Sorry to those of you who’ve been asking for an update (i.e,. my dear cousin). We had our Thai Language final today, so now that that is over, I can hopefully devote more time to this, although I doubt things will slow down much. For our final, we had to give a five minute oral presentation (in Thai) in front of three Thai teachers, AND perform a 15 minute skit with a group (also all in Thai). Surprisingly, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, but we did spend a lot of time studying and practicing. I’m really surprised at how much Thai I do understand – much more than I thought I would know after only 7 weeks. My conversations, though, are limited when talking outside the realm of the weather, ordering food, fruits, and numbers. After coming home from school, I usually feel pretty good about myself and my ability to communicate, that is, until I sit down to watch the nightly Thai soap opera at 9:00 pm with my Thai mom. For that hour I am completely entranced, trying to catch just one word that will clue me in on what is going on. I laugh or gasp occasionally so that my Thai mom will think I know what’s going on. Sometimes, though, I “strategically” laugh at an actual shocking part, and my cover is blown. Shockingly, my ability to gauge the mood of the Thai soap opera has not improved much over the past 7 weeks, so I’m still pretty sure she knows I’m a fake.
Speaking of my Thai family, I constantly am telling my friends at school funny stories about them, mostly about my younger brothers. My littlest brother’s favorite English word is “super,” and tries to use it in every sentence. This is a typical conversation we have in the car:
Me: “Tung, how was school today?”
Tung: “Super okay.”
Me: (laughing)
Only last night we had another memorable exchange. We have a small electronic keyboard in the house, and it has some demo songs on it that it plays and the keys light up so that you can press them and “learn the song.” Well, last night Tung was trying to learn one of the demo songs, which was Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca. ‘How convenient!’ I thought to myself, since I learned that song years ago. Schemingly, I asked Tung if I could try. I sat down and played perfectly along with the demo, adding in the left hand part, which surprised him even more since those notes didn’t light up on the piano. Unfortunately, I didn’t think out my scheme well enough because he left very confused and thinking I had some magical powers since I couldn’t explain to him in Thai that I already knew the song and was playing a joke on him. I’m just hoping that tonight he doesn’t ask me to do the same thing, except with a different demo song that I don’t know. Then he, along with my Thai mom, will know that I’m a fake.
I think that in each blog entry I’ll start adding in a segment called “Only In Thailand.” It seems like I have numerous small and quotable cultural experiences but can’t find a place for them within the blog. So, I’m just going to start throwing them in. So…today’s “ONLY IN THAILAND” piece:
Last weekend 5 of my American friends and I went to a video rental shop to see if we could rent a movie to watch at someone’s house. Apparently, at Thai video rental shops you can rent not only movies, but also entire living rooms to watch them in. Upon learning this, we, of course, rented “Blood Diamond” along with the living room. It was literally a room upstairs, where I’m pretty sure the family that owns the video store uses. It was actually really nice – a flat screen TV and a nice couch. We basically rented America for two hours. Quite possibly one of the weirdest experiences ever was walking back downstairs after watching the movie. I felt like I was at home, and then walked downstairs only to find myself in a large room with about 10 Thai people staring at the 6 “farang”(foreigners) walking out from a hidden door at the back of the store. Actually…It may have been weirder for the other people in the store: Can you imagine being in Blockbuster’s, walking around trying to pick out a movie, and seeing six non-English speaking Asians emerge from a hidden door behind the “New Releases” section? I imagine I would be rather freaked out, and would probably never return to that Blockbuster’s again for fear that I was supporting some sketchy underground “Anime” film smuggling business. Maybe most video rental stores have already thought this unfortunate chain of events out, and that’s why they don’t rent out living rooms.

So in case you didn’t get the pun, “wat” is the Thai word for temple. Oh, I’m so punny!
This past weekend our group stayed at a Wat near Chiang Rai to learn how to meditate from the monks. Fortunately, we did more than meditate during our time. It felt more like a youth retreat than a meditation weekend – we had group meals, played silly games and pulled pranks on each other. We also went spelunking through a bat cave and collected alms with the monks…that’s the part that was unlike any youth group trip I’ve been on.
We left Chiang Mai on Saturday morning and visited about 28 wats before we arrived at the one we would be staying at for the weekend. Okay, so it wasn’t 28, but it was so many that I really don’t remember how many. Before we arrived at the wat we drove to the opening of a cave, climbed a small mountain to get to the actual opening, and spent an hour or two wandering around. It was rather peculiar, actually. We weren’t given instructions or a time to be back, so it was sort of every man for himself. Within 100 feet of being inside the cave it was pitch black, and the tiny candles we were given didn’t help much. But thanks to my MacGuyver-esque skills, I converted my iPod into a makeshift flashlight. Some of us decided that it would be fun to all climb in a small crevice and find out where it led. Apparently it finally led into a tiny room with limited oxygen, but I never made it there because the line leaders started to not be able to breath, freaked out, and told us to get out as fast as we could. So selfish! But don’t worry: we were all fine. And I’m sure that if I had needed to, I would have been able to craft a rudimentary oxygen tank out of my water bottle and survive. That was also in a MacGuyver episode.
You might gather from the start of a new paragraph that all of the cave adventure stories are over, but you would be wrong. It’s just that this next experience deserves a paragraph all to itself. After we made it out of the oxygen-less part of the cave, we decided to enter into the portion of the cave inhabited by bats and see how far in we could get. Again: not the best idea ever. It was the single most disgusting experience of my life. As soon as we rounded the corner we literally hit a brick wall of humidity caused by the vast amount of bat poop. We progressed for a few more minutes and would stop every so often to listen to the hundreds of bats flying around us. (p.s. that is not an exaggeration). I took a few pictures in which I pointed the camera up and took a picture with the flash so we could see how many bats there were. There was one very mysterious image which I believe was a bat that flew right in front of the camera as I took the pictures. It’s rather frightening. Despite the thrill we got from getting pooped on by hundreds of bats, we turned back when bats started flying in front of our faces.
Well, we finally arrive at the wat portion of the weekend. The festivities of the night included our first meditation session. We all gathered in a large room and sat on the floor on mats in lotus position (well, some of us sat in lotus position. Others of us slightly less flexible deferred to “Indian style.” The monks led us in about an hour of standing, walking, and sitting meditation. You are supposed to wipe your mind of everything and only concentrate on what is going on then: your breathing and your steps if you are doing walking meditation. I have admiration for people who can meditate for hours, because I could only last a few minutes before my mind was fully engrossed in the fact that my foot was asleep and coming up with a way to remedy the situation without anyone noticing how completely “un-enlightened” I was. Fortunately, everyone else in the group was suffering the same plague of ADD. So meditation was a bust, but the next day was full of excitement, from 5 am on.
That’s right – I said 5:00 am. That’s what time we got up in order to go with the monks down to the village to collect alms. Since monks don’t cook in the temples, every morning they go out into the streets with bowls over their shoulders and people are waiting there to give them food. This happens EVERY morning. And people are inclined to get up this early because it is a way to make merit, a very important Buddhist concept related to racking up good karma that will hopefully bring you a better life when you are reborn.
After that we went back up to the temple grounds and the monks invited us into their “dedication ceremony” where they dedicate the food to Buddha and then eat it. I never thought that the verse in 1 Corinthians 10 about eating food sacrificed to idols would ever be literally applicable to my life, but it is. I can eat the food with a clean conscience because I’ve given thanks to God for it, acknowledging Him as the true provider, not a statue. It’s been really hard trying to discern the line between being respectful of the people here and disrespecting my God. Yes I am an observer, a sociologist, and I am grateful for the Thai people inviting me into their culture, but I am first and foremost a Christian, and that dictates things that I will and will not participate in. There are going to be many more instances and situations like this one, so please pray that God would make it clear to me the right thing to do and how to do it with respect.
Well, the rest of the day was much less mentally trying. It involved another short meditation session (equally as entertaining), and a trip to the sauna. Apparently temples in Thailand come fully equip with sauna rooms. It wasn’t exactly what I pictured a sauna being like: it was literally an outhouse with an herbal fire. The group that went in after us was all boys, so we of course took advantage of the situation and stole their clothes after they went in. Ahh, just like the old days of youth group pranks. Apparently it’s outrageously disrespectful to roam Buddhist temple grounds without clothes (who knew!?) so we had to give them back. Nevertheless, it was a great weekend full of excellent learning experiences, some more serious than others. Again, please pray that all of us would be able to discern the right thing to do in situations when our convictions are put to the test. Thanks!

"You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
You're blessed when you care. At the moment of being "care full," you find yourselves cared for." (MSG) Matthew 5: 3,4,7

This has been my first week of interning at Agape, an orphanage for kids with HIV/AIDS. I taught English classes on Thursday, and taught some music classes today. (More about that later.) This orphanage was started not too long ago by an Australian woman who was working in the government orphanages in Thailand. She saw one little girl who wasn't being cared for and when she asked the orphanage workers why, she was told that the little girl had AIDS and was going to die, so there was no point in investing in her and using their resources to help her. After a long process, she adopted the little girl, Nikki, and founded a home for orphans with AIDS in Northern Thailand. The facilites are amazing - trampolines, dormitories, toys, and a staff of nannies (most of whom also have AIDS). It really is a place of hope - it's not a depressing hospital where the kids are just waiting to die. Avis (the founder) has really created a place where kids are shown how to live with the disease, not die from it.

So on Saturdays all of the interns are given the opportunity to teach a "class" for the kids - mostly an opportunity for the kids to have something to do. Today we had some cooking classes, a computer class, an art class, and my music class. I had no idea what to expect and what I would really do. I ended up having about 3 or 4 kids in each class, and they ranged from age 7 to 16. I planned on teaching them Solfeg (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do) but really thought it was going to be a bust. To my surprise, one of the girls in my first group had seen "The Sound of Music" and proceeded to sing me the entire " Do a deer" song. It was great! There was another girl in my first class, a girl about 15 years old, who I was told could play guitar. I tried for the first 15 minutes to speak to her in Thai (very poorly) when one of the workers came up to me and told me that the girl was fluent in English and her name was Nikki (a.k.a. the girl that is the reason why Agape exists today). Wow - I felt like an idiot.
In my second class I decided to teach them some songs full of eternal significance such as "The Hippo Song" and "The Beaver Song." They loved those for sure, but after that we got the guitar out and started playing songs that we knew. One of the girls in my class is a 15 year old and plays the guitar really well! I asked her what her favorite song was, and she opened up her notebook and pointed to a page with the lyrics and chords to "Here I Am To Worship" scribbled down. It was at that moment when I almost cried - that song was written by Tim Hughes, who was the worship leader at my church in London and who I have been keeping updated about my internship. Her face lit up when I told her that I knew the man who wrote it and that I would tell him that it was her favorite song.
That happened today and I haven't been able to think about anything else since then. I think it was such a big deal to me because it gave me hope: Since being at Agape I've realized that I will never be able to fully understand these kids' lives or relate to them. But we worship the same God, and our love and worship of this God supersedes all barriers that we might have between us.
I've found it to be true time and time again that when you go out to help someone, you end up feeling like you've been blessed by the person you were trying to bless. I love the way The Message puts it: "You're blessed when you care. At the moment of being "care full," you find yourselves cared for."

http://www.nikkisplace.org/about.htm