Something I Never Reckoned For...

That about says it.

This whole experience is something I never reckoned for.

I've been here in Thailand for over a week now. School starts in less a week from yesterday morning, for me. We had a teacher's meeting on the front porch this morning. I discovered that I'll be teaching from 9:45 to 11:15 Monday - Friday. As little as that seems, the prospect of standing up in front of a group of children that hardly know English, as their teacher, and know that I'm there to help them understand it better, when they hardly understand me in the first place, is a little daunting to say the least.

Add to that looking at the long months stretching out before me in seemingly endless recession. Thoughts of home, beloved friends and family that I left behind crowd my thoughts for a place and notice. The sleepless nights, intense stress levels, and emotions of being seemingly alone batter on the door of my heart, threatening to take over. It's enough to daunt anyone, really. And, to be the more honest, it's daunted me so badly in the last 48 hours that I nearly lost all courage.

The devil's sick and tired of my advances. He's rolled his sleeves up; it's time for action. What to do?

Roll my sleeves up and fold my hands. Find my battle station on my knees, or among the banana trees amid a surprisingly cool breeze, and pull out the prayer of faith to hack down the enemy. Cut him right in two. The Father hasn't sent me to this foreign land, to these precious children, in the face of these obstacles, because I'm a weak and helpless child.

He's sent me here because He knows I can conquer, through Him. He knows that anything I may meet with here I will be able to handle, through His strength. A few years ago, that wouldn'tve been the case. I haven't been in a real mission filed like this yet because I wasn't ready.

I've been sent because God saw I was ready.

I need to make my Father proud.

So, to war. This may be something I never reckoned for, but by God's grace and through His power, I'm going to become an opponent that the devil never reckoned for.

And I'm going to do it from my knees.

Are you with me?

Flashcards being used to help me learn the Karen alphabet. I strategically arranged them for the picture, but put them all upside down on accident, so I can't exactly tell you which ones are there. But by the time I was done, I knew them!

This is Koo Koo Paw. When we went into Mae Sot the other day, we took Michael and Inge Ross with us, and they've been taking care of Koo Koo Paw, so she came too. Quite the little character!

Now, before you have a heartattack imagining what it would be like to see numbers like that on a gas station sign in America, realize that that's 30 baht. So basically, the Thais are paying a dollar per gallon for gas. Want to move here?

A street in Mae Sot.

This is a better representation of what Mae Sot looks like. People everywhere. In order to get the full effect, I'd have to be out of the car, on the street taking pictures. But when it's normal and every day for everyone else there, I feel a little silly. After all, it's my normal now too.

Lunch in Mae Sot. Believe it or not, I couldn't finish all of that. It's more than what it looks like. On the right, on the white plate, is pineapple fried rice, with raisins and cashews and pineapple pieces in it. On the left, on the fluted-edged dish, is what's called a taro basket. It's a little edible basket woven out of taro, which looks and tastes alot like shredded hashbrowns to me, and inside is this tofu-vegetable-sweet-and-sour-sauce-drenched stuff. It's pretty good. Oh, and can't forget the coconut mango shake sitting on the top left. I guarantee I finished every last drop of that.

More food! This was lunch today. Or part of it, at any rate. That banana on my plate is full grown, and probably was as long as my pointer finger. The other little things on there are called (to spell it phonetically) longens (lawn-jens), and they taste alot like pears. Their texture is something like... I don't even know what. They have a semi-tough shell, which you pop open and then extract the fruit. Then you pull the seed out of the fruit and eat the rest. Those little black things are the seeds. Those are some heavy-duty seeds, let me tell you. Hannah and I could play David and Goliath with those things and probably inflict some mortal wounds.

More of lunch. Stir-fried potatoes. Oh, that's familiar!

Lunch still. This was super good. Over here, everything that goes on rice is called curry, but this was vegetables and TVP (I think) with a sort of brothy sauce over it. It wasn't very spicy, much to my disappointment, but it was super delicious on the rice.

Looks like a pretty bland picture until you realize that those funny shaped things on that hill are huts, and that they're the tiniest fraction of a Burmese refugee camp that houses around 40,000 people. Go ahead, take another look. 

Huts everywhere as far as you can see. We saw this on the way to Mae Sot. Apparently, the camp itself has it's own Adventist church and school, it's so big. It looks like crowded and unsatisfactory conditions, but when you consider what these people came from, it must be like heaven. In a small way, at least.

View from the front porch this afternoon. When the sunshine comes out here, and there's blue sky, there's no power on earth, not even a camera, that can fully express the beauty that wraps you up.

The driveway, lined by banana trees.

I took a lengthy walk in the banana orchard. These aren't ready yet, but will be soon. Bananas here are so common that you can't buy them in Mae Salit, the closest town to Sunshine Orchards. Everyone owns at least one banana tree, so who on Earth would want to buy any? Well, gullawa's, that's who. "Gullawa" is what the Karen people call white people, by the way.

Another thing Sunshine Orchards is known for is limes. There are SO many lime trees around here, and they produce year round! Tasty little things... but what do you do with thousands of them? Sell them in Mae Sot, I guess.

I discovered something amazing by accident while on a walk in the banana orchard. I was looking at these little leaves with all their many fronds, and being reminded of ferns from back home. I reached out to pick on and absently touched it...and it closed up on my finger! Every one I touched would fold in on itself, right in half. It's almost uncanny--they really look alive.

A small, small rainbow. It's on the left hand side of the picture right above the tallest tree poking above the horizon. A promise from the Lord, that no matter what comes, He will be there... and He will never send something my way that is greater than I can bear.