Thailand Adventures

Time is Running Out

Two weeks left eh? That’s what I just realized this past Sunday. It feels like it has been only 2 weeks. God has been so amazing. I came to Thailand, having already accepted that I would probably not see anyone come to faith in Jesus Christ because we can’t speak the language and we were here to plant seeds into people’s hearts. 

God changed that. In the past 8 days or so, I have witnessed 4 people come to faith. Praise the Lord. It’s amazing because we are in a country where you are pretty much born Buddhist and God is changing the hearts of these people. Wit accepted Christ on Sunday night. He goes to a university where some of our team members met him. They handed him a flyer for our American party on Sunday and so he came. Then one way or another, one of the Thai church members started talking to him and I heard that he because Christian. It’s as easy as that I guess, haha.

Last Sunday we went over to Lopburi where we thought we were just going to look at monkeys. Lopburi is a very rural farmland area. P Rung told us that Lopburi is a place that is hard to evangelize to because it is so dark.  We had a prayer meeting that night. I really enjoy it when we pray with the Thai people because even though it’s in a different language and we don’t understand it, God hears our prayers. The next day we went out and passed out tracks and did house visits and prayed for people everywhere we went. At the end of the trip in Lopburi, 3 people accepted Christ, praise the Lord! After all our ministry stuff, we went to go see monkeys at the monkey temple.  These monkeys were scary, I didn’t think that I’d be scared of monkeys. So by the end of the Lopburi trip 3 people had accepted Christ. This trip was a good reminder of why I was here. I was starting to feel comfortable in Bangkok just because it was similar to home; it was a big city and we live in a nice place.

Last Sunday we had an American party. We invited almost everyone that we crossed paths with. The Kunatee school team invited all the students, about 2 showed up but I’m glad they did. They have probably never stepped foot in a church before. Another team invited some students from the university. Again, 2 of them showed up. Within 30 minutes of them showing up, Wit, a 24 year old English major, decided to accept Christ. God is amazing. Overall the party went well.

PRAY for

Bee. She is one of the teachers at school, I got to talk to her a bit about why we are here.

The members at Baan Suan church are accepting of the poor area kids into Sunday school instead of just Saturday school

Me. To stay focused in these last weeks. It’s easy to feel comfortable here in this big city.

Our team. To use the most of our time here doing the work we were sent here to do.

Pra Jou ouy pon khrap

Me touching the elephants buttock

Me and my new hat and a lady wearing the same hat

Picture is self-explanatory

This is the reason the beef in Thailand tastes like khrap

Gettin my new hair do

Finally got to wear my pants. This is in Lopburi

A Day or Two Past Halfway

Where did I leave off last time? Oh yea, teaching at the school. That has been going well. Students know us all and they seem to love us. Maybe it’s because we are farang (foreigner). We teach the kids how to say “Whats up” and “Peace out” and high-fives and stuff and they get all excited. I hope that they are able to see God through us. The relationship with the student teachers is getting better. We talk to them more often, and ask them if they need help more often. I feel that we need to step up our God game at the school with the teachers because they actually understand English. Ajan Rata is bringing us to her hometown this Saturday and I think it’ll be a good opportunity to get to know her better and even share the Gospel with her. She seems open and accepting of Christianity so and pray that God will use us to further water the seed and what not.

Last Monday, our off day, we went to Pattaya then to an island nearby to relax. The beach was pretty nice with warm and clear water. Spent a couple hours in the waters got a bit of sunburn even after the sunblock. After, we decided to rent motorscooters and ride around the island. Some of us crashed but I survived, left the scene uninjured. Came back that night safe and sound even though our van driver was driving at 140km/hr (bout 87mph) when the speed limit was 80km/hr (50mph). Scary ride.

Today at night we went found a basketball court with about  11 dudes. One speaks English pretty well, his name is Ed. Also met a guy named Jun, and a missionary named Seth. We will probably be showing up there almost every night just to hang out with them and share the love of God with them.

This trip has been going pretty well. God has definitely blessed us in everything. Keeping us healthy, keeping us safe, showing us what He wants us to see. I am definitely learning about myself, this trip, than I had thought. I thought I was going to come and learn about the Thai and how I can help them. God has His ways and I fully believe that they are good and also that He is preparing me for something, not sure what yet.

Thanks yalls for praying, I definitely need support by prayer as I’m here in Thailand.

Pray for team chemistry so that we may come together and build each other up while serving God the best way we can.

Pray for the students at the school, for the teachers at the school, and the people that we meet along the way such as the basketball guys.

Pray for me to hear God more and to obey what He is calling me to do, and also that I am reminded to rely on God more than myself.

Self-explanatory Picture

Those are the glasses I bought from earlier

This is P’Mali and I. She is our host missionary.

This is me teaching the kids in my cholo shirt. Teaching about cholos and how to say hey esse. Just kidding. We were playing pictionary.

Me eating my 4 drumsticks of fried chicken right after dinner, about 2 minutes after.

How can I pray for you? choy.kev@gmail.com

Me? Ajan??

Ajan means teacher. Week 3 of our trip. It’s been going by pretty fast. This week was my first week officially teaching students at the government school. I have 2 classes a day per week. Half of my classes are taught with student teachers but the other half are actual teachers that have been teaching there for a while, so they kinda disappear when I start teaching the class. It took me a week to figure out how to teach a class. The first couple days were disastrous, I did not know the level of English the kids had and tried to have them introduce themselves. Did not go well… Anyway, by God’s grace, I was able to get through the class without the students going wild. 

At the Kun-a-tee school, I see that the ministry is not only with the kids but mostly with the student teachers. Brian, Dan, Grace, and I kind of have our own student teachers that we work with and I can see God opening great opportunities to build relationships with them and to share the Gospel with them.

In other news, I am getting over a cold. My stomach doesn’t hurt anymore. The other two sub teams in our team is doing well, so I’ve heard. One team is teaching English to people signed up at the church. They are doing things to let the community know that the church is there. Many of the neighbors, who have lived there for a while, don’t even know that the church existed there. Some of them had never heard about the church until we blew off fireworks and they were asking who we were and where we were from, haha. They are also going to some of the choom chons at night to just conversate through God’s grace because we speak no Thai and they speak no English.

PRAYER

Prayer is important, I cannot emphasize that enough. God is so faithful about answering prayers.

-For the Kun-a-tee teachers that we come into contact with, that God would open up opportunities to share His love.  (When we aren’t teaching, we are in the room with them.)

-For Thailand. Thailand is in a crisis right now, and a lot of people have no where to turn, pray that they turn to God.

-Its been 3 weeks here in Thailand. Pray that I don’t get so used to being here because when that happens, I might start relying on myself and not so much on God. So pray that I always rely on God and always put Him first.

Thanks

Oh and, on the first day we were at the school, these kids probably 16 or so years old comes into the room and says “Teacher, teacher!” and we look up, he then points at his friend and says “He is stupid!”. Then leaves. Pretty funny. As I am at the school more now, I come to see that they are the school trouble makers, pray for them.

Brian and I on our bed on the first day

Getting my daily baseball fix every night ( play by myself in the room)

Best BBQ chips

Students

The First Week in Bangkok

I have been in Thailand for about 2 weeks now, but this week was my first week in Bangkok. The first day, we learned that we will we working with 4 choom chon (nicer way to say slum) areas. That day we walked around those areas with some people from the church. It was good that we had so many teammembers because every place we went we were seen. Hopefully Jesus was seen in us. The last post had 2 pictures of the choom chon area. After that P. Rung and Sai (two people from the church) brought us to a lot of places such as the mall, and the grocery market, like a walmart type of deal, and ate dinner with us. They were showing us around the place. P. Rung cannot speak English that well so it was hard for her to communicate with us but we found out she spoke Cantonese and so I communicated to her through that and translated to the team. Praise God that these things worked out. The next day, we went around different parts of Bangkok with P. Mali and Pastor Vit. Both these days very tiring because we were constantly walking. Pastor Vit brought us to the oldest church in southeast asia. It is a chinese-thai church and has an average attendance of 1000 people every Sunday. It is encouraging to see that there is such a big church in the middle of Bangkok. On 6/30 (the last day of orientation) we went to the seminary in Bangkok. That was also very encouraging to see that there were about 150 people so on fire for God in a land where Buddhism is the norm and Christianity is seen as something very foreign. Here, I learned a bit about the history of Christianity in Thailand. It started with the missionaries who were kicked out of China. These missionaries moved to Thailand where they kind of sat and waited for clearance into China. When they found out they couldn’t go back, they started ministering to the Chinese people in Thailand because these missionaries could speak Chinese to them. Because of this, there are many Chinese churches in Thailand. Anyway, on July 1st, we started our ministries, 4 at the church, 4 at the government school, and 2 at another church. I am involved with the government school, where we will be teaching English. I have the 8th graders and apparently they are the “naughtiest” so we will see how that goes.Today, at the school, we shadowed Ajan (teacher) Rata. We introduced ourselves and taught the class slang like, whats up and peace out. After lunch at the cafeteria (a lot better than school lunches at home), we had to leave to catch a meeting back at our church. Before we left, I played a couple games of basketball with the students that we taught. It was fun but I got soooo sweaty. Hopefully we can build relationships with these kids and lead them to God. A lot of them come from the choom chon areas and have broken families

God is good. Recently we went over the passage 1 Samuel 14 about Jonathan. He went out there to fight the people who were sitting on God’s land. I was reminded that it is not alright for satan to just sit here on God’s land and that we need to fight for God, amen? It really helped me focus on what I am doing here, and that is to kick satan off this place and win hearts for God. Something to think about whether you are on a missions trip or at home.

Some things I need prayer for (now please):

-As a group of 10 people, we are usually the loudest people where ever we go. Pray that we are good ambassadors of Christ and that people could see Jesus through us where ever we go.

-There is a teacher that we are going to be working with. Her name is Rata. I think we will be working pretty closely with her because she is the head of the English department. Because she knows that we are Christian, she told us that her older sister is Christian and that her mom came from a Christian family. I believe God specifically place her in our lives and us in her life for a reason.

-Pray that the Thai people we minister to do not look at Jesus as just a teacher and add his teachings to further their Buddhist beliefs.

-Pray for the teams health. We were told that it is unusual to not get sick from the food. Personally, my stomach hurts, but nothing comes out… And also some of us are starting to catch colds or have colds.

-We are hosting a 4th of July party here, we tried to invite everyone we came in contact with, but pray that that that goes well.

PRAY NOW

Pictures: I don’t have that many pictures as of now, because I don’t always bring my camera around because everyone else has a camera. So I will add more pictures to the posts that are relevant to the pictures. Check back every so often for more pictures. Anyone notice the new picture in the last post?

The oldest chuch in southeast Asia

Sa wa dee khrap (crap)

Instead of using crap, I say khrap.
Anyway, its 9:42pm here in Bangkok. Just got back from a Resort in Thailand where all the OMF Thailand missionaries go for a time of relaxation and renewing, like a retreat. I got the chance to take care of the 3-5 year old preschoolers. Got to talk to the missionaries really encouraging, these are the guys fighting at the front line for God and then we get to take care of the next generation missionaries. Relaxing for us too, kind of, I can definitely cross “pre school teacher” off the list of occupations for me. These kids just don’t stop moving, we had nap time one day that lasted for about 1 minute, literally 1 minute. We did coloring and Bible story and snack and a lot of just playing with toys. Cute kids but by the third day, we were dead tired. One kid, Tobias (pronounced Tobieas) was German and only understood English when he wanted to, which was never. We weren’t sure if he actually spoke English then my teammate Ted brought him to the bathroom to change into swimming and Tobias just starts talking about his red cars at home, IN ENGLISH. That was the resort

fun fact: of the last 6 days I ran 20 minutes in the morning and did sprints another day, both pretty early in the morning.

Before orientation we had the chance to explore Bangkok, pretty fun. After one day of exploring, I came back with the following observations:
Bangkok has a DOUBLE FISH FILLET and DOUBLE BIG MAC. and I thought Americans were fat.
Seems like anyone with a heart beat gets to drive here, the taxis are crazy
Spirit Houses are everywhere
oh and I love that the toilets and the shower are right next to each other with no shower curtain or nothing

My Thai is getting better. Few things I need you to pray for me for:
Team Chemistry
we haven’t worked together with only our team yet, we will starting tomorrow.
Protection from Satan
spirit houses everywhere, less than one percent Christian here in Thailand
Communication with the Thai people
i can kinda speak some thai now, but i still dont know what they are saying to me, ask God to plant seeds into the hearts of people here
Missionaries
the missionaries fighting on the front lines to not be burned out and always be seeking God

but with pictures.

Bangkok Poor Area missions starts tomorrow!

Kids that I took care of at the conference

Peking Duck Wrap from Starbucks

Double Fish Fillet

Double Big Mac