OceanicThai

Christmas is a time of frantic frenzied activity within the Christian community here in Thailand. It is a time of outreach, giant neighborhood parties and trying to explain to everyone we are not celebrating the birth of Santa Claus, but in fact are celebrating the birth of Christ. A typical party are tents and booths pitched outside on the dirt, sweaty crowds of people showing up for the food, treats & free presents. We play crazy games, kids are screaming, dogs are barking, there is trash everywhere and the sound system is so loud our ears are ringing. Through the years my ideas about what Christmas is supposed to look and feel like have morphed from the American ideal into something much stranger and hardly recognizable for us whities. I usually come home exhausted and half deaf, covered in dust and food. It's a grand and glorious time, always a funny new story, always the great feeling that you made Christmas for so many people. We still try to have a few hours Christmas mo...

I work 3 days a week during the busy hours at WonGen Cafe'. I take orders, bring food and drinks, and work the cash register. I also help clear and clean tables when the customers leave. I wash dishes. It's probably not exactly what our supporters envision their missionary doing. In all relationships, communication is essential, time together is important. Where I am from, getting together once a week to build a discipleship kind of relationship is seen as good enough. I brought that idea here and I don't think it works very well. Relationships here need much more time, trust builds slowly, change comes gradually. Seeing is believing, especially in the areas of love and trust. It is not enough that I am a Bible school graduate. It is not enough that I am fluent in the language and understand the culture. I am still an unknown foreign woman. Working at WonGen Cafe' enables the women who work there to get to know who I am & I get to know who they are. How we work with...

I dreamed about Wendi last night. We were at some kind of fair. We took a picture together and Wendi smiled her beautiful smile. We watched a gorgeous sunset together over an ocean city filled with water. The water was reflected in beautiful colors over everything because it was flooded. I kept crying and wanting to sing you songs, I knew I wouldn't see you again. You seemed distracted and kept walking away, getting further and further away. Oh Wendi. Why did it have to be you? I miss you so much.

It has been difficult to write since the death of my best friend, Wendi L. I miss her so much, and the easier days are the days I forget that she is gone. Sometimes I dream about her. In my last dream she was healthy and whole again, not thin like she was when she was on chemotherapy. She told us all she was ready to die the day before she passed, but we were not ready, those of us who loved her. I don't know if I felt more grief or more anger, even in the year and a half of knowing she had terminal cancer, we all believed, herself included, that she would be the exceptional statistic. Instead, she died earlier than the 2 years the doctors gave her. My world is not as bright and beautiful. Without you, Wendi, life is different and there is this pain that just sits there somewhere deep in me. I love you, I miss you so much, I still don't want to believe you are gone.

Rotting, tattered leaf shreds and brown shrivelled vines looked ugly underneath the vibrantly green growth of new leaves, vines, huge yellow flowers and curling tendrils of my climbing pumpkin plants. I started to chop them off, thinking the trellis would look so much more attractive with just the good looking parts on display. Curiously, as I chopped off the old, mostly dead vines, the new vines started falling off the trellis. What was going on? I looked carefully underneath and realized the new, tender vines and tendrils had piggybacked on the older ones. When I cut the old ones off, the new ones lost their foothold, their support structure on which they had their hold. I left the rest of the old brown, yellowing growth to simply fall off on its own so I wouldn't have all the new plants collapsing off the trellis. It reminded me of people, of course.

Wendi Louise Lehman died April 13th at 11:30 a.m. I will love you forever, Wendi, my beloved friend.

My beloved friend Wendi L. has run out of time. I was planning on flying out to see her in June after the kids finished school, but her condition has deteriorated more quickly than any of us could have anticipated. She is on morphine and oxygen, and she no longer has the energy to talk more than briefly. My best friend for 25 years, I will be content just to hold her hand and be with her, nothing needs to be said, really. I already know she loves me, she already knows I love her. We have had countless hours of conversation through the years. I just want to be with her one more time before she goes into eternity. My passport and visa came just in time before the offices close for several days for national holidays here in Thailand. The seat I reserved was still available even though I went past the reservation day. I am in shock, I am devastated, but I am also so thankful I can make this trip. I will fly out of Thailand tomorrow and be able to see her Friday. Oh God, just help her to ho...

Wendi became my best friend my senior year in high school. She was a radiant new Christian, a peacemaker, someone who laughed at everyone's jokes, no matter how corny. She had a beautiful smile and a tender heart for everyone, no matter where they were on the social ladder. She was on the student leadership council and was the youngest in our class because she had skipped a grade- she was smart, too. In many ways we were opposites. I was more the angry sullen teenager in black, still in shock that I, too, had become a Christian. For reasons I still puzzle over, we hit it off. We hung out together, spent weekends together, went to Senior Prom together, did airband, went to reggae dances. We became best friends that year, 1986. After high school we were roommates in Long Beach for a few months before I went off to the army. We began to write long letters, the kind you write with a pen and send in an envelope with a stamp. The years flew by. Wendi was my maid-of-honor when I married K...

This is a 3 day recipe. You will need a healthy sourdough starter to make this. Temperature and humidty affects times and the dough, I am working in 80-90 degree weather with high humidity. Ingredients: 100 grams sourdough starter at 100% hydration. 100 grams whole wheat flour. 400 grams bread flour. 2 1/2 teaspoons salt 2 tablespoons dill or herb of your choice 4 slices of bacon, chopped up (optional) olive oil Day 1: (evening works best) Mix 100 grams starter with 100 grams bread flour and 100 grams water & add 1/2 teaspoon salt & set aside. This is the levain. Mix 100 grams bread flour and 100 grams wheat flour with 200 grams water & add 1 teaspoon salt. This is the autolyse and will give you better/more complex flavors. Leave both mixtures out at room temperature overnight, no longer than 12 hours. Day 2: (morning) Mix together yesterdays concoctions, add 1 teaspoon salt, dill/herb, bacon & 200 grams bread flour. Knead lightly, put in oiled bowl and cover. After ...

I got obsessed with bread. Not just any kind of bread, but artisan bread. Natural yeast, sourdough, whole wheat 7-grain boules, to be exact. I am a bread lover, to be sure, but somehow my love for bread turned into a quest for a difficult but supremely delicious bread, in short, my bread obsession to make the perfect loaf. So what you see below is the product I finally managed to make after several weeks of trying to get a good fungal/bacterial culture going, I mean, bakers yeast/lactobacillus, also known as sourdough starter. That was a challenge in itself, considering that Thailand is bacterial heaven and the temperatures are not ideal for the growth of yeast cells. I am too ashamed to tell you how many hours I have spent on the superb website "The Fresh Loaf" which you can get to yourself if you click on my title above. I learned from chemists, who also like to make bread, more than I ever imagined I could or wanted to know about growing microbes. Certain special m...

Poppy ended 8 years of homeschooling and entered highschool at Grace International School in Chiang Mai mid-August of 2010. She also went into a dorm so we could continue our ministry in Southern Thailand. In the end, the enormous changes proved to be a little more than she could handle without mom & dad. Kennedy decided there would be no more dorms or living with others, these would be our last few years with our daughter and she needed us to be with her. Within days of his final decision almost all of our furniture sold and everything fell into place to make a very fast move. Personally, this was a difficult move for me and I am still in a bit of shock about the whole thing. I am very glad to be with Poppy again, though, and she is so much happier to be with us. So here we are in Northern Thailand and I am feeling rather dazed and confused. I know that everything will make perfect sense later and right now is a time of transition. Kennedy picked a lovely house for our famil...

The Grand Finale snake story, anyway, since we did have snakes after this one. This was the most dangerous snake of all, a king cobra. I never in my life thought I'd find one, much less next to my kitchen. Earlier that morning I had encountered a huge black snake while gardening that scared me to death but turned out to be just a rat snake. After lunch I heard the dogs bark their "I found a snake" bark, so I went out to investigate. I pulled back a box, heard a hiss, and thought "Oh great, a cobra." I called my Thai friends to come kill it. Then I saw it. It was huge. I thought how strange it was that a python was hissing, didn't think they hissed. So I called another Thai friend, Tanom, who is a hunter and wouldn't be afraid of a big snake. The 2 men killed it and it was a king cobra. I hope I never have to find another one.

No longer in Southern Thailand, now I am in Northern Thailand. A lot has happened, there are still more stories to tell from before and during and then after the move. Life is a journey.