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.