Evil Packaging

I had thought that Thailand was a safe haven from this sort of impossible-to-open packaging that has become so common in the US. I was very dismayed to find that it has infiltrated Thailand.

Lahu New Year

This was the second time I have gone to the Lahu village for New Year. So far, it was one of my more enjoyable trips to the village. I took a friend for her first village trip in Thailand and Eric & Gabe stayed at home. We (and everyone else in Gabe's class) were invited by Joshua and Somallay as their son, David, is in Gabe's class. Our home base was the house of Joshua's sister (standing next to Joshua in the picture). Half the village were related to Joshua. Joshua is the youngest of 12 or 13 children and it is only recently that a family of that size is no longer the norm in Lahu culture. That means that in every Lahu village we have visited everyone we talk to seems to be somehow related to Joshua. We had a really great time with Joshua's family and our other friends. Joshua spent time telling us his life story. It was amazing to me that 25 years ago, Joshua and Eric couldn't have been living more different lives. Joshua was a young jungle man without any sort of education and living at subsistence. Eric was a boy growing up in university town on the other side of the world. Yet 25 years later our sons are together in the same kindergarten. Amazingly, Joshua began attending school at 20, learned Thai well enough to graduate from Thai high school and then went on to learn English well enough to study at seminary in Singapore.

Anyway, one interesting aspect of this village visit was that while we were there, a short-term team from Australia came to set up a clinic. The whole town was dressed in their traditional holiday outfits (as you can see from the photo). These costumes seemed to make the team assume that they were talking to uneducated yokels. I was sitting by Somollay and a woman came up and started talking to her saying "I don't speak Lahu, but I have this book about the four spiritual laws and I'll speak very slowly." Wow, I was really annoyed. Somollay is studying for her master's degree in linguistics and speaks quite a few languages, including English, very well. She is far more intelligent than I could ever hope to be. I don't know how Somollay was feeling, but I eventually managed to tell this woman about Somollay's education and she was amazed and much more respectful after that. I have to be careful about my attitude toward short-termers.

Just one thing to point out in the photo: The woman second from right is wearing Somollay's wedding dress. It's hard to see from the picture, but it was a beautiful dress made all by hand. Somollay, who is pregnant (on the far left) was quite annoyed at have to wear an "old woman's dress" instead this year.

The Inventor

Christmas

I'm really behind in my blogging, but I here's a beginning of catch-up. This was Christmas number 6 in Thailand and the 4th in a row. Our first Christmas in Thailand we were just excited to be in Thailand and to be so warm on Christmas day. Our second Christmas in Thailand we were preoccupied with being new parents. Our third Christmas nice because my cousin was here, but these last three I have missed home in spite of having very nice times with our friends. This year, in spite of the effort I knew it would cost, I really wanted to have Christmas at home with all the Christmas food and typical Christmas day activities. We started out with monkey bread in the Wolthuis tradition. I made the dough myself and though the dough was very nice to work with it did rise a LOT and the individual bits that were stuck together were more like whole pieces of monkey bread. I'm sure next time I can fix that problem. For Christmas lunch we invited two families. One family is American with four boys. The other family was David's family(David lived with us earlier in the year). We and the other Americans made traditional American Christmas dishes. Our Kiwi friends made Christmas salads. Since Christmas is at the height of summer in New Zealand salads are much more the norm for them than all of the heavy food we Americans eat. None of us being confident to make a turkey we ordered one from a restaurant that caters turkeys at the holidays. It didn't really cost much more and we thought we'd have the confidence of knowing it was done right. When we cut into the turkey the meat was pink and we weren't quite sure what to do. We went and asked a neighbor to come and check it out for us. Julie came over and pronounced our turkey perfectly done but we still weren't confident. We ended up microwaving some of the turkey. We did a survey among our friends later and found out it was fine to have pinkish meat on turkey and none of us got sick. Oh well. Our second problem was that we didn't know how to cut the turkey. I wish I had a better pic of this, but you can see me holding up a piece I had cut. Larin (who was my turkey cutting assistant) is in the background with an expression of total bafflement. We ended up picking the meat off with our hands. It didn't look very nice but no one cared. We had a lovely dinner and the kids all enjoyed playing together. We had three teenagers so we were able to play some big group games. In spite of not having family there, I would say that this Christmas felt the most homelike of any Christmas we've ever had here. Just the enjoyment of being together at home the whole day made it feel Christmas-y.
However, the best part of the day was talking to our families on Skype. I really wish we'd been able to do it before this year because it was wonderful.

Last, we continued in our Christmas tradition of celebrating with the kids of BBF. We weren't able to do it on Christmas day as this year Christmas was on a school day, but we did have a party on the week-end and were able to bring lots of friends with us. We're sorry that we'll have to break this tradition next year. Here's a pic of them singing in front of a stage they made for the occasion out of bamboo. A celebration isn't fun without being able to sing on a stage:)