Language fun

In looking at culture and language in missions, there have been some fun examples.
In the Doni language of Papua New Guinea, they greet people with scatological phrases.
Here's the literal translations and the meaning translations:

Literal: 'Let me eat your faeces'
Meaning: There is nothing bad about you, I will accept it all (isn't that sweet?)

Literal Male form: 'Let me grab you by the testicles' and Female form: 'Let me touch your vulva'
Meaning: You are safe with me even your most intimate parts.

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