Tawm's visa

Please pray for Tawm's visa to go to Canada. She applied earlier this week and we will find out around the 28th.

English Camp is a success

While the team was here, the first part of the trip we went to a town called Chiang Dao. Previous teams that have come have gone to Chiang Dao and we have been building on the relationship that we have with Tawm's parent's school. Tawm's dad is the principal of the school and every year we try to have an English camp. Each year we get more bold in our evangelism. For 2 days we taught about 250 kids from grade 5 to grade 9 English. We divided the kids up into 7 groups and they would cycle from station to station learning things like directions, fruits and vegetables and other basic things. One of the stations was a Bible class where Beverly told Bible stories and Nicky talked about the Bible. Over the 2 days, each kid heard a clear gospel message and we gave a tract to every student that was there. We gave away about 20 Bibles as well. We were very pleased with the way things went. A couple days later, Tawm and I and some church members were practicing worship at the church when the mail man gave us 6 tracts that we had given out from people requesting more Bible information. We were really excited and please pray for us as we try to figure out how to go about ministering to these people. Chiang Dao is over an hour from where we live.

Can elephants read signs??

One of the funniest things about living in another country is the signs that you see sometimes. This one I had to do a double take. I thought the sign was telling the elephants which way to go for a toilet, then noticed that toilet sign was only for people. The other sign was instructing people which way to go too. Although the elephants can be trained quite well, I don't think they can read signs yet.

Elephant Taxi??

On a rare occassion, usually not in the big city, although I have seen it once, you can see people using an elephant for transportation through town. At night, they tie a little blinking light to its tail so that you don't rear end it with your car or motorbike. Quite an amusing sight.

Elephant show.

One of the popular tourist attractions here in thailand is to watch an elephant show. Asian elephants unlike African elephants, can be trained. In the past, this part of the world used elephants to fight wars, just like we used horses in the west. They have used elephants to plow fields and do manual labour. The elephants have been trained to pick up things, paint pictures, bow and raise a flag on a pole. The show is quite entertaining, and when it is finished you can ride an elephant too.

Coming to America

For those who haven't heard yet, we have received our visas to come and study in the United States. We leave Thailand on August 5th and will not come back here until the end of May 2006. We will be studying at Texas Baptist Institute and Seminary in Henderson Texas. Throughout the year we will be doing suppport raising. If you would like us to come and visit your church please get in contact with us. Please pray for the work here in Thailand. It is hard for us to leave, but we know that we need to study to be more effective here in Thailand.

Tawm and I at Doi Inthanon

Here is a picture of us. We travelled to a hill tribe village that was a 3-4 hour drive from Chiang Mai. We stopped at Doi Inthanon which is the highest mountain in Thailand and the mountain also has a beautiful waterfall. We stopped there to eat and had time to take pictures. It was nice and cool there because as the water fell, there was a nice cool mist.

Church Family

Here is a group of us from our church in Chiang Mai. Included are Nicky and Beverly Barnett, Tim (a girl) who is our church secretary, Samson and Lemuu who are missionaries sent out by our church in Chiang Mai and Muek, our truck driver along with Tom and I. We all went with the STEAM team that was here for the past 2 weeks and really enjoyed our time together. I will update you more on what happened. Please pray for this group as they are the core people at our church.

team comes tomorrow.

We are excited to be having a team from America come with 11 people on it. We will be keeping them busy for the week and a half that they are there. First we will go to Chiang Dao, to the school Tawm's parents work at. Pray that God would open doors for a future ministry there. Then we will go to work at Mae Jo University. This is the first time that we are trying to do anything on campus. Pray for contacts to be made, and that our outreach would be received well by the students and that it would help us understand what a future ministry at the university will entail. Finally we will go to a hilltribe village and teach in a local elementary school and run a vacation bible school for the kids. The work in this village has been going on for about a year. Pray that this village, which is mainly Christian (in name) would come to a deeper commitment, or a first time commitment to Christ. Also pray for Tawm, Nicky, Beverly and I as we lead this team and that everything would go smoothly and according to plan.

Happy Canada Day