What a day it has been. Or trip inside a trip rather, as Chiang Mai has been full of fun, fear, sadness, lust, love, danger, excitement, adventure, debauchery, enlightenment… Ok maybe not all of those things, but it has been a very fulfilling week nonetheless.
The church that we have been staying at is a very comfortable place to return every night. The four of us sleep in the same room because it is the one with air con (as they call it here) as it is an invaluable commodity in this land. But they heat here is not as bad as back in Bangkok, Chiang Mai is located at the base of beautiful mountains and is at a much higher elevation, but still it is enough to make your shirt wet with your slightest movement. We woke up Tuesday with a breakfast in a parking lot under the church with Kempet’s wife, she had gone to the market and bought us a plentiful feast. Our new favorite food to eat is Kaao Niaao, sticky rice. It is absolutely great, you pull off little clumps of it as you please, similar to eating cotton candy, and it goes great with any meat or sauce or spice that you dip it in/form around it. After breakfast, we had a little meeting with a woman that works at this church and puts together activities for poor kids around Chiang Mai to come, have fun, and hear the gospel. Brandon and I learned a lot about how to partner well with someone and to be a helping hand and how not to be. Kempet and his wife then had to go take care of some churchy opportunities, so Sunny, Panya, Brandon and I decided to go up the mountain a little way and visit The Elephant Camp! It is not as exciting as I make it sound, but it was cool. If you are the tree hugging/animal loving/”don’t step on that ant it has rights” kind of person then you would not have enjoyed this camp, as elephants were kept on 3 feet chain leashes around one ankle and force to do cheap tricks all day long. The ones that got ridden have it worse though, as they are directed around with something to the effect of a fire-poker to the back of the neck, ouch. But on the bright side, the keepers do allow the elephants to express themselves through art. The paintings are actually quite impressive, they have a big sign in front of a mural that reads “MOST EXPENSIVE PAINTING CREATED BY GROUP OF ELEPHANTS: WORLD RECORD.” I hear it actually quite a coveted and competitive award. During the, we came to find that the white people next to us were from San Jose and that one of the girls had gone to Cuesta for a year, it really is a small world. After the show, we headed back down the mountain to kill some time until the Baan Nok Kamin children were out of school. Little did we know, the best lunch that we have had yet awaited us….
We pulled up to this little building on the side of the road that looks moderately nice, and Panya ordered us some traditional Thai food. While waiting, we met a lady from Colorado who had visited Paso to try the wine, small world. In Thailand, you never quite know what to expect with anything, ever (the X factor), but with food you’re okay about 80% of the time. The lady brought out these fat bowls of soup for each of us that were yellowish orange looking and had crunchy noodles, soft noodles, and a big chicken leg. It was sooo good. I don’t know what they put in it or how they do it, but it was definitely the best food we have had so far. Afterwards, we loaded up in the car and headed to Baan Nok Kamin location uno. In Chiang Mai, there are two different places with families, both with only girls. The main one is a piece of land just outside of the city and has two house of 11 and 12 girls. But because there are only two houses, the third family of 10 girls leaves in a house in the city that BNK rents every month. When we got there, the children had still not yet arrived. There were two kids there though, the biological kids of one of the house parents. A little boy of 5, whose name we could not understand so we called him Ting Tong (crazy), and a little girl of 3 named straight up Donut: awesome. Name and personality, she is just the most precious thing. The rest of the girls showed up not too much later, and we hung out and played for a couple hours with all of them. They were all very happy to see us again. They forced us a second lunch, not surprisingly. We’re sick of eating so much, but its all just so good that we have to. One of our favorite people that we met at the camp is named Noot. She is 21 and still lives as a BNK child because she is still in secondary school due to having no opportunity for school as a younger kid. She speaks very little English, but that is better than most, and we were very excited to see her. One of our favorite things to do is to make the girls look into the camera and say, “I so Asian.” They never understand what it means at first, but the get it after a while; its just so darn cute. As the sun went down, we said out goodbyes for the night and headed back to the church. Once we were there, we found that we had a huge craving for ice cream, so Brandon and I headed out for a little while. We walked around the town, went to a fruit festival, watched a weird Thai toddler traditional talent contest, err something, ended up in the red light district, made it out safely, and returned to the church ice cream in hand and a good day under our belt.
Wednesday was the day of relaxation. The plan was to go fishing with Kempet and one of his friends, and we loaded up the van and headed out pretty early. An hour drive through rice patties and farm land put us at the shore of an absolutely stunning lake in the jungle. We were anxious to start when we arrived, and we kept that same feeling all day long. We did not catch a single fish. We were out there for at least a good five hours, with numerous types of bait and lures, but to no avail. Im not really that big of a fisherman anyway, so I wasn’t too bummed. But the excitement of our excursion came with a little poop incident that I had. Lets just say that one week of not pooping and a squatty-potty in a shack in the middle of the freaking nowhere is NOT a good combination. After that struggle of mine, the heavens opened and out poured the essence of life on earth for a little while. We were all done with the effort of catching anything at this point, but our driver had disappeared since the beginning of the day to try to go shoot some fish with his twenty-two, oh and he took the care. But not to worry, we had a little 3x6 tarp held up with bamboo in the ground to keep us dry. About a half hour later he showed up and we headed back to civilization. On the way back, we almost hit cows in the road on two separate occasions, once in the jungle and once in the city. Why is there a cow running on the streets in the city? I don’t know, go ask your mother. Oh I almost forgot, on the way home we stopped at a hot springs resort to soak our eggs. We bought some eggs to put in the hot springs for a quick snack. The resort was actually quite nice, there were many little channels of hot water to soak your feet in, but Brandon and I got bored so we stripped down to our skivvies and swam around in the 2 foot deep canals. We met a very nice Jewish man who shared some of his eggs with us, they were actually really good, but it is still weird to me that the main attraction of this place was to hard boil eggs. That had rigged the spring to become a geyser, and when the water reached the point where the slope of the tangent line is zero on the x axis of the coordinate plane and returned to the earth it was cold and felt very, very good. The time came to leave, and we returned to Kempet’s house for a first dinner. We then went to BNK location dos to see the rest of the girls. They too were happy to see us and we hung out for a couple hours. Hanging out with people but not speaking the same language is definitely a skill that we have learned and have been improving, but it can still be difficult, but we all enjoyed our time together. The girls here are all so very adorable. Afterwards, we headed out on the town with Kempet and Nok for dinner number 2 and we got to hear Kempet’s testimony. It was a very cool story, he was heading up to Chiang Rai to kill himself because of his addiction to drugs and alcohol, but he stopped in a church during one of his would be last nights alive. He made friends with the people, and even though he was not a believer he was asked to be in the Christmas play. He was given the role of a Roman soldier during the crucifixion (I guess the mix Christmas and Easter here, X Factor!) and during practice the man playing Jesus began to cry. Kempet asked if he had hit him too hard during the scene, but the man replied, “No, I cry because my Jesus did this for real, for me.” Then the reality of the story of Christ, redemption, forgiveness set upon Kempet heavily and he gave his life to Christ. The freedom Christ gives unchained him from his drug and alcohol use and he has been serving the Lord ever since. Kempet is a no nonsense guy, he is go go go for Jesus everyday. He is always coming or going to our from somewhere for prayer or meeting or something, and he prays at the church for 2 hours almost everyday. Once again, another good day.
Thursday really got our blood pumpin’. Not that we haven’t really, really enjoyed the past two days, but this day was definitely the most exhilarating. We woke up late, but we headed out by foot to find the cheapest deal on renting motorbikes Chiang Mai had to offer. Riding scooters in Thailand is ridiculously fun. It tops it all. We got 4 pretty new scooters that kicked butt and we were flying all around Chiang Mai as the locals do, all for the low low price of 15 bucks a person. Both of my parents would be freak if they were with us today, seeing us weaving through traffic in the city, passing in the oncoming traffic lane, flying around corners, cheating death at every minute. The only reason I can write this is because scolding and punishment are not very effective when trying to use half way around the world. We gassed up and took off on the road climbing the nearby mountain. S turn after S turn, up and up we went through the gorgeous jungle. It took about 1 and a half hours to get up, we were cruisin’, stopping at different places to check out the view. We ate lunch in a little Hmong village, the tribal people of the mountains. On the way down, we stopped at a temple. The entrance was pretty high on the mountain, but 319 steps later we stood higher than everything in sight. This temple was one of the gnarliest ones that I have seen, meaning the amount of wealth and time invested in it. Buddhist people are so very lost, and looking out over the entire city, realizing that nearly all of the people living there do not know Jesus Christ and are so entangled in Buddhism, was not a happy thought. It is people like Kempet that we need to love and support to reach these people for their salvation. We walked down, mounted our motorbikes once again, and started down. We were haulin’, I mean, haulin’. I dare not scribe exactly how fast we were going. It took no time at all to get down. There were a couple close calls, but we made it with no scratches; glory to God. We then headed back to BNK uno to see the girls one more time before we left. We ended up going to a soccer practice with a few of them, and Brandon and I both scored! This is huge, because Thai kids are really good and well Brandon and I are really not. Afterwards, we said our goodbyes and headed over to the other house for dinner. Our first goodbyes of the trip weren’t fun. The ride between the houses was a good 30 minutes, and on the way a policeman was checkin’ out Brandon and I for a while. He followed us, scoping us up and down and debating whether or not to pull us over, but we veered off onto a side road and he decided against it. Over at the other house, we ordered some food and ate it with the kids. There are three white volunteers that are living just around the corner of this house through Friends of Asia. Two of them are from Boston and one from Switzerland. One of the girls is really really smart. They have only been there 5 days and are already in love with the kids. This group of girls become particularly attached to both Sarah Murphy and Sarah Fulbright during the camp, so we set up a skype date with Murphy and the girls were all very excited to see her (Fulbright is at Hume, so we couldn’t get a hold of her). When it was time to go, we learned that this house was traveling to Sukhothai on Friday to go to the conference, so we didn’t have to say our goodbyes just yet. I’m not exactly sure what this conference exactly is, I think that all of the house parents and staff of BNK are invited, but I really haven’t a clue (once again, X). Some kids are going, some, but we will find out soon enough!
Friday was to be our last day in Chiang Mai. The first thing we had to do in the morning was turn in our motorbikes, a very sad event. We got to the rental store in the minute they were due, because we had to suck out all of the gas that we didn’t use. We walked back to the church, then hopped in the car with Nok and headed to Mae Jo University (their mascot is the American Cowboy btw) to see Kempet’s other daughter Kaao (which is an awful name for a girl in English, but in Thai it means “Rice,” which is the essence of life here). She is a first year student living in the dorms, and had been unable to hang out with us yet, so we were excited to see her. We picked her up and went to lunch. The six of us ate for just under ten bucks. Nok had wanted to take us to this pseudo-amusement park that had gardens of every different nation. It was a long and uncomfortable ride, as Sunny and I were crammed in the trunk of the car because we had too many people, bit we had the air con so it was allllll good. We got there, rented bikes for 60 cents each and started riding around. I had a slight tire issue when brapping a curb super tough, but we got a new bike and it was all good. It was pretty cool, there was the main path that you followed, but then you could veer off anytime you wanted to see a specific style of garden setting that you wanted to with different plants and little buildings. It was very serene, and a beautiful day, until we heard the thunder from behind a mountain. Then seemingly out of nowhere huge dark grey clouds rolled over us and began to dump more water than Atascadero had seen all winter. We quickly rode to the nearest shack and dove in for a few minutes. We thought it would subside as quickly as it came, but that was not the case. We started messing around inside with one of the workers, but quickly became bored so decided to ride in the pouring rain. The cold water felt so good that it didn’t even matter that we were completely soaked. We were sliding all over the place and finally reached the end of the park. Brandon, Kaao and I beat everyone else that wanted to stay dry so we had to wait for a little while at the exit. Brandon went planking with a random Thai man, which was pretty cool. We rendezvoused and headed back to town. Once freshened up and changed our clothes, we went out to this super nice Japanese buffet. Sushi fer dayz. Lets just say that it was a very stinky room later that night. It was an awesome last meal with our friends Kempet, Nok, Kaao, and Nam in a city that we had come to love. We will miss our friends here and are eager to be able to visit them again, I think that a trip to Thailand must now entail a trip to Chiang Mai. We all prayed together at once, as is customary for Christians, which makes sense, because who else really needs to hear your conversation with God? It was a very nice end to a great week.
Now it is Saturday (Wan-Saao) and we are on our way to Sukhothai, 4 short hours to the southeast. Brandon is now driving the car, and we haven’t had any problems yet. He says shifting is weird with the left hand, oh and he says hi The Baan Nok Kamin house is located just outside of the city on a mango plantation. It houses 40 or so boys. The oldest and most troublesome boys stay here, so it should be a fun trip. We only have two days planned here, but there is a good chance that that may change (X). We look forward to what the Lord has here for us and hope to get much more good footage for our video. Please be praying that we continue to see what God is doing, that we can be a blessing top everyone we come in contact with, and that we will do a good job on the video. We have been talking to Sunny and Panya about funding, and they really need help. Pray that God is preparing hearts back home to hear the message about the hurting kids that BNK is saving and that they are generous to give.
