Pattani Central Mosque

Quite crazily, we co-incidentally arrived in Pattani on the day that the whole province gathered to pray for the flooding in Thailand, totally ignorant of this fact. As busloads of Muslim children began to unload, we started wondering 'What in the world is going on?'
Al Jazeera and Reuters reporters also put in an appearance, sharing some tips with us and showing of their gigantic camera. Thanks to their presence, we were allowed in to video wherever we wanted.

There is such a thing as a free lunch!

Today, 7:15am we started rolling down the road to the deep south of Thailand. Along the way there were many military checkpoints but I was too sleepy to care as the soldiers peered into the car. Anyway, they always waved us through. When we arrived we met our contact, a Thai Christian. They were very nice, but obviously scared. Our discussion about places that we would like to film went like this:

Me: Main mosque?
Contact: Oh no, they don't allow it. Too dangerous. They don't like foreigners. Not even non-muslim locals are allowed in.
Me: How about just from the street outside?
Contact: Oh they will come out and ask you what you are doing, and catch you.
Me: How about a Muslim village?
Contact: That's the most dangerous area around here.

Then he told us the news was warning about a likely car-bombing this week. Around this time I realized that unless we found another guide, we were going to be very short on footage. So we contacted someone else and they graciously canceled their work for the day to take us around. First stop, the fearsome main mosque.  As for being covert, my student W stood on the barrier in the middle of the busy road in front of it, taking video (which turned out to be mainly a view of the powerlines anyway). Then we went inside and the Imam introduced himself to us and took a photo with W. My other student T walked around to the women's side and terrorized the poor ladies in hijab with her camera, making a couple of them even pose on the stairs for her. Two college girls shared their snacks with us. One asked me if I was a Muslim. I replied that I am interested (in their culture) which seemed to be alright. One of them invited us to go to see their university. She was actually studying to be a teacher in Islamic studies so we interviewed her.
The Imam also wanted to be interviewed but he had to go to a wedding first so we didn't have time.  After prayers, another man just leaving the mosque invited us to lunch, saying 'I will take care of you.' I thought it would be nice to have lunch with him, but actually it turned out that his wife already had lunch for him at home and so he just paid for us all and left! So hospitable!
Next stop, we followed the student to visit her Islamic university, where T's exclamations over the location of the toilet echoed throughout the university mosque. In the library, the librarians showed us around, including posing with books of the local Jawi script. T was surprised to find that she could understand it being read out loud, but not in written form (it's a form of Malay but using Arabic script, whereas the other Malay languages have used Latin alphabets). I had to repeatedly rescue W from walking into gender inappropriate areas while filming. Finally we wrapped up, said good-bye to our new friends and shed our head coverings. I sent W off to practice video at a local market while T took a nap in the car. The Muslim presence is definitely stronger here, it's almost like a different Thailand. The military presence is also quite heavy, with soldiers on quite a few corners and barricades made of barbed wire, sharpened stakes and tyres on the road.
At dinner I made a mistake reading the Thai on the menu and accidentally ordered roast pork. Luckily the waiter just looked weirded out rather than offended and I quickly switched to roast beef. Reflecting on this rather surprising twist of events during the day, I can see that if most Thai believers share the same fear of Muslims as our first contact, then they will never reach out to them or have friendly experiences. No doubt, there has been violence and terrorism in this area, but it seems to be a case of the 10% of fanatics ruining life and relationships for the other 90%.

Chiangmai is flooding

It has been a very extended rainy season and it seems that the dams and river ways have had enough after this last two days of nearly non-stop rain. At 3:30pm, this was clear. I drove through here at 5pm and this is what we saw.

Along the river banks people had crowded to take photos and marvel.

And of course, what is a good natural disaster without a snack of dried squid on the side?

Teaching Scriptwriting.

So I step into a new part time role, teaching with Wycliffe's Project Video. My first assignment: Teach scriptwriting to the Karen at Chrestos Mission in Mae Sariang.
I had no idea what their previous ability or experience was, though I knew they had written a script already. When I arrived there, after a leisurely beautiful drive through the countryside for several hours, I was impressed with the quality of their set up. Secretly, I was also thankful that I did not have to sleep on  a camp bed under a mosquito net as well.
I had been nervously about trying to fit what was usually a week's worth of teaching into a couple of days, especially since I would be teaching cross-culturally (some spoke English, some spoke Thai, all seven spoke Karen). I had pared everything down to the bare bones meaning, and what was necessary to communiate. Words like 'protagonist', 'catalyst' and 'normality' all needed to be translated. I began teaching in Thai and had to end up reverting to English simply because the specialised words used in media are beyond my current Thai lexicon.
Then amazingly, somehow we finished the teaching in one day.
The next day I sat and we went through the script that they had already written. It was an amazingly powerful redemption story - a poor mother has to give up her girl child to a richer friend to raise, then the child scorns her when she gets older. The rich mother then casts out the child, saying 'If you do this to your own mother, what will you do to me!'
However, they had spent about 25 scenes setting up the child's back story, and the first confrontation only happened in scene 26, then the movie was over by about scene 30.
Now, we had a dilemma. Was this just the Karen way of story-telling, to spend endless time on details and introducing characters? I had already heard from someone familiar with the Karen that they did like to show everything. Or was this just novice scriptwriting?
At this time, I was really wishing that I had more of a background in Ethnoarts and cultural research. We did ask people who were Karen or had spent a long time working with them. One of the funniest answers I heard was from Win, another Karen guy who does already do media. He said in Thai,"This long script has nothing to do with the Karen culture. It's because they're just used to making Karaoke music videos."
So we did adjust the script, to make it, in their words, "More power."
I want to go back just before they begin filming in November. We still haven't really taught them about reverse angles, crossing the line and telling a visual story!

If the World Were a Village of 100 People

If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:

The village would have 61 Asians, 13 Africans, 13 people from the Western Hemisphere (North & South America), 12 Europeans, and 1 from the South Pacific
51 would be male, 49 would be female
70 would be non-white; 30 white
67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian

As to their ages:
30 would be 0-14 years old
63 would be 15-64 years old
7 would be 65 years old and older

20 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
18 would be without access to a safe water supply
39 would lack access to improved sanitation
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
7 people would have access to the Internet
1 would have a college education
1 would have HIV
2 would be near birth; 1 near death
6 would control 59% of the entire world’s wealth; all 6 would be US citizens

Sources: The Global Citizen, May 31, 1990, Donella H. Meadows (unless otherwise noted below), The CIA World Factbook
2001 (age, birth, death, internet), 2001 World Development Indicators, World Bank (HIV), Adherents 2001 (religion) Bread for the World (malnourishment), United Nations Population Fund (food security) The Global Supply and Sanitation
Assessment 2000 Report (improved water, improved sanitation)


I reposted this from the Family Care Foundation. It's a sadly accurate view of our world and the continued need all around it.

Praying over Thai Missionaries

Quite hilariously, I went up to pray for one girl during a time of blessing the ethnically Thai Ywam staff, and before I knew what was happening, someone began praying over me!

Location:Soi Suk Samer,Cha-am,Thailand

Inheritance- Ywam conference

Ywam Thailand is increasing by 40% every 2 years. To deal with these Phil Porter has proposed 4 directions based on the style the Israelites took the promised land.
1. Develop many leaders, especially Thai leaders.
2. Release the new generation
3. Increase the sense of family
4. Remain connected and fight for each other.






I'm proud that Ywam Thailand staff is at least 50% Indigenous staff.

Location:Soi Suk Samer,Cha-am,Thailand

Anti-trafficking Concert

A while ago I went to my first Thai concert in the 700 stadium in Chiangmai. It was a last minute free ticket, thanks to my house-mate Heather, in return for driving her and the kids from her ministry, Taw Saeng, to the concert. The concert was co-sponsored by the Australian Government to increase aware of human trafficking and there were some pretty disconcerting videos interspersed throughout.

The line up included pretty big names from Thailand and Korea, and was very random in musical genre. They had even imported Katie Miller-Heide and we rocked out to her singing John Farnham's song 'You're the voice.' Here's some samples of the other bands.

Lounge/Jazzy ETC

Hip Hop band Thaitanium, which I've decided I like.

And of course, Superstar Korean band 'SuperJunior'

It was quite surreal to be at an anti-trafficking concert with kids who were at high risk of being traffiked. The concert was similar to any that I may have gone to in Australia to raise awareness about this issue, but as we stood there in the rain together, I realised that it was now so much more than just an abstract cause.

Good Friday

Today I began work slightly bitter that our office didn't close when all my friends in Australia are face-booking about their 5 day weekends. The we watched this animated video. And all I could think about throughout was 'that is my Lord and Saviour'. It's just a cartoon, but knowing that Jesus had to go through it in real life had tears pouring down my cheeks ( a little embarassing in an office situation, but luckily we have men who cry in this office so I don't feel too awkward).

Along with meditating on the substitution this was for me - the face I should have been the one there suffering, my thoughts eventually turned to the repercussions of this single act on the world. Phillip Yancey in his book 'What Good is God?' has an article in which he says (loosely paraphrased from my memory) that until Jesus the record of human history and narratives only celebrated victors. But with the sacrifice of Jesus a new narrative entered the thread of human history - that of the victim being the true victor, of the moral and transformational power of sacrifice and that the downtrodden individual has value and a voice. And it's this new narrative that birthed movements like the end of apartheid & segregation, the end of slavery and is still fuelling movements like the end of child traffiking. The value of any individual goes up immeasurably when someone else has sacrificed their life for them.

We do see in cultures over the world stories of great personal sacrifice for the greater good, and the power and value of that sacrifice is recognised in ways like the Mooncake Festival in China (my mother told me the mooncakes were thrown into the river to prevent the fishes from eating the body of a noble General who was unjustly killed) and even here in Chiangmai there is a Chedi that commemorates a soldier who saved the Lanna Kingdom by tying himself to a stone in the river and drowning, thereby winning the competition against an invading kingdom. These stories are of people dying for their communities, ideology and allegiances, but only in Jesus did someone sacrifice their life for everyone regardless of whether they regarded it as a benefit or not.

This was like a huge rent in the fabric human history, and when I am constantly brushing with issues like poverty, prostitution, child labour and human traffiking here, then this is a paradigm shift I must believe is still changing the world now.

Songkran 2554

No, I do not have the date wrong, that is the year according to the Buddhist calendar used in Thailand. And to celebrate the turning of the year, a national water fight! Why don't we do this in Australia?!
Chiangmai is the acknowledged centre for water play and it is the hottest month of the year. The inner city shuts down, the moat roads are crowded with pick-up trucks full of delighted children (and adults) throwing icy water on passersby, even a group of monks squirted me! So armed with a super soaker I waded into the fray of celebrations, crossing from one side of the city to the other, re-filling my gun from the dirty moat water and hoping I didn't end up with any infections afterwards.
It's just an amazing time where everything pauses and returns to childhood. And the best thing is that Thai people smile at you AFTER you soak them.

Thapae Gate

Somtum (papaya salad) in the making

Video footage of Earthquake Aftermath

Sound has been removed to protect the video cameraman.

Burma Earthquake Relief

On the 24th March an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale hit Burma. The epicenter was 200 km away from Chiangmai. At that time I as sitting in a restaurant next to a Californian girl who had just flown in. Being experienced in earthquakes, she pointed out that the lights were swinging and suggested we might be having one. Seeing as I am completely unexperienced in earthquake, I just assumed the sense of the earth shifting was due to the dizziness I had been feeling all week due to my fever and strong medication so I told her, "Nah, it's just windy."
Then when all at the table realised that we really were having an earthquake (i.e the floorboards were shifting) we debated whether to run out or not. Kath, an Aussie girl, in classic style waved us all back to our seats saying, "It's just a small one."
At first the news only reported one death. Then a score more. Then personal eye-witness accounts started to trickle through suggesting that the real death toll was much higher than the Burmese government was acknowledging. This isn't a surprise since a couple of years ago there were over 130,000 deaths due to Cyclone Nargis and the government claimed there were only 79.
The government tried to prevent images being taken, but some people still managed to get some out and some of the photos and footage ended up in my hands. With this news the disaster relief group in my church started to take action, although no foreigners are allowed into the affected areas. In my role as media and communications I began to collect accounts of the damage and try to collate a truer picture of what was really going on and keep the different relief groups informed so we can co-ordinate better.
It's complicated and exhausting to try to keep up with the reports coming in, work out what is the best course of action with limited resources and and even finding a map to locate the villages was tricky. On the side, I have been trying to use the media to inform the Western world which seems to have mainly overlooked it. The Burmese government and world news reported only 75 dead but one girl said that in Tarley town alone there were 137 known dead two days after the earthquake. Out of Kya Ku Ni came one of the sadder stories- the church fell on the the youth group bible study and 30 died.

Images of the church.


The unofficial reports lead to an overall picture emerging showing 300 known dead at the moment, neglected mountain communities not receiving help, tainted water causing diarrhea, collapsed homes leaving survivors trying to shelter under tarpaulins in the rain and the Burmese army confiscating relief supplies.
This earthquake was of a greater magnitude than the one that hit Christchurch, New Zealand and it has killed more people and left more devastation in an area with far less resources to recover. As we see the major relief groups ham-strung by international diplomacy, it seems that it will be the local ministries and indigenous church networks that can make a difference on the grass roots level to these affected communities.



To read more about what happened, I have been writing damage reports at:
http://thehavenproject.net/24-march-2011-earthquake/ and
http://thehavenproject.net/burma-earthquake-update/
You can donate at these links.

A google map tracking damage reports

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=214528781436986238938.00049f7c7f0997fd6a8a6&ll=20.705301,100.080729&spn=0.064872,0.115614&t=h&z=14

A link to one eye-witness account

http://blog.partnersworld.org/?p=1457

7-11 adaptation

7-11, considering that it's just a chain of convenience corner stores, has such an amazing impact on quality of life in Thailand. Having a 7-11 in your muu baan (village) immediately ups it's status I feel. Not only can you buy junkfood, alcohol and ice at 3am, you can also pay all your utility bills there, recharge your phone and even pay for a plane ticket. Think of how much these last services mean for the remaining large numbers of people in Thailand who have never owned a bank account or credit card. It's impressive how much 7-11has adapted.
And on top of all this, in this country that doesn't really believe in providing public trash bins, you can always reliably find a bin outside 7-11.

Pic of the week

A prayer walk around Wat Ched Yod- place of 16th C Buddhist convetion.

Location:Chang Khian Yu Yen,Chang Phuak,Thailand

Who is my neighbour?

Today I went to visit my other neighbours. About 500m down the road from my house is a Shan slum. It had a rickety wooden fence around it and the houses are made out of corrugated iron. The children are riding their bikes and playing on the dusty earth. I've assumed it's Shan before even though I've never been into it, because most of these kind of slums are filled with Shan people who have escaped from the oppressive military regime in Burma and work for around $3-$6 a day as construction workers in Thailand. As a result of their work, they often move around from construction site to site, and so they just bring their families and build these slums near their work. However, this one has been there for at least two years now and one guy we spoke to today said that they would stay there. So it's become a way of life.
I see the workers out every morning waiting in blue trousers and shirts by the side of the road. They are waiting to be collected for their jobs, and it's common here to see twelve or more crammed into the back of a ute on the road. I have never actually spoken to them in the one and a half years that I've lived here, perhaps because it's easier to ignore the poverty when you don't have an answer for it. I saw this very clearly a few years ago in Jakarta, Indonesia when I went to document evangelism in desperate slums that were right next to luxury malls. I heard Indonesian Christians who had lived and gone to church right beside these slums for all their lives say, 'We never knew this poverty existed' after they had prayer walked with us through the slum. After that experience, I still occasionally wonder, 'Where are the poor around me? Is there a blind spot in my 'garden'? (The garden is my euphemism for the area that God has assigned for me to take care of - I can't save the whole world, but I can tend my own backyard). Essentially, I'm the guy in Luke 10 asking 'Who is my neighbour?' and I never want to hear back from God 'It's the one you left by the wayside.'
So I spoke with Lydia about it a couple of weeks ago. Lyds is working with the 'Meeting Point' which is a YWAM ministry for Shan people in Chiangmai. Her assignment with them was to go and survey the different Shan slums around Chiangmai so that the ministry could plan their work. So she offered to come with me to visit the slum down the road from me. Also, the main actor from our Shan film, Sai Sai, moved to Chiangmai a week ago and we asked him to come along too. That was a very good move as Sai Sai is so affable that he opens doors everywhere.
Today the three of us walked down from my house carrying plastic bags filled with women's clothing to give away. My plastic bag was filled with clothes left behind from friends who had moved away and couldn't fit everything into their luggage limit. I wasn't really sure what they would make of the farang styles. We walked in through the opening in the wooden fence and saw a few children, but only one guy around. We said 'My song kha' which is hello in Shan and then that pretty much exhausted all the Shan language I know so Sai Sai went on to ask the survey questions. The guy told us that the head guy was not at home but pointed us to other people that lived one row further into the slum. We passed a woman bathing her baby in a plastic bucket and stepped into a skinny alley between the shacks.

Sai Sai stood in an open doorway and chatted away merrily explaining what we were doing. Lyds practiced her Shan that she's been learning with a young guy in the alley. I hid behind them both after answering the usual question about exactly what was I racially (they always guess Korean), and peeped into the one room houses. Cardboard was piled in the gaps between the roof and wall, probably to block the wind. I'm sure everyone could hear everything though. They slept on the floor, but did have electricity. It would be cold at nights, since they only had one layer of iron around them, and I know that I've been chilled sleeping within my cement walls.
I think that's why the lady who took our bag of clothes asked immediately if they were winter jackets. Unfortunately I know that it was mainly light summer clothing in my bag. I don't even have a winter jacket for myself here (my mother made me give my warmest jacket to her at Christmas as she's going to Antartica). I may try to get some jackets though and go back with them.
Sai Sai felt like it would be good for us to build trust and recognition by wandering around the slum for a bit so we walked around and kept talking to people. One middle-aged man was in his blue overalls speckled with paint, obviously his profession. Lydia asked Sai Sai to ask him if he was married. Sai Sai seemed a little bit reluctant, but in the end he did ask it. There was this awkward moment and then he sort of giggled nervously and shook his hands. Sai Sai had to quickly explain that Lydia was only asking because of her work with children, but the man still scurried quickly back into his room. Perhaps he thought he had better escape before the farang proposed to him.
There were over twenty families in that slum. When we reached the end of it there was an open space of dirt between piles of scrap material where kids were playing. One lady had told us that the kids didn't really go anywhere in their free time because it would cost money to take them out on excursions so they just played there in the slum. She suggested that if we were to start a children's program the weekend might be a good time as the kids had nothing else to do. I was surprised to see the towering over the kids' playlot the back of buildings (like the pink one) that I recognised on my street and realised that the slum extended much closer to my house that I had originally thought. We really were neighbours.
Today, the phrase 'Good Samaritan' is in common use and is a positive expression, but I think back in the day in which the parable was told, it would have sounded like an oxymoron to Jesus' listeners. But Jesus used that most ordinary of people, a Samaritan, to express the concept of being a true neighbour - the one who has mercy on them.

The Shan Outreach Centre has a website at http://www.shanoc.com/en/home.html

The Cue Meet

Usually I write this blog simply to vent or process for myself, but tonight I met Ericka who linked to it from Mark, who linked to it from who knows where, so it's encouraged me to write more knowing that people actually read it and in hopes of giving the larger world a honest insight into what missions is like.
One of the perks of missionary life is meeting great people and having deep friendships that spring out of like-mindedness and struggling together.
I was reminded tonight of one the more memorable first conversations I ever had with a friend and thought I would just share it.
I had been dragged to an annual ladies conference here in town. Usually I avoid them because I feel like ladies conferences always have themes like 'how to raise Godly children' which is not applicable to my foreseeable future, or 'modern knitting patterns' (also not in future). On top of that, every time I get encouraged as a 'nurturer' I just feel like growing plants in a hot-house. But my flatmate Bethany lured me into this conference with promises of 'quality time' and probably also something about her birthday.
In a tea break amongst all the Christian matrons and maids, I sat down with a cuppa next to a girl called Candace. I'm sure we probably swapped names, and then for some reason I can not remember, I began to tell her about this dream I had recently. So this is probably how it sounded:
"I was down at the beach with my sister when all of a sudden, planes began flying low overhead and we all looked up. Then with a shock I realised that the planes were actually aliens disguised as machinery so that they could come close enough to take over our world. One landed nearby and began to swallow me, but I realised that if I was digested they would eat my sister next so I fought back and ended up tearing my way out. I was then able to fight and protect my little sister because the alien bite had turned me into a super strong zombie with no feelings so my sister was saved. Then we travelled to one of the last hide-outs of mankind. It was like a football stadium. The humans embraced my sister but then sent me down to the cellar under the bleachers because I was a zombie and that's where the other zombies were. The cellar smelt because the other zombies were in a further stage of decomposition. I came back up to the light to tell them that I didn't feel like a zombie because I was still a pretty fresh one and I was scared of the other zombies. The humans didn't care and send me back under the bleachers. The other zombies shuffled out of the darkness with only one arm or half a face and surrounded me. I was completely disgusted but began a rousing speech about how we were the last hope of mankind because we were the only ones strong enough to defeat the aliens. The zombies were in a state of self-indulgent apathy, but finally I convinced them to get out and fight.
So all of us went to a mega-church in the area. The aliens had been waiting until church was finished and then eating people as they came out of church. And they ate everybody, whole services so other people never knew and new people kept turning up Sunday after sunday and being eaten. We attended a full service and then immediately after the benediction I grabbed the microphone before people could be dismissed. I said, 'There's aliens coming soon, so who here has a gun on them?' and several people put up their hands (this is how I know the dream was set in America). I ordered them to shut and man the doors. Then I arranged for all the women and children to come down to the front stage, the most protected area. Finally, I placed the zombies in front of the left door and said, 'Everyone get ready because I guarantee you, the next person through that door will be an alien.' We all tensed, set to blast them away. But the next people to come through looked like a young family, mother pushing a pram with a little girl alongside, and the dad behind. People in the congregation began whispering and doubting me. I hesitated in giving the order to fire. But then I looked into the little girls eyes and realised that they were glowing an unnatural shade of green. The aliens had learnt how to disguise themselves as people. I also realised that I had let them get too close and had to decide between giving the order to fire on them and have people accuse me of manslaughter later, or provoke the little girl into attacking me, which wouldn't hurt since I was a zombie, but I didn't want to get mangled any further since I didn't heal. While trying to decide, I woke up."
Candace looked at me for a second and then said, "So what you're basically saying, is that you were an alien turd then?"
I thought about it and said, "Well, yes I guess I was." Then we both burst out laughing so hard it took minutes to calm down. Bethany came over to try work out what we were laughing about but in between the ramblings about being alien turds and zombies while still laughing, I don't think she fully understood us.
And out of that a great friendship was born.

Chiangrai Motorbiking visit

Fending off a slight cold, I got on my motorcycle pretty soon after returning to Thailand because I received a text message at 3am saying "COME the baby is here." It was sent by Jeow, my Thai - Karen friend who had basically been camping on my couch in March last year. Then I had gone to India for a month and when I came back, I found that she was married and in the countryside of Chiangrai. Surprise! So now the baby had also been born prematurely by a month, another surprise!

Tara is pretty healthy, fat and sleeps a lot as you can see. Jeow tells me her name means river and she didn't know it sounded like an English name too. Two birds with one stone I reckon.

On the way back I stopped at the Charin Resort, a mecca for pies which I've been trying to find for a while now, but kept missing it before. Thanks to the careful instructions of Lydia, I found it, ate a banana cream pie and bought two more to bring back for others. Then I had to figure out how to strap them to my bike without squashing them. I also was parked next to a beautiful custom built chopper hybrid and felt pretty dodgy on my obviously unwashed motorcycle with the handgrip being held on by tissue paper because it kept sliding off.

I did get caught riding in the mountains at night because it took me so long to strap those pies down, but the sunset was worth it on the way.

Re-entry thoughts

Just a few things that jolted me when I returned to Sydney, Australia for a month after over two years in Thailand.

• Traffic laws are so strictly enforced! Big brother is everywhere on the roads.
• Everyone has an iphone.
• All the motorbikes are so big.
• There's so many cultures mixing it up.
• People look kind of depressed on the trains (they're probably going to work) and no one is eating.