Here’s another picture… I’m getting closer!

Iven was out this evening and I was getting hungry.  I left our little room in search of food, and went back and forth over whether I should walk one block and get some garlic chicken on rice for 30 baht (a dollar) or walk 4 blocks and treat myself to Burger King (4 dollars).  Five minutes later I was sitting on a neon pink plastic stool in front of a nearby street food cart, happily consuming my garlic chicken and rice, decision made.  Being that the baby is now quite big and so my stomach is quite squished, I couldn’t finish my dinner and asked them to put it in a styrofoam box for me to take home and finish later.

After a walk around the block I stopped outside our house and squatted down to chat with an older lady who “works” outside our alley.  She was chattering on to me in Thai about her ailments and her dinner when an older Thai man I didn’t recognize came to peer over her shoulder and investigate our conversation.

“What are you doing talking with this girl?” he asked my friend (in Thai), clearly expressing that he should she must be crazy to think I would understand her words.

She spun around to look at him and pointed to me with my street-food-to-go box, squatting there on the sidewalk, “Eh?  She speaks Thai.  She is one of us.  She lives here in this building and she eats the same food we do. Shes the same as us.”  What a compliment!  I was glad I decided to have rice over Burger King. Ha.

I have mentioned before that there are women working the streets of our neighborhood 24 hours a day, which is true, but sometimes hard to believe, even living here.  Late-stage pregnancy has brought roving insomnia on me, nothing serious but enough to find me laying in bed at 4:30 am this morning, wondering why in the world my body decided to be awake SO MUCH EARLIER than normal. So, a little before 6 I got up, put on clothes and went for a walk.  The sun wasn’t up yet but the urban-dwelling birds were aware that morning was coming, and chirping their little hearts out.  Walking the one block north, past the largest local “short time motel” there were about a half dozen young women sitting out on plastic chairs, ostensibly hoping to pick up a taxi-driver finishing a shift or someone on their way to start their work day.  The pain and hard things of our neighborhood somehow seem so much heavier at six in the morning, when the sun hasn’t even come out yet – it seems like “sex for money” just shouldn’t happen in the stillness of early morning time.  The women look tired and so sad.

A few mornings ago Iven and I were up just after the sun rose, on Sunday morning.  That is the time of day when the saffron-robed Buddhist monks are just leaving the temples to make their rounds giving blessings and receiving donations for the first hour or so of daylight.  A grown woman in a short skirt got off of her plastic chair and kneeled down to pay homage and ask a blessing from a pair of passing monks, who responded to her the same as they would for any other resident or worker in the neighborhood.  It was such a striking image.  Our life is filled with striking images – most of which we don’t feel comfortable trying to capture on film.

One of the adventures of having a child is naming a child. This is an awesome priveledge and gigantic responsibility. We are excited about this very important task, which will soon befall us, but we are also a little stressed about it too.  It really comes down to the fact that we both have pretty unique names and we like them – yes, they were difficult in pre-school and early childhood when no one can pronounce them and yes, Iven gets called “seven” a fair bit here in Thailand but nonetheless we want to give our child a name that is a gift to them, much as we both feel like our names have been a gift to us.

Naming Thai babies is a lot easier, I think, then how we foreigners go about naming our babies.  Most all Thai babies are given both a formal name and a nickname, usually completely unrelated to one another.  The formal name is used for formal occasions and documents but for all practical purposes and everyday life the child (and later, adult) is known and called by their nickname.

Those nicknames are for the most part either a noun or an adjective.  Common girl names are “Gai” (chicken), “Muu (pork, our landlord’s name), “Benz” (as in Mercedes), or “Ying” (literally meaning: girl). Common boy names are “Golf” (yes, as in the sport), “Bond” (made popular after a James Bond movie filmed here in Thailand several decades ago), “Honda” (like the car company, or more notably in this context, the motorcycle) or “Boy” (pretty straightforward).

Either gender can be nicknamed “Uan” (fat), “Noi” (little), “Bia” (beer), or “Dam” (black/dark, as in dark-skinned).  We have one friend whose given nickname is “Bowling” (because dad liked to bowl).  One of the cuter and most disturbing nicknames given to children, at least from an English speaker’s perspective is “Me Pooh”, which is the literal translation of “Pooh Bear” (as in Winnie the Pooh) but is just plain horrible if the poor kid ever makes any foreign friends.

Another funny thing about naming Thai babies is a bit too close to home for us in our current season of life (getting ready to meet our baby and not sure yet what he/she will be called) – we recently heard from a Thai friend that each hospital has a particular “default” name for both boys and girls that they assign to babies whose parent’s can’t decide on a name by the time they leave the hospital.  I expect these can be changed later but the path of least resistance is to keep the assigned name.  For example, Chula Hospital assigns the name “Bua” to any unnamed girl and “Kwan” to any unnamed boy.  What this means in practice is that the nearby and largest slum community, Klong Toey, has a ridiculously higher than average number of children with those two names.    This would never go down in America…  Can you imagine?  ”I’m afraid you have taken too long to settle on your child’s name, so the birth certificate will be filed as ‘John Smith’…thats the fifth John Smith born at this hospital this week!”

Don’t worry, we’ll find a name…

32 weeks pregnant now.  Its crazy how quickly this pregnancy season is passing!  I feel this little baby wiggling and kicking inside of me (In Thai the literal word is “dancing”), and I wonder who this little person will become.

As my belly grows and grows we are getting increasingly more smiles, questions and excitement from the people we see every day in our neighborhood, and especially the guys on outreach.  A funny thing we didn’t predict is that just about every single guy we have seen on outreach declaratively states, “Its a boy.  I’m sure its a boy.”  I finally asked one of the guys, “Well, if the baby turns out to be a girl, would you still be happy for us?”  Without skipping a beat he answered, “Yes, and then I would do her makeup.”  That stage is still quite a while off, for which I think Iven and I are both very grateful.  I’m so glad they come out as babies, rather than teenagers!!!

Hi Friends! Wanna hear about our trip to America, the 2nd annual Christmas Cookie Caroling Extravaganza,  and our first shot at throwing a Christmas party for the guys? Then read our newest official newsletter by clicking here on: Rak Teh #11 or on the link at the right of the page.

Feel free to check out our still very new logo (a big thanks to Adrian Young – communications guru extraordinaire at YWAM Thailand) and some photos that we are using to help share about rak teh by clicking at the top of this post.

And if you want to skip the newsletter and go straight to the pictures of the Christmas Cookie Caroling Extravaganza 2009, well, are you sure you want to do that? Really? If so, then just click on the image below, and it will take you to the album on Picasa, but we really do think it’s worth reading the newsletter… and now you know you’re gonna wonder…

On Saturday we were invited to participate in the monthly outreach to our homeless neighbors, planned by ECB (Evangelical Church of Bangkok). This month over 30 volunteers traveled from all over the city to come and hand out meals, sing Christmas carols give practical little gift bags and make friends with the homeless men and women who live all over our neighborhood.

Being a part of these outreaches has really been a treat for us over these last six months. Some friends from YWAM, who are part of ECB, first put the idea together and it has really gained momentum over this year. We love being involved each month, and we especially love that it is just a 4 minute walk from our home to where we meet the group (both in practice and also in principle).

This Saturday’s outreach held an especially emotional conversation for me (Kashmira). I found myself connecting with a woman whose sad situation both mirrored and was a blaringly stark contrast to my own. The group I was in was talking with a young woman who was clearly very sick and laying on a mat on the sidewalk (there was a doctor in the group who was asking her about her symptoms), while I sat back a few feet on a raised part of the sidewalk. A separate young woman approached me very timidly and asked in Thai what we were doing. I explained that we are a Christian group who have come down this month to give gifts and food to people who have hard lives in this neighborhood, to help celebrate Christmas and share God’s love in this season. She told me that she was interested in learning more about God but didn’t know where to go to learn or where there is a church nearby (the reality is that there isn’t any churches nearby). As we chatted more she explained that she is 28 years old, pretty much homeless herself, and sells her body in the neighborhood to get money.

The rest of my group finished talking with the sick woman and was ready to move on, so I asked them for a Christmas gift bag to give her, and someone handed me a children’s gift bag to see if she could give it to a child that she knows. I asked her, “Do you know any kids who might want this little candy and toy bag?” She looked down for a minute and then said, “Well, I have a baby inside. I’m three months pregnant, but my boyfriend threw me out so its just me and my baby. Is it all right if I just take the kid’s gift for myself?”

That insight into her life opened up a whole new wave of compassion and emotion for me – here is a woman who is my age, just a few months less pregnant than myself, who is homeless, dumped by her boyfriend and selling her body to get by. We talked some more and patted each other’s bellies, and expressed a desire to meet again and share a meal sometime.

The nature of the homeless and “working” people in our neighborhood is that we may see each other again tomorrow or not again for a year or even ever. I hope I see her again. I hope I can bring some encouragement and peace to her heart in the midst of her hard situation. Our neighborhood has so many needs and hurting people.

As I write this blog post, Iven and I are listening to an elbum by “ELI”, a musician we love, who has a knack of really capturing God’s compassionate heart in his lyrics. The song that is playing right now is called “God Weeps Too”. It is such a comfort to know that even in the midst of Iven and my often feeling so overwhelmed by the stories and lives of our neighbors and the men we work with, we know that God is present and active in the midst of both pain and triumphs, and His heart is with these individual people so much more than ours ever could be.

The two and 3/4 of us decided to celebrate Christmas morning with a Western-style brunch at a nice restaurant about a 20 minute walk from our house.  As we approached the restaurant we were surprised and delighted to see Wa, the homeless friend whom we know best here in our neighborhood. We haven’t seen him in several months, and there he was “spanging” (asking for spare change) on Christmas morning, right outside the door of our destination.

We sat down and caught up with him before heading in to have a meal (he had already eaten) and then visited with him for a good while and a walk afterwards.  We had a box of cookies with a ribbon on it that we had with us “just because”, which was a treat to be able to give him as a Christmas present.

When he told us that he planned to go to a temple the next day to make an annual homage of remembrance and offering, Iven quickly offered to join him so that he wouldn’t have to go by himself.  You see, Wa literally lost everything in the tsunami – (which struck SE Asia 5 years ago, December 26)  - his wife, 2 year old daughter, business, home and even the fingers on his right hand (they were cut badly while he was digging through the debris, and the ensuing infection was bad enough to require amputation).  Christmas for him is nothing more than the day before the anniversary of his life falling apart.

They met early the next morning and Iven sought to bring him some comfort and support, not through intentional conversation, but simply by being some company. Wa was understandably not interested in talking about the deep things of his heart on that most painful of anniversaries.  This is just one day in his journey of recovery from loss and pain, and he has such a long road to travel in order to be free from the trap of homelessness and alcoholism that now have him so ensnared, and though he is trapped by his grief and the trauma which no one should have to endure, we remain amazed at how he has chosen the path of softness and grief, over bitterness and anger – tears come easily to Wa, most any day, not just this week.  Please be praying for Wa. And also for Iven to know how to love him in the ways that are supportive and encouraging, rather then enabling and patronizing.

During our recent two month trip to America we were able to spend some good visit time with all of our family, which was really a gift.  A few days after Thanksgiving, we were driving around Iven’s small hometown looking for something fun to do, to make a memory with Iven’s 17 year old sister Ally.

In the parking lot of the local drug store an idea hit us, and we ran in to buy a Christmas tree – which would soon become known as our “hostage”.  Tightly bound and stuffed in a seldom used bathtub, hidden behind the shower curtain, the poor little creature waited almost a whole week before we got around to decorating it, all behind the parents’ backs.

The night we finally rescued our “Christmas hostage” from the bathtub was just 5 hours before we had to get up and leave for the airport.  It was a fun, slightly mischeivious little home-based adventure with Ally and a total surprise to Iven’s parents, who awoke the next morning and found that although we were already on our way back to Thailand, we left behind some memorable Christmas cheer.

Right now I am sitting on a train rumbling through beautiful hilly green Thailand, preparing to spend a week of intensive study on the book of acts. It is about 7:30 in the morning and it is gorgeous. So peaceful, not a sound to be heard save the clickity-clack clickity-clack clickity-clack-clack of the wheels and the rail tracks. I never really remember how much energy it takes to simply be in the city, living in our neighborhood until after I’ve gotten a good many miles away.

I tend to forget that I can actually go to beautiful open green spaces. Places where there is room to breath, and fresh air too! And yet I thank God for my forgetfulness, because I think it helps me to understand the experience of our guys a little bit more intuitively.

You see when we are surrounded by a particular environment for a long time, we might remember what other places are like, but we forget that we can actually go there. Instead we just keep plodding along, talking about the outside, but never really doing anything to change our situation.

I’d like to introduce you to “B”. He comes from somewhere not too far from this gorgeous green countryside I’m travelling through right now, but he’s been living in Bangkok with his mom, dad, and twin sisters for a long time. In the months that we’ve known B he has worked at 2 different male massage parlors and presently an A-Go-Go bar. B is my age, “rung-diawgan”. He is bright, generous, easy to hang-out with, and he has been doing this sort of work for a long time now. So have his twin sisters.

One day we were walking in a market on his day off and I asked B, “So what do you normally like to do for fun when you aren’t working?” He replied, “Oh, I like to walk around.” “Where do you go?” “This Market.” “Why” “Because I used  to be a masseuse here too.” “Who do you normally hang out with, who are your friends?” “Friends? I don’t have any friends…. The only people I ever see are my co-workers and my customers.”

“The only people I ever see are my co-workers and my customers.” You see, B works nights, at least 6 days a week, unless a customer has decided to take him away as a private boyfriend for the week. He goes into work in the afternoon, works till early in the morning, and then goes home to sleep for a few hours before waking up late and going back to work.

Even if he wanted to, B doesn’t really have the opportunity to get to know anyone outside of the scene. And so he doesn’t really remember that there is a world outside of the guys streets.

One of the lies that B believes is that he can make more money doing this type of work. There is some truth to that – you certainly make more money in one hour of male sex work than in one hour of just about any normal job. But there is no consistency, sometimes you can wait for a few days in between customers, and then your average income is lower than if you were working at 7-11.

Poverty works in lots of different ways. It is connected to our income to be certain. It is connected to our education. And in significant ways it is related to our network of relationships. If we only know other poor people we assume that life has to keep working the same way for us as it does for each of them, that it will never get any better. We rarely tend to think that we have options outside of the options that our friends are pursuing.

And if, like B, we never have the chance to get to know anyone outside of the industry, then we assume that all we will ever be able to do is the industry!

I am grateful for the chance I have to ride a train this morning, to remember that there are beautiful places outside of Bangkok that really aren’t very difficult to get to. And to remember that sometimes all it takes is our remembering that we can leave, and that things can be different.