I would first like to say ….I AM FULLY FUNDED!! Thank You to everyone who donated or supported me.
Second, I would like to apologize for not keeping you updated back home. Many of you donated and want to see where that money went, and I have not been posting enough to share what is going on. So much stuff is happening here, if I could write a blog everyday I would only be able to catch 50 percent of what happens.
Third, This week I had a teammate go home for surgery on his arm. Hopefully Aaron will be back in a couple months.
Now, Let me tell you what ministry is. I can’t just say one thing about ministry because ministry is so vast. I tried to look up what ministry is online and in the bible and there are so many different categories and types I did not know where to start. So I will just tell what my ministry looks like.
The first month, my team renovated the hostel we stay in. We painted the walls, build pallet couches, rooftop table, cabinets, sanded chairs, stained chairs, and a bunch of other little renovations throughout this big 6 story hostel. Some days we would have ATL (Ask the Lord), most of those days we went to monk chats at the local temple and tried to preach some good news to some monks. On Fridays, we would go to this Orphanage of 150 kids. We would cut the grass with some crazy weird equipment. We helped the girls team who worked there sand some chairs. The last two hours we got to play with the kids. The toddlers always went swimming at that time. I liked just throwing the ball back in forth with a couple of them. Some nights we would go to a huge University in Chiang Mai and play volleyball with college students.
This month we are working at a new orphanage about an hour away. This orphanage also has over a hundred kids. The drive to this orphanage is beautiful, we drive through the mountains and rice fields. Our ministry host who is 78 years old takes us to a different restaurant in the back of his truck everyday for lunch. Thailand is suppose to get rid of all orphanages in a few years, so this one is building homes on their big property and selling them to make a bunch of foster homes. This orphanage has a huge farm with any fruit or vegetable you can imagine. Dragon fruit, Melons, Pineapple, Bananas, etc. This place even has a bunch of little ponds and tanks to raise fish to eat. I went back to one hole and there was like 200 catfish swimming. This place also has a stray dog named Blue who lives there and he works with us everyday. He is our new best friend.
So, at this orphanage we pulled up and chopped out big roots for an incoming road on the property. The second and third day we trimmed palm trees with ladders and big pole saws made of bamboo. The leaves have big thorns and I think we all got cut at least once. One of my teammates had a thorn go all the way through his arm and had to go to the hospital to get it cut out. We are suppose to mulch the leaves and then put that mulch on some crops. This week we laid a concrete sidewalk behind a big house. We had to mix the concrete in an old fashioned way. We have big tubs where we dump buckets of sand and cement and stir it up with a hoe. Then we pour buckets of water and gravel to mix it up and lay it out. It was very tough and tiring to mix the cement in this way. We do it way better back home. Tomorrow we are having a field day and get to play sports with the kids.
Ministry does not stop here, everyday and everywhere you go is ministry. We do ministry by going to street markets and talking with the people whom we have met.
ENJOY these great photos:
