Our Trip to Omkoi

For our last ministry trip we went with the group of students in the picture above to a Karen village about 3 1/2 hours South of Chiang Mai. The Thai man at the top of the picture is Pastor Kiat. He made the contacts for us, and directed the revival meetings in the evenings, as well as teaching at the local Bible School during the days.

This is a Karen boy in a traditional handwoven Karen shirt.

Huh? What? Who? Me?! I'm not doing anything, Daddy, honest and trully!

One of Christy's many "admirers" :) Just playing :)

This is a traditional Karen women and myself after an evening meeting. Many of the local people had responded for salvation that night.

Here is Christy in her Karen dress that was gifted to her. The people loved her! She was sick a lot of our stay with the stomach flu, but overall she has done pretty well.

Here is the group of students that we worked with a lot during the days, teaching English.

This is the student body of the local Bible School where we ate most of our meals. They basically hosted out stay in the village.

Darren and Asher with some of the students in their traditional dress.

 

Several of the girls wanted to pose for pictures with us. 

And lastly just a couple shots of the children, since some of you have been saying you would like to see them on here. 

A cute kissing moment between my two little munchkins! Johnny can be so original at times! This morning he told me "Josiah was so satisfied because he couldn't do along to volleyball!" He meant sad. :)

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An excerpt from the letter we sent to our church folks, for those of you who haven't already read it and wish too. It says some of the same things, but without the added pictures:

    Greetings!  We just returned from our third, and favorite ministry trip! We went to Southern Thailand with Pastor Kiat, and stayed in a Karen village. The people were very friendly and hospitable, but the food was somewhat trying, especially the cucumber stew. The first morning that they served us the cucumber soup/stew, I had stayed home with Christy because she was sick. Darren brought some back to me and it was cold and rather gross. I tasted it, and my stomach did some flip flopping. But I hadn’t commented yet when John tasted it. He took one enthusiastic bite and then turned away with “Put that stuff in the POT, Mom!” I had to mentally agree with his deduction. So if any of you all have extra cucumbers this year, and were just thinking that soup might be a creative way to deal with them.... Do a retake. :) 
    In the evenings we helped with the revival services at the local churches in the village. Quite a number of people responded for salvation. But I had to wonder how deep their understanding of sin and salvation was. Pray that the pastor there would be able to disciple them, and that they would not fall away and become more gospel hardened.
    The history of the Karen tribe here in Thailand is that when the gospel came, they turned to Christ by the hundreds. But now it is several generations ago, and many of people do not really have more than a nominal Christianity. The smell of opium was on the air even at the church service, and one of the talented local men, who could sing and play guitar, and spoke very fluent English, had obviously fried part of his brain doing drugs. There is much need for discipleship among these hill people.