follow her around the city clueless of where we are. We ask her what we’re going to do today. Everything is new, everything is a discovery. I didn’t even know how to use the toilet in our house. (It’s of the crouch and spray variety, as Brandan put it.) It’s fun to experience this foreign culture, but a little hard function as an adult. However I am growing up to the challenge of Bangkok. I can get to school and back again by myself. I can order khaawphat phak say khay (fried rice with vegetables and egg). And if you dropped me somewhere in the middle of Bangkok I’d say there’s a 20% chance that I could find my way back home as compared to 0% chance when I first got here.
I met Pastor Doug and liked him immediately. He’s full of enthusiasm and I feel that I can talk to him and he will understand (there are more types of communication barriers than language barriers). That day it was outlined what Cory and I would be doing. In a nutshell we’ll be shooting and editing short documentary films on mission work. In addition to that, Cory had the idea of painting a three story mural on an vacant wall down our street. But Pastor Doug made it clear that the official job we have in Thailand isn’t the point. Anything we undertake in Thailand will stop the moment we leave; so as short term missionaries we will have accomplished pretty much a bunch of nothing. That is why everything we do must be done with the Thai people. We are not the ones who will convert Thai people, Thai people are the ones. Our role here is to encourage and empower the Thais--to teach them and let them go out among their countrymen. A Thai can reach a Thai much more effectively than any farang (Thai word for white foreigner).
So any project we undertake must be with the help of Thai people. It’s through relationships and example that people are converted. As farang we are emissaries of Christianity, whether we like it our not. And as farang we kinda stick out in Bangkok. So it’s also our job to lead exemplary lives, reflecting Jesus through our daily actions.
So what am I doing in Thailand? You know… just hanging out.

PS. I most sincere and heartfelt apologies to anyone who made it all the way through this post. I promise from here on out that there will be a higher concentration of pictures and less bothersome text.

A Weekend to Remember

So our first weekend was another overwhelming introduction to Thailand. It started with the four hour train trip down south from Bangkok. I had not had more than two or three hours of sleep the night before, so as I got on the train I was ready to hit the hay; sadly a hot crowded bus isn’t the most conducive to sleeping. Even worse was that the four hour trip turned to a four and a half hour trip which in turn became a five hour and twenty minute trip. We got there in a little over six hours. It was right around midnight by Thai time, too dark to really get an idea of our surroundings, and I didn’t really care at that point. I just wanted to sleep.
The next morning I would find that we were right by the beach surrounded by miles and miles of coconut groves. Up the beach a mile or two was a gentle hill crowned by a Buddhist temple. I won’t waste words recounting the whole weekend, pics and eventually video will do that a thousand times better than I can. But I will say that Cory, Brandon and I lucked out because we got to do things our first weekend that other SMs had been waiting six months for. We swam in the ocean, visited a Buddhist temple, saw monkeys, rented motor bikes and cruised around, watched muay thai matches (Thai kickboxing, Thailand’s national sport) and a myriad of other stuff. And in between all this we would get Thai food and the more experienced SMs would share with us the wisdom they had acquired while being in Thailand.
I think it was Sunday night, after grabbing some sticky rice from a vender at the fair, I was driving myself along the beach on a motorcycle/moped on the left side of the road (not the right) that it struck me how weird this all was. And it was weird because driving a motorcycle on the left side of the road in a foreign country felt so normal. Los Angeles seemed like another lifetime ago even though I had only been in Thailand three days. So much had happened that it just felt like long, long ago. I got to wondering if these months I’ll spend in Thailand will fly by or feel like an eternity. Time will tell.

So it begins...

So this is my first blog from Thailand. I’m typing this in an internet café in the middle of Bangkok full of 10 year old Thai boys playing computer games. I’ve been in the country for a week now, and I’m starting to get into the groove of how to get around and function in the city. But let me start at the beginning—which would be when I arrived in Bangkok.
It was about 1:00 in the morning by Bangkok time when we (Brandan and I) arrived. We had been chasing the sun on a 747 from LA to Taipei creating an 8 hour sunset. We then moved on from Taipei to Bangkok for a grand total of 20 hours in the air. We were met by Kelly, Cory and Jorge, and it was nice to some familiar faces. All of us crammed into a taxi cab and headed on “home.” As we drove Kelly made small talk to the cab driver in Thai as I pressed my face against the window trying to get a glimps of the city that is to be my home for the next 4 months. But it was about 2:00 in the morning by that time and I could see very little. We arrived and were presented with home: a dark little back alley--classically ghetto in every sense. The dirty little street was bordered by three story high apartments. Each apartment had what looked like a garage sized metal gate, the kind most shops in malls use after they close. My reaction was mixed. I simultaneously thought, “am I really gonna live here?” and “awesome! I’m living here!” The inside of the buildings more or less match the outside, and our room was small but quite clean, but most importantly included an air conditioner! Praise God! We went to bed about 3:00am ready to get up at 6 in the morning to go to Thai language class. We had missed the first day.
The next morning we needed to get to class quickly, so we each took a motorcycle taxi. Basically you just sit behind the Thai driver on his motorcycle/moped as he weaves in and out of traffic. We quickly weaved in and out of pedestrians and onto the main street into the organized chaos of cars and motorbikes that is the traffic of Bangkok. As we threaded a needle through two moving cars I tried to wipe the goofy grin off my face. This was the most amazing first taste of Bangkok. No windows came between me and the city, only a 360 view and air rushing past. And the smells! Smells of garbage, smells of meat being cooked on the street, sweet smells, putrid smells, smells you can taste, smells without a name. I was still trying to wipe that grin off my face. I didn’t want to look like some tourist or anything like that. We arrived at the Sky Train, and took it the rest of the way to school. Brandan and I had missed the first day, so we just got thrown into it.
Thai is a very hard language to learn for many reasons. First it’s not English. Secondly its tonal, meaning that your voice going up or down can change the meaning of the word. Third, they have crazy weird vowel sounds. We think its just A E I O U. But someone had the bright idea of thinking there are vowel sounds in between those ones. Try saying A E I O U slowly, morphing from one vowel to the next. Yep, those are distinct vowels. Think of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Class is pretty much hilarious because we have all been reverted to toddler status. We have 12 people in our class, all speak English and most are middle aged. With as much dignity as each of us can muster, we let out a eeeuuuu as the teacher makes us repeat it over and over. Apparently we never really get it right, just kind of close.
Anyways, this is getting way too long, so suffice it to say that it was a crazy first day. It was a Friday, and we and bunch of the other SMs were heading about 6 hours south by train to a beach. We had been in Thailand for a day, and we were already getting a vacation! But the weekend at the beach is a story for another day. I’m a week behind and I’m skipping so much, but eventually as things settle down I’ll get caught up. Anyways, this is how I plan to let everyone know what’s going on, so I don’t need to repeat myself to everyone. I hope to hear from all of you. Peace.