OceanicThai

Here is Ton, a friend of ours, a young Thai Christian, sampling Ken's expresso. Kennedy has been meeting with young Thai men who are really excited about church multiplication and/or house churches. He has the seminar on church-multiplication set up for August and will be distributing brochures & booklets on it next week to key people in this province of Phang Nga and also Krabi. It is exciting to see how our ministry is forming. We are hoping that the family that just arrived 2 months ago will choose to partner with us, they love our ideas of business and would like to go that route. It would be excellent if we could continue to use our religious visas and they could use a business visa.

We went on a visa run to Burma the day before yesterday and ended up on a wild toad ride. We drove around the town of Ranong looking for a boat to take us to Burma and found a small sign advertising boats for visa runs. We drove into the small dock area and found ourselves surrounded by Burmese packing some smelly fish product. There was rank water all over the cement dock and fish products everywhere in all manner of containers. Men, women, children and toddlers were busy going about their daily routine, they lived and worked there in that stinky place. A man bargined with his limited Thai and limited English and we got a boat for 400 Baht, or $10. I thought we were going on the relatively safe looking large boat with life-preservers. We ended up in a small long-tail boat with no roof or lifevests, holding umbrellas to keep the sun off ourselves. Two boys came along to help, one got off on another boat and the other stayed the whole trip, perched on the prow. We sped along a big bay ...

Homeschooling Here is Kennedy teaching Jasper Saxon Math 1.

Things are coming together for us as far as our ministry. These past few months have been survey months, to make a careful evaluation of who is working where and how we can best fit in. It has been hard not being able to pour ourselves into a specific ministry right away, but we were frequently encouraged that doing a survey first was an excellent idea. Now, as the "who, what & where" is coming together, I am so thankful we did the survey first. We will be working with several other churches and organizations in the community to help in the effort to evangelize, disciple, and teach new believers in the tsunami-hit zone. Our ultimate goal is to see reproducing churches planted, not by us, but by the Thais themselves. It has been exciting to see how God has given us the relationships we have needed to network together with other believers in this area that have a similar vision, so we can effectively help each other. Kennedy is organizing a church-multiplication seminar for...

The ants have taken over our shophouse. It started with one thin line of them at the front door, now they are in everything. It is hard to make dinner when I can't set anything down for more than 5 minutes, sometimes less! I put the spoon down from stirring the chili and when I pick it up again, ants. Ants eat our toothpaste, our bar soap, our garbage, our clothes in the laundry basket (especially the kid's clothes, which have bits of food on them.) They are in every room, in every crevice, and throughout the day we will be picking them off ourselves. Ants have ruined our electronic equipment, building nests in our keyboard and getting into our laptop. It is enough to make a person nuts!

We were in Chiang Mai for 3 weeks. We went up across the Burmese border to get visas, the border guards up there always give me the creeps. It was fun in Chiang Mai, as it always is; great to see friends, great restaurants for cheap prices, and great shopping. Chiang Mai is the handicraft center for the whole country, it's the best place to buy the beautiful arts and crafts of Thailand. There is silversmithing, woodcarving, weaving, metal beating, paper-making, laquerware, tribal crafts, it is really amazing.