Leaving for HuayPha Village

      We wanted to update you all before we head back to HuayPha village. During the last two days, 65 Musikee Center graduates, who now attend University,  have been here for a 2 day youth conference. A Chinese/Thai pastor from Bangkok has been the main speaker. He's able to translate some of it but we still have fun listening & learning the Thai. We (just Karis and Johanna) will be sent  with some of the college students to help with a kids youth camp in HuayPha. This is the first time that Musikee volunteers have gone to help with something like this, and stayed as long as we will.  We'll be living at different houses throughout the duration of our stay. Their staple meal is rice, so Don advised us to pack some extra protein like peanut butter :)  Because it is so rural, we won't have electricty, refridgeration, showers, and  we'll be  sleeping in mosquito nets. Don packed us up with as many water bottles as we can carry and if we run out, we will be boiling the water for drinking. We are very excited for this opportunity and can't wait to experience their day to day life!!

      We would love lots of prayer: 1. To be conscientious of their culture but be able to help in as many ways as possible. Karen (one of the tribes from Burma) people are very humble and hospitable, but we want to learn how to bless them and help with their needs without imposing. 2. This camp will touch the kids' hearts who are coming. Many of them are Christians, but some do not feel free when they go back home because some of their families are Buddhist and do not accept them. 3. God's protection over us.

      A few fun facts: We showered for the first time in 5 days. Good thing we brought a lot of baby wipes! Our obsession with mangoes--so cheap and EVERYWHERE! We eat them with most meals, snacks and dessert. We stick out like a sore thumb--yesterday someone fell off their chair, AND not because it was broken ;) Today for lunch we ate tadpoles (which they said to us "baby frogs!"), leaves from a tree in the yard, rice and potatoes. We are trying new things!

We don't know how long it will be until we'll have internet access, so until then, DUBLU!

Up in the mountains

    On April 12th, the Songkran festival (Thai New Year from April 12th-15th) started throughout Thailand but especially in Chiang Mai province. Celebration solely consists of throwing as much water as possible on any passerbys. It started as a Buddhist tradition for the kids to flick water on the elderly because it's the start of the hot season. It has now turned into a huge free-for-all, where all the citizens and tourists are in the streets with super-soakers, hoses, and water buckets (usually from the really dirty moat water). We participated all day on the 13th, and as hard as we tried to avoid water in our mouths, we both ended up stomach sick, just getting over it yesterday. We stayed in the city center at a guesthouse (hostel), and our street was intersecting one of the common prostituted streets. Eating out for dinner, we often saw transvestites, beautiful Thai women with older western tourists/expats, and many bars with scantily dressed women inviting men in.

    There are three main types of sexual exploitation for Thai women. Many women are bar girls, where they are in charge of getting men to buy them drinks all night. This helps the bar owners' business, while also feeding the bar girls' addiction to alcohol. Men can buy the girls a 'break' from the bar and during the break the girls can make their own money by selling themselves to the customer. Another option are brothels, night shows, and 'happy-ending' massages. Single mothers can fall into this line of work, especially when they have debt or unexpected expenses. Lastly, westerners can hire 'girlfriends' to live with them full time. She gets paid a monthly wage, and he gets his needs met.

    We left the city on the 14th, meeting up with Don Fox (head of Handclasp Ministries at Musikee center) having just arrived from California. The village we are now based in is located 4,500 feet up in the mountains, North of Chiang Mai city, a four hour drive up switchback roads. The Musikee center, sponsored by Handclasp and HRDC (Hill-tribes Resources & Development Center), we are at has 60 kids living here throughout the school year, but there are 400 kids in different centers throughout the Karen hill-tribe villages. Right now, the children are on school break because of the New Year. Some have families to go home to, so we made a trip to a drop them off at their village yesterday.

    We drove only 24 km to Huay Pha village, but it took us over two hours to get there due to the lack of paved roads. If you think you've experienced back road driving, you haven't seen anything yet. We had a full car and 10 kids in the bed of the truck, driving through the jungle on rough terrain, that as Americans, we wouldn't even call this a dirt bike path. Props to Don's maneuvering around ditches and staying on the road with drops of sometimes 400 ft below.

    Karis' camera has attracted not only children, but all the Huay Pha village people who want to get their portrait taken. The two of us walked around the village accompanied by an elderly Karen man (who spoke no English) but through motions we ended up entering many homes taking photos of Karen villagers. Karis showed them the picture after taking it and their reaction was either embarassment or excitement on seeing their photo perhaps for the first time. We stayed the night at a very hospitable family's home, who just had a baby. We have so many great photos that we have been trying hard to upload, but the internet connection is too slow for it to work. We will put some up as soon as we get a better connection.

We have internet at Musikee and our address is:
HANDCLASP PO BOX 381
CHIANGMAI, THAILAND 50000

Love J & K

Beginning of our journey

Karis and Andrew arrived in Crete via spending a day in London the week before our trip. They had a lot of fun hiking, beaching, watching tennis, and eating lots of gyros :).   Johanna made it to Crete the day before the Andersons arrived, flying from Thessaloniki finishing up her six month internship with the anti trafficking organization-A21 campaign. Instead of spending time with everyone,  she spent the week home getting strep throat and the stomach flu. One day on the beach, we met a Burmese/Thai  guy who is stationed on the Navy base. Very excited to hear that we were travelling to Thailand to work with Burmese refugees, specifically the Karen people, he taught us Thai words and told us about his life. The crazy thing is that he is from St. Paul-what a small world!

On April 9th, we took the ferry from Crete to Athens in very stormy weather. We slept terrible between the intense rocking of the boat and the cabin roommate's snoring all night. The next day was spent in Athens and then we flew out in the evening, not before meeting up with our friends Cameron and Shelby Clark who live on Crete. On the plane from Athens to Cairo we sat next to an American woman who grew up in Saudi Arabia  and lived 30 years in San luis Obispo, California. We're making connections everywhere! She is currently a teacher in Saudi Arabia and told us all about what life is like there, and gave us her card if we were ever interested in Saudi Arabia. By the time we got to Cairo, Karis had gotten the stomach flu and spent the majority of the five hour layover in the bathroom. (Good thing Karis packed half her bag full of nuts in case we would be hungry on the flight. Now we have American nuts for everyone we see since the thought of them makes us sick). Luckily from Cairo to Bangkok she had an empty seat next to her and slept the whole time.

First impression of Thailand was from the airport where there  were specific toilet stalls for 'elders', monk waiting rooms, muslim prayer rooms, and not understanding anyone's heavily-accented English. Currently in Chiang Mai, we are staying with a missionary family (Karis' aunt Kaaren's dear friends), Bill and LeeAnne Hoppe. They run a counseling clinic for missionaries all over Asia. They also team up with an organization FreeBurmaRangers. Started by a retired military beret, he works with the Wa people group of Burma, equipping them to defend themselves against the ethnic cleansing militant government. A lot of action is happening in Chiang Mai with missions organizations, as it is a religiously free country  compared to surrounding Asian countries.

Today we awoke to sounds like a rainforest, with birds chirping and fresh papaya, mangoes and pineapple for breakfast. They have been so hospitable to us, letting us stay with them, showing us their ministry and giving us a tour of the city. There is also a missionary family visiting the Hoppes, the husband is Pakistani and the wife from Australia, with 2 adorable kids. Very fun getting to meet new people on this trip!

 

Fresh pineapple at the day market! Less than a dollar to chop up a pineapple and eat it right there!

The huge centipede found in the Hoppe's yard.

Alex boys and hiking in Crete.

We watched an assembly line of 'Grandmas' making the umbrella's starting with the mulberry tree. This is one of the stations to see the painted umbrellas.

Johanna, Bill and Stephen (Hoppe) inspecting the giant centipede.

We'll update more in a few days!