2023 Year in Review
Happy belated New Year, everyone! 2024 is already flying by. We hope each of you are experiencing God's goodness and love as you start out the new year. We are missing you all.
God has been so gracious to us over the past year and we want to share some of that with you in this newsletter. We have prepared a little "2023 Year in Review" with pictures. I hope you enjoy these snapshots from the past year. It is a taste of our life and ministry here: the joys and challenges, a peek into the context that we experience everyday, and a glimpse of the work that lays ahead.
January 2023
Cultural Event
Sauce Village Elementary School, Ditch County
Not a good year for this poor iguana. One of the cooks from the school accidentally hit it with her car. What do you do when you run over an iguana, you might ask? Well naturally she brought it to school and gave it to the most senior teacher as a gift.
"What will you do with it?" I asked the teacher.
“Wrap it in foil and barbecue it," she said.
Isaan people are very resourceful and have a way of turning almost anything into food.
February 2023
Curriculum Development
Our Foundation Office, Bee Creek (our home village)
I expanded the office teaching program to include four additional kids. This office is like my private laboratory for developing curriculum that we use to help Thai students learn English which is the most immediate felt need of the community. When the curricula passes initial testing at the office it gets promoted to being used in one of our programs in the public schools and then, after further refinement, it is used in the village which is the ultimate goal.
Beginning here in our office, I devoted much time to developing our non-profit programs last year. As a result we saw our effectiveness in connecting with new groups of people grow exponentially throughout the year.
March 2023
Partnerships
Prosper Peak Village, Ditch County
Pastor Victor (center) introducing us to Pastor Happy (right). We had heard tales of Pastor Happy for years and the day finally came to meet him. He is one of a very small handful of believers from the Free Mountain Tribe, a sub-group of the Isaan people. He was converted over twenty years ago while working construction in Singapore and since then he and his wife have been quietly following the Lord in their home village.
As for Pastor Victor, he recently retired from his church in another province of Isaan and moved out to the countryside to try jumpstarting some church growth. Over the past year he has been patiently working on gathering scattered believers for regular fellowship at the Ditch County Evangelism Center as well as entering new villages for the purpose of evangelism.
Relationally, things started out a bit rocky between us and them but by God's grace our friendship and partnership with these two men and their families has steadily grown. We look forward to what future work God is preparing for us in the coming years.
Foreign Living
Department of Motor Vehicles, Swamp County
Thailand is very different from America in almost every way but the experience of walking into the DMV is almost exactly the same. I'm not sure how they pulled that off but it's true.
Our licenses had lapsed while we were in America during the Covid season and so upon our return we had to do all the training and testing over again. We insisted on waiting in the same lines as the locals, attending the eight hour training, and finally taking the fifty question test in Thai. The scary lady at the front desk (you know the one) even pointed to us as examples to lecture the rest of the Thais in the class who weren't paying attention, “Look! Even foreigners are doing this.” But praise God we got 'em done. Legal for another five years.
May 2023
Curriculum Development
Mountain Ring Elementary Academy, Mountain Ring County
This is me holding my first seminar for about twenty teachers at a private school to promote my phonics curriculum. The school embraced the idea of using Phonics for Thai students but in the end opted for a different curriculum that required less training for their teachers. It was a helpful experience though, enabling us to further refine the curriculum and gain valuable experience in a different setting than we are used.
Community Programs
Glass Village Elementary School, Bee Creek County
We started teaching at another village school. This one has grades from Kindergarten to ninth grade. It is called an “Expanded Opportunity School” because it includes middle school. Back in the day, schools in the village only went up to sixth grade and if they wanted to continue their education the students would have to travel to the county school. More recently, the government decided to allow some village schools to extend their program up through ninth grade. They receive no additional funding, however, so it is a real commitment from the community.
The presence of Expanded Opportunity Schools is usually a sign that the communities are isolated and remote and the incidence of 7-12 grade youth dropout is high. If they dropout the incidence of teen pregnancy or drug and alcohol use increases. It has become an epidemic in Thailand in recent years.
May 2023
Team Life
At the end of May, Joy Rose was born to our teammates, Josh and Mindy. She has quickly become the joy of our team!
May-June 2023
Church Planting
Ditch County Township, Ditch County
The Ditch County Evangelism Center officially opens. It was founded by Pastor Victor and Pastor Happy and their families and we also joined making it seven adults total. It's basically a church. Not sure why they call it an evangelism center. You can read more about the opening here.
July 2023
Foreign Living
Bee Creek (our home village)
This is our little group of Thai houses. Our landlady cut down all the trees that provided shade for our complex. They used to provide complete cover for our entire courtyard so the day they came down was very sad for us. Our landlady was fearful that the trees would blow over in a storm and crush the houses. Safety first, I guess, but it also destroyed the elegant mature trees which provided year round shade for our little tree house. An additional consequence was a subsequent termite infestation.
Also, earlier in June, we experienced a tick infestation in our home. We discovered thousands of nearly microscopic ticks crawling all over our bathroom. It took months to eradicate them and discover where they were coming from. In the end we pieced it together that a stray cat had managed to sneak into our house and spread pregnant ticks everywhere.
As a result of all this drama we seriously started to consider moving. We stressed over this for about a month, dreading the idea of moving but feeling very unsettled where we were. We started looking for new houses. Eventually though God graciously gave us new peace that we are where he wants us and so the matter was settled. We decided to stay and learn to just deal with the termites and ticks (they are everywhere anyway).
July 2023
Community Programs
Prosper Peak Village, Ditch County
Pastor Victor and Pastor Happy invited our team to start an English program in Prosper Peak Village for the purpose of establishing new relationships with the village and to ultimately share Christ. We taught around sixteen kids for three and a half months. We eventually handed out certificates to four kids who had completed the curriculum in December.
August 2023
Foreign Living
Foundation Office, Bee Creek (our home village)
At the end of August, trouble began with visa extensions. There are many theories on why this happened but our understanding is that some criminals were using foundations for nefarious purposes. Our teammate James (photo left) caught the brunt of it and we spent about two months doing continuous runs to immigration in order to renew his visa. There were a lot of new demands on our documentation and very particular wording was requested in our forms and letters.
October 2023
Community Programs
Glass Village Elementary School, Bee Creek County
In October, our foundation was able to provide glasses for Sky, a girl in ninth grade in Glass Village (pictured). Wes noticed that she was squinting a lot in class and was basically unable to see the white board at all. Fortunately, someone donated money to our foundation which provided an opportunity to take her to an eye doctor to get her eyes checked and some glasses made. It was such a small thing but when she first put them on she lit up and said, “I was blind but now I see!” We continue to pray regularly for her that God would open her spiritual eyes as well. The whole school was touched by this act of kindness toward her.
Foreign Living
In mid October we had to say goodbye to our teammate, James, who tried for months to extend his visa but ultimately with no success. We all just trusted and prayed that it was God’s will that he should be back in Australia with his family during this time and said a hard goodbye.
November 2023
Community Programs
Prosper Peak Village, Ditch County
When we finished our curriculum in the village our whole team had the privilege of visiting all the student's homes and families to collect feedback about their experience participating in our program. We will use the input to further refine the curriculum and learn how to better execute to program in the future. It was also good experience for our team to learn how to better do home visitation in rural villages.
Lisa's Art
A small treat for me was that I discovered that a picture I submitted to the Moody Bible Institute calendar (my alma mater) was selected and published. It was a photo I took while we were on vacation in Utah with my sister and brother-in-law. So fun!
Team Life
Also in November, Joy turned 6 months old.
Lisa sharing her love of reading with Joy.
December 2023
Community Programs
Prosper Peak Village, Ditch County
The year ended with some satisfaction. On December 17th, the church held an evangelistic Christmas event in Prosper Peak Village where we had been teaching. This was when we gave out the certificates to students who completed the English program.
The church had an altar call at this Christmas event but no one came forward or put up their hand. Pastor Victor later expressed privately how disappointed he was that nobody came forward. He was disappointed because he and Pastor Happy spent a lot of time in intercessory prayer over many months praying some would come to Christ. They were hoping that the fruits of that time of prayer would be harvested. It was the first time that we saw how different but complementary our ministry methods are with theirs.
In the end, our team's assessment of this long ministry cycle in Prosper Peak Village was that our combined efforts plus the Christmas event left a positive impression on the community and gave us some new open relationships with non-believers in the community. This may seem like a very small win but remote villages like this are very suspicious of outsiders. No one has come to Christ yet but the door is open and we can build on what we have started.
Church Planting
Ditch County Township, Ditch County
From June to December, our little church gathering has slowly increased from seven to thirteen people (one lady holding the camera). The lady sitting down on the right is a new believer. There has also been a new family starting to come regularly as well. It's been so exciting to see us all grow in fellowship and love for God and one another. It already feels like family.
Thank you!
We just want to close by saying thank you to each of you who had prayed and supported us over the past year. We are so grateful for the privilege to represent our Lord Jesus in this lost place. There is SOOO much still to learn but by God's grace His Gospel will continue bearing fruit in this part of the world.
