We have long seen the need for homeschool helpers for families on the field. Besides our own needs, I have often had conversations with other families both here and in our last country about this situation. Before we left for the field my idea of a missionary family was a Type A family with their only struggles coming from the challenges on the field. Yes, little did I know… The first time we had significant health struggles in our last country, I was shocked that we were going through it. We were missionaries and had sacrificed to go, didn’t that mean we’d get immunity from other struggles? (Read that with all the appropriate outrage.) Apparently not. The second time we had significant struggles, I was shocked again. Lots of life later, I’m no longer shocked, but am shocked when life goes smoothly or to plan. (Read that with all the appropriate irony.)

What we’ve seen is that the missionary families here on the field have many of the same struggles as any family in the States, plus also experiencing field-specific struggles (which would, in themselves, be enough). The majority of the missionary families that we know or have met also have struggles concerning one or more serious issues such as major health or dietary needs, adopted kids struggles, kids with special needs or educational handicaps, and the list goes on. Serious needs that would be stressful anywhere grow to a whole new level on the field, being compounded by having less emotional support and availability of professional help than would be available in their home country. That’s the real world of missions as we’ve experienced it, and that leads to the real need for homeschool helpers to help mitigate some of the stress of an already stressful life, again with the goal of keeping missionaries (in all their real-life lives) on the field and better able to minister.

We have been abundantly blessed this past year to have a homeschool helper here with us. She (Amanda) focuses on working with our kids with the day-to-day school, which gives us more time and space to focus on ministry. It has been a huge blessing in many ways and we can’t even enumerate all the benefits we’ve experienced from this arrangement. When other families have heard about her role here, their next quick question is “How did you get her?” Which basically translates to “How can we do that?!?” One family jokingly, (I’m hoping!) even tried to steal her away from us when she first arrived by asking how much we were paying her. (Um, that would be approximately nothing…) As our time with Amanda has progressed, and others here have heard about our arrangement, we began to realize that although they’ve seen the need and would also love to have a homeschool helper, they didn’t feel they had the wherewithal to solve all the logistics and details that come with bringing someone here. Whereas in our case, having, one, set up our own support system without the assistance of an organization and two, having also done so with Amanda, we were uniquely suited, and not at all intimidated, to do that work. Our distinctive situation, along with our experience of working with an org called TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission) through Frontier Ventures (FV) and their short-term team this summer, has led us to pray about establishing a program whereby short-term workers could come to help long-term missionaries on the field, while also giving the short-term helper exposure to missionary life, either as a one-time experience or as they pursue a long-term calling. 

The greatest value of a short-term team is often found through aiding established long-term missionaries to be more effective in their ministry. We feel this program would be an exceptional way to accomplish that. The young people who came through TEAM this past summer had the main goal of being exposed to mission opportunities in Asia. As we saw the process they went through while here, we couldn’t help but think how practical it would be to align that goal with the above mentioned need for homeschool helpers. Helping long-term missionary families in this way would give the shorter-term people a real experience of what life on the field entails and the ministry opportunities that exist, while being immediately beneficial to the work on the field. 

As we start to further develop this program and how it will work, we are praying with and pursuing partnerships with FV, TEAM, and other organizations who may be interested in being involved. Please pray for us as we start down this path of possibilities and logistics. 

Also, if you know of someone who would be interested in serving as a homeschool helper, we know many families who are interested in having one. As we have already brought Amanda here to help us, even without an “official” program yet, we would be able to work with them and connect them to a family immediately for this January or the 2022-’23 school term. 

Thank you for your prayers in this and your continued support in prayer and financially,
– Ruth, for the Baker family.
​​

The twist and turns of life never fail to surprise me. It’s why I have such a hard time answering the question “What’s your plan?” when being asked about ministry direction. I know that whatever answer I give, if it’s specific, likely won’t be accurate in a few months time. God never seems to take us on the journey we think we’re headed on. The only time it’s accurate is when we give the generalities God has already given us, “We plan to work with missionaries to support and encourage them to help keep them on the field.” However, the next question is sure to be, “How will you do that?” and as soon as I try to answer that with specifics, using my oh-so-logical brain, inevitably it’s not where God ends up taking us. While a general answer isn’t the most satisfying, it’s usually the most accurate. The solution to answering that question accurately, of course, is to talk about what God has been doing so far with you on the field. However, when you’re just starting out in a new direction, like we were when we were in the States this last time, there’s nothing yet to talk about but the future. So, for all of you who are supporting missionaries and interested in what they’re doing on the field (as is right and good), give the ones starting in a new direction some grace when a few months later what they are doing isn’t what they thought it would be (and again a few months after that when it happens again…)

​All that to say, if you talked with us while we were last in the States, we assumed we’d be partnering with a missionary guest house here in Thailand once we arrived since they had asked us too. However, since no one foresaw covid travel restrictions, no one realized the guest house wouldn’t have any guests for over a year, making ministry with them impossible right now. We still plan to restart the music ministry we had with them right when we came back, once guests are there again, but for now all cooperation with them has necessarily been put on hold until missionaries are traveling here again.

Our work with O’B and Frontier Ventures is ebbing for awhile since he will be traveling to South America and the States for a few months as he works on this new partnership for helping other organizations bringing missionaries in to Asia. This is good timing for us as we will soon be starting to organize and prepare for the upcoming holiday celebrations we host for single missionaries. If you or your Sunday school class are interested in helping us with the cost of these holiday celebrations, please see our “Support Us” page where you can quickly and easily make a donation right from there. The more ministry funds we receive for this, the more special we’re able to make the events. I remember Midwest Camp (the summer camp I attended growing up) once blessing the missionaries in attendance by giving them holiday celebrations during the week. It made me realize how hard it must be to celebrate the holidays away from home year after year without traditions and family to share it with, even more so when you’re single and when the culture around you doesn’t celebrate the day. Strange as it is, Christmas is just a regular work day here for the Buddhist majority of Thai people around us. While we can’t replace family or other’s holiday traditions, we can try to fill that gap with our family, traditions and someone to celebrate with together. 

Right now we are very excited about the newest project we’re working on that is evolving from our work with FV, and our experience with Amanda as our homeschool helper. Our current hope and prayer is to be able to develop a program that facilitates bringing in homeschool helpers for families here on the field, in order to reduce the overall stress on the missionary family enabling them to be more involved in ministry and increasing their long-term effectiveness and viability. Please pray with us these next few months as we pray about, discuss and start to plan this project with others here who are interested in partnering with us.

As always, we wouldn’t be here without your prayers and financial support, so thank you for both.
– Ruth, for the Baker family. 
​

July is here and we’ve successfully turned a bunch of office rooms into bedrooms for the group coming in through TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission) being housed at Frontier Ventures (see last month’s post for these details). In the end, as with any first time endeavor between a bunch of semi-strangers doing a big thing for the first time, things didn’t go as smoothly as you’d hope, dates were switched, we had two weeks less than we thought we did to get ready, panic ensued, long hours were spent shopping and setting up, but we did get finished the day before they came, if not spectacularly, then at least respectably. All in all though, the people coming in weren’t affected by the scramble ahead of time (and they had beds, with sheets!, to sleep on) so it was fine, if exhausting, but fine. (This is me reassuring my inner planning perfectionist…)

​When trying to make a place comfortable in Asia for Westerners, it’s not the most straightforward thing. These rooms, while being immediately set up for the short-term team’s use, will eventually be utilized for those coming in from South America and other Western countries to be housed there while they acclimate to Asian culture. While going through culture shock it’s nice to have at least one place that’s comfortable when you need a safe place to de-stress. Comfort, in culture shock acclimating terms, equates to familiar. However, setting up a western-comfortable bedroom in Asia is surprisingly challenging. Here are a few challenges we scoured the length and breadth of the city to overcome: 

Speaking of our church, another interesting thing that happened this month is that the church we’re attending asked us to be a part of their leadership team. When many of their veteran members were stranded in their home countries for months on end because of covid restrictions, Lance and I were able to get involved in ways that would otherwise already be taken care of. My favorite job is teaching the 1-5 year-old class. One Sunday they announced that there would be no 1-5 year-old class that day unless someone volunteered to take the kids. Since I knew that wouldn’t be a problem for me (and a shame for the mothers not to get a break and hear the sermon) I volunteered, which then led to an every-other-week commitment. Since our church meets at a tourist zoo-like attraction, our Sunday school class is in the barred waiting area of the park’s train ride with camels and deer across the street. It gives us something to direct the kids attention to while we’re cleaning up snack or switching over to the story. The kids are a mixture of local Thai, missionary and Chinese kids and at that age some barely have English. I appreciate the simple Chinese language I have to help with instructions and organization. Although we were gratified the church leadership felt we would be a beneficial addition to their team, after prayer and seeking counsel from our sending church and missionary oversight team, we agreed that we currently have enough ministry going on to not be able to responsibly add more to our schedule as we didn’t feel specifically led to join them at this time, but we’ll keep the opportunity in mind for future consideration.

Thank you for your continued prayers and support,
– Ruth, for the Baker family.

We have been partnering with an organization called Frontier Ventures and have a lot of news to share about them. The story of how we’ve come to be involved with them twists and turns like any typical God-led story so I’ll give you the brief overview. When we moved to Thailand in March, 2020 we stayed at a missionary guest house while getting our house ready for us to move into. This was during the initial covid lock-down here, so we were at the guest house with a group of other people either stranded in the country or newly arrived like us but with no place to go. While there, we met an older gentleman named O’B (for O’Brian) who was newly arrived in Thailand and we learned he was setting up a hub in Asia, for an organization called Frontier Ventures, in order to better support their missionaries in the surrounding closed countries reaching UUPGs and FPGs (technical terms missionary-types use to denote people groups and tribes who have no gospel influence, search it for more details). When we initially talked to him, he focused on the ministries they do with the people they want to reach, not the missionaries they’re trying to help, so at that time Lance and I had no idea his goal was so aligned with what God has called us to do. He focused on talking about The Joshua Project, which is one of Frontier Ventures more well known ministries.

​Fast forward a year later and O’B called Lance up to get together for lunch. Since O’B is one of our regular single guests at our holiday celebrations, we assumed he was just calling to catch up, and we had come to mind since we had just invited him to our Easter celebration. Imagine my surprise when Lance came home from lunch to tell me that O’B said he’s had us in the back of his mind for a year while getting his org established here in Thailand, and he’d like to pursue partnering with us. When Lance started to describe the work he’s establishing and where he hopes to go in the future I couldn’t believe how perfectly what he’s doing aligns with what we want to do to help missionaries. 

O’B is establishing a base here in our city for Frontier Ventures to use as central hub for missionaries going out or already established in the surrounding closed countries of Asia. Through this hub, FV will advise, network, support, train, encourage and work with missionaries from their organization, as well as partnering with other sending organizations, to offer them the same assistance with their missionaries. 

Among other things being discussed and prayed about, a large part of the work O’B is focussing on right now is prayerfully moving toward cooperation with CMA churches in South America, with the help of another family here from Ecuador and a woman here from Brazil, to be the catalyst and first stop for their missionaries as they come to the field in Asia.

During this time of set-up, we are helping O’B get his office established and up and running. He has already set up a partnership with another org here, TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission), and will be hosting a short-term team they’re bringing in for the summer. Lance and I are helping him brainstorm and solve all the details this will involve, as well as purchasing all the supplies needed to do this. It’s literally an empty set of offices that we’re turning into a bunch of rooms for the people to stay in with a meeting room and a dining room. We’ll let you know how that’s all working out next month.

Thank you for your continued prayers,
Ruth, for the Baker family.

There is always something happening here to keep us busy, usually something I would’ve never guessed had I thought about it the month before. This month I’ll update you with the things we’ve been doing lately in ministry and next month I’ll go into the major direction God has led us. We’re so excited about it! (All of it, the randomness and the focus.)

I forgot to mention the Easter celebration we hosted last month. It ended up being such a large group that we had to completely rearrange our downstairs and bring in a second table. We had our usual group of single missionaries, a few new singles and a couple that runs the missionary guesthouse here in town. We spent last Easter with them when no one was allowed to gather because we were still at the guest house and we reminisced about how life-giving that celebration was for them amidst all the Covid turmoil. We also had an Easter egg hunt at our house (on a different day) for the neighborhood Thai and missionary kids. The kids had fun decorating bags and then searching for eggs all around our house. I had a spread of breakfast baked goods and drinks out so any parents that stopped by had a reason to stay, to give us the opportunity to visit with them awhile. Inevitably, all the eggs weren’t found (though presumably the lizards or ants have found them by now), but everyone had a lot of fun and it provided a great opportunity to build deeper ties to the neighborhood kids and parents. We have had further relationships develop from just this one event which has been super exciting. 

Another hosting highlight we had this month was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day on Mother’s Day. Um, yes, you read that correctly. I know, different months and all, but since we were picking up Amanda from Bangkok to Chiang Mai around St. Patrick’s Day and didn’t get to celebrate to the boys’ dismay, we decided to combine the two celebrations with a family who needed a break, giving the mom (and her family) a day off and our kids the StPD celebration they missed. (St. Patrick’s Day is big at our house, being Scotch-Irish on my mom’s side.) It was super fun with games and a ton of food and I know the mom, who’s been through a lot lately, really enjoyed the day with her kids and my kids didn’t miss St.PD after all, so it worked out really well. 

One item of business before I sign off: Amanda, our homeschool teacher, is here until December 15th. I will finish teaching the boys for the rest of the year but that means we have the fabulous opportunity for someone new to come over for the ’22-23 school year to homeschool our boys and experience missionary life in Thailand! Aren’t you excited to let everyone you know about this amazing opportunity?!?! Clearly there is only one good answer. Besides homeschooling our boys during the day, Amanda has had opportunities to become involved in ministry with refugees and local Thais while here. So this experience not only gives someone an experience of life overseas and in Thailand but also mission opportunities here beyond our family. If someone is interested in learning through experience more about being a foreign missionary or seeing if that is a direction God is leading them in, living here, with us helping them get settled in for the year, is a way to experience missionary life without having to first determine what organization or direction they want to go in, while still being able to be involved in ministry in a foreign culture. We are actually discussing this opportunity with an organization here about developing a program for young people coming over as a way for them to be involved with missions as an exploratory trip while also supporting the missionaries already on the field in a substantial and widely needed way. If you know of someone who would be interested or would like more information about this opportunity please pass on our email address or contact us at lanceandruth@psmail.net.

Thank you for your continued prayers and support,
– Ruth, for the Baker family.

We have been so so busy over here! (which is why I’m just now finally getting to updating our blog for the past many months) However, as you can see by my first sentence, Thai culture is settling into my brain somewhat. They repeat words for emphasis or illustration and you’ll often hear Thai people use that same language structure when they try to communicate to you in English: “many, many” for “a lot” or “same, same” for “It’s the same thing/price.” As a point of interest: their sentence structure is dead opposite of ours, ending a sentence with the verb, but it’s the same in Chnese so it wasn’t a completely new concept for us. We often see Thai and Chnese relate in the same way that Romance languages relate, which is so interesting. Sometimes even words are the same, just with a different tone (making it so much harder to remember which one is Thai). So knowing Chnese has been both a help and a hindrance.

​A bajillion ministry things are going on and I’m not sure how to cram them all into this update without making it too long. This post I’ll focus on the foundation we have our visas through so as not to barrage your brain with more information than you have interest. As I mentioned in February, we have partnered with a local Thai foundation for our visas. Through this we are able to do our ministry of facilitating missionaries reaching closed countries or unreached people groups, while the foundation provides the opportunity for us to be involved in the local community and directly with minority groups here.

​The foundation is involved with various humanitarian projects and as the people do their work among the nationals, as Christians, they also share the gospel. One of the latest projects we are pursuing is determining the viability of making cheap and easy-to-produce air purifiers using a water filtration system for the Thai guys Lance plays soccer with. This way we can provide our friends with air purifiers for the burning season (here farmers burn their fields after harvest making February and March filled with smoke and hard to breath), while also teaching them how to do it, so they can pass on the knowledge to the impoverished Thai villages where they put on free soccer camps paired with a clear gospel presentation.

Amanda has actually made it to Thailand! Hurray! She was released from quarantine March 13th, which was exactly one day shy of the date we landed in Thailand last year. The boys enjoyed that piece of trivia. We enjoyed that she was finally successfully here. Since she couldn’t book a flight straight to Chiang Mai, having to stop for two weeks in Bangkok for quarantine, we were having trouble finding an affordable flight that would accommodate her allotment of international luggage, since the only flights running in-country are budget flights. In the end, we all piled into our car and went to pick her up. It was a great break for us and she was glad to have the chance to see Bangkok after just being in a hotel room there for two weeks. It was a whirlwind three days but we had a lot of fun shopping at night markets, riding in a long-tailed river boat through a lock and on the canals and just being reminded of the uniqueness of Asia through new eyes. You forget what is novel and strange to westerners after living in Asia for so long, and I had to laugh at myself multiple times for not realizing what would be different for her. I loved it. The long weekend in Bangkok gave the boys a way to get to know her and share their world in a casual setting which we were glad for too. 

​The rest of this month will be filled with getting her set up in her house, showing her where/how to shop, arranging her visa and details with her language school (she will stay here for the year on a student visa), and all the other details that come with setting up and living for the first time in a new country. We’re so glad she’s here to help us with homeschool which allows me time to focus on language and ministry. 

Thanks for your prayers,
– Ruth, for the Baker family

Night Market Food

River and Canal Tour

We are pleased to announce that, not only has our visa problem been solved – but also Amanda’s! It’s unbelievable that everything is falling into place so easily and quickly all of a sudden for both of us. Lance says he’ll believe it when she’s standing in our living room, but as far as we can be sure, she’s able to come as soon as she’s able to come! (You followed that, right?)

​Amanda will come on a tourist visa and then we’ll be able to switch her over to a student visa for the rest of the year. There’s a lot of details about all that but suffice it to say, it’s convoluted and bureaucratic, but once she’s here, she’ll be able to stay one way or another with all the COVID provisions for visas that they’re coming up with to help keep people here once they’re here. She’ll have to go through a quarantine period in Bangkok for 15 nights at a hotel set aside for that purpose before she’ll be able to join us here in Chiang Mai. So, although she leaves this month from the states (February 24) we won’t see her until March 13th because of quarantine (and the time change and how long it takes to fly here…)

Our visas this past year have been student visas and since we can’t legally be students forever in Thailand, we needed to find a solution for staying here long-term.  We are so excited God brought us a fantastic and more permanent solution for this coming year and the foreseeable future. Through a friend of ours, we’ve connected with a local Thai believer who started a Thai foundation to help foreigners like us (who aren’t connected with a large organization that has visas for their workers) to get visas for staying in the country on a more permanent basis. Through cooperation with them quarterly in their humanitarian work with local Thais and minority groups, Lance can get a volunteer work permit with dependent visas for the rest of us. We were so surprised at how easily this solution came to us right when we needed it (our student visas expire next month) and how well it fit our situation. This has not been our experience on the field and we praise God for how easily it was solved (if you put hours and hours of paperwork, meetings and immigration office visits in the “easy-because-inevitable” category, which we did since it lacked any extreme unforeseen stressful problems like we usually encounter). We’re also excited to have the opportunity and entrance into volunteering with the locals and minority groups around us, since that isn’t the overarching focus of our ministry. 

Thank you for your continued prayer support,
– Ruth, for the Baker family

Compared to most of you in the States, I think our year went more to plan than most. We left for Thailand in March to start language learning in Chiang Mai. Three days after our arrival the borders closed and we have continually praised God that He got us here before then. We stayed at a missionary guest house while getting our belongings shipped up from storage in Bangkok (that we had shipped over from our last country) and setting up our house. We were so thankful that God had convicted us to pack/ship most of our belongings instead of trying to replace them in Thailand since the stores were only allowed to sell food and cleaning supplies for our first three months here due to the Covid lockdown.

This year has been focused on learning Thai and acclimating to the culture and life here. Most things were closed when we first arrived, so we had a slow start to meeting people and developing a network of friends for the kids, but we’ve been able to work on developing relationships with Westerners, Thais and other Asian nationalities now that most things are open here again. 

One area we’ve had setbacks in is with our language learning. We had planned to have a homeschool helper (Amanda) for a year to help us teach the kids while we learned Thai, but since she had planned to come two weeks after us, she wasn’t able to get into the country. We eventually switched the boys to an online curriculum instead of using the textbooks I had for them, so we didn’t have to prepare lesson plans for 3 boys while trying to study. Hopefully we’ll be able to return to some physical textbooks if we get a homeschool helper to come, but I’m thankful to have the online resources so I can keep up with Lance in language learning. Also, our language teacher has had a rough year due to health and lack of new students since the borders have been closed. Because of this, it has been a struggle for us to maintain a steady learning environment with her. Her desire to teach is no longer there and she plans to close her school completely soon, so we are looking for a new solution to language for this coming year.

Getting a visa for Amanda has been an ongoing project this year as we keep up with the changing situations for entering Thailand. Along with this, Lance is now also working on a permanent visa solution for us, since our student visa expires this March. In both areas, God has directed us to the people we need to help us and we hope to have a solution for both of us soon. Please pray for both situations as we work on this over the next few months. 

Although this year’s focus was on language, we have also been able to do quite a bit of ministry as well. When we first arrived, the directors of the missionary guest house we stayed at began doing a Sunday service on the premises since all local churches were closed. We led the music for that service as well as a mid-week worship service each week for a number of months. It was a unique and wonderful way to serve during the months of lockdown that many others didn’t get to experience. This ministry is suspended right now since the guest house is closed due to lack of guests, but they and we hope to continue it in the future once they reopen. We’ve also had a ministry develop by hosting multiple holiday celebrations for people who don’t have anyone to celebrate with. We were blessed to host a birthday celebration for a Thai lady and her daughter, suppers with a number of missionary families and singles, and Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s celebrations with groups of single missionaries, missionary families and new friends we’ve met hailing from Malaysia, China, Thailand, New Zealand and the States

Through this whole year, we’ve continually praised God that we were able to make it here before the travel lockdown last March. Our family has been so blessed to be back in Asia, out of the temporary housing situation in the States, able to invest in our long-term ministry and relationships, and to have our own place to call home again. Micah’s health is doing really well here when he doesn’t inadvertently eat MSG, and we can see all the boys are blessed by being reunited with their toys/belongings, having a specific homeschool curriculum to follow again (instead of cobbling it together for a year since our books were all in Asia) and a home that’s theirs again. Lance and I are similarly excited and blessed to be here for the same reasons and to be back doing the ministry we were created for. We thank God continually for bringing us here and giving us this ministry. Thank you for your prayers and support for and with us.

– Ruth, for the Baker family.