The boys sometimes had to bring their school to work on, while we worked at the office. This is an example of them not working on school. At least, it’s an attempt to work while being harassed by your brother.
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:
Trying to check out with our groceries in one cart and FV’s pillows and garbage cans in two other carts.
In Asia, a mattress often is little more than a board with 1 inch of padding sewn on top or a mat thrown on top of it. Even if the mattress looks like what you would think of a mattress (thicker than a board), when you lay on it, it feels like a board with a mat thrown on top of it. After a few nights sleeping on that, culture shock descends to the depths of despair (much sooner than it does otherwise). Sheets are another problem. In the land of 106° days, as a westerner, I would expect to find flat top sheets, either for nights that are cool enough for no air-conditioning (they do happen), or nights when your husband has the air conditioning too high (more common). However, even after 5 years of understanding (or not understanding) Asian culture, I am still baffled that all they have for beds are fitted sheets and heavy, fluffy, perfect-for-snuggling-under-on-a-cold-day (which isn’t really a thing here) comforters to cover up with, but no flat sheets to be found anywhere. I guess I should be glad they have fitted sheets. Hoping to avoid having to scour the internet (not wanting to chance buying sheets I couldn’t feel), we finally found flat white sheets at one store in their hotel supplies section (see the previous scouring sentence in this paragraph.) Thankfully, they could order the amount and sizes we needed and it only took a month to come in, but since we started all the scouring early, they came in right in time. All that to say, it’s been a pretty exhausting month, I’m super tired of shopping, and I have funny pictures of Lance and I trying to get to the front of the store with shopping carts filled with 18 pillows or piled high with nine different colored towel sets in duplicate.
The boys doing the dishes after one meal so we could continue our meetings without the clean-up delay.
Lance and I were the third-tier of defense if the people coming in needed something. So, if something went wrong or they needed help, they first went to their TEAM coordinator, then O’B as their host at Frontier Ventures, then us if the others weren’t available or needed a break. As such, we spent time getting to know them when they first came in and with a few excursions around the city introducing them to Thai culture. We enjoyed welcoming them in with a homemade traditional Thai meal on their arrival to Chiang Mai at the FV headquarters (after their 2 week quarantine in Bangkok) and seeing a temple downtown with them later during their first week here. As the churches here still fluctuate between being allowed to meet and not or where they’re allowed meet depending on the latest Covid restrictions, we were also able to host them at our church a few Sundays when the other churches were closed.
This is where I do Sunday school class with the kids. Deer on the left, camels on the right. (No kids pictured since some families hope to return to their closed countries.)
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.
Visiting a temple complex with the short-term team.
Inside the main temple. The king, queen and their late king’s queen are pictured on the right and also worshipped alongside Buddha.
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Seeing the sadness of people praying to Buddha.
As I was taking a picture of the various Buddha’s you can pray to outside the temple, this man stepped up to give alms (money) to one of them to receive blessings.
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