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This month I’d like to share about our outreach to our immediate community which is a group of about 200 homes. Normally, we have large gatherings of single missionaries and/or families at our home during the holidays, but this year we had just gotten back to our house in Thailand in November, and the majority of the missionaries we know were in their home countries since the world had finally opened back up to travel post-Covid. So our focus shifted a bit to our neighborhood, which is probably 75% Thai, and 25% expat and mixed nationality families. Most of them don’t celebrate Christmas, but despite having their own Lunar Buddhist calendar, pretty much everybody does celebrate the Jan. 1st New Year’s Day, so we had a neighborhood-wide get together. Three of us planned it, and it just so happens that the one fella’s niece runs the office, so we were able to close one of the roads and commandeer the whole park! I organized a series of 15-min. football matches (soccer), with different age groups, and we all brought food, and had tents put up for shade. It went from 4pm to about 11pm. We met a lot of new people, and shared stories, and were able to initiate what I think will be some good long-term new relationships.
Then about two weeks later was Thailand’s National Children’s Day. This one I didn’t do as much planning/prepping for, but Ruth set up a whole “build your own puppet” station, which was a huge hit! And since our boys are getting older, they brainstormed and decided to each create and operate a fair-style game for the younger kids, complete with a system of awarding tickets which could then be turned in for prizes. Ruth found wonderful prizes online to order, and I manned that area while the kids ran their respective games. We got to meet a lot of the parents, which were a different group of neighbors, and it was a very successful day. Then, at the end of January, the Chinese members of our community put on a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration, which brought back wonderful memories of years past for us! We joined their celebration there in the same neighborhood park, and they asked us to bring some Western food to have alongside the traditional Chinese fare (including pork tongue, squid, and pig ear), so Ruth baked almost 100 mini cheesecakes. Multiple ladies asked her to teach them how to make them, so we’re interested to see where that leads. In the end, January probably marked the most positive interactions we’ve had with neighbors since moving here! |