After meeting up with Kevin Austin (NFS Faith Communities Director and FM missionary)and Ginger Coakley (NFS representative for Illinois) in San Fransisco on October 24th, we headed off to Thailand. We spent one VERY long flight getting to know each other better and looking forward to all God was going to show us and teach us over the next couple weeks. Here are a few photos of Bangkok the day we arrived, 'resting' for a day before flying to Cambodia, quite jet lagged.
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A common site were spirit houses just like this one in front of every house, business, outhouse, you name it in Thailand and Cambodia. People believe that they need to build a spirit house on the property they have built something on, to appease the spirits they displaced. Every day they make offerings of incense, food, or flowers at these shrines. This was one of the very first things that I noticed upon arriving; I can't think of anywhere or any culture that I had been to where there appeared to be a complete void of things relating to Christianity in symbol or structure or anything..
This was not a common site, thanks to Kevin's knowledge of Thai terrain, and what areas of Thailand to avoid because of flooding, since he had been a missionary there for even years. This was the worst that we saw of the Bangkok flooding that was covering the news around the world. It did change our plans the last 2 days of the trip, and several areas that we traveled to this first day we couldn't come back to on our last day in Thailand. The night before we flew out, the floods had reached the area we visited our first day to Thailand.
....a Tuk-Tuk
This was our first room, first night in Bangkok. The painting on the door was a 'blessing' by a Buddhist monk. These were also often put on the ceiling of the taxis that we rode in. We had many gecko friends that shared the room with us, but in general it was much nicer and inexpensive than we ever expected. We were blessed with a great night's sleep. So I am still wondering if I slept so well because I was jet lagged or because there were no 'little people' waking me up in the middle of the night?! Actually it would be a great time to thank all of you who were praying that I could sleep, He answered so I could function on all cylinders, relatively!