Drew in Missions

Editors note: This was written Sunday night, but I didn’t have internet access, so I saved it and pasted it here. Enjoy!

Holy cow, there is a Thai woman massaging my feet as I type this. And by massaging, I mean tickling with a stick. I’m not a very ticklish person most of the time, mostly because if I’m ticklish, the CotH kids will use that weakness against me in the pool, but for the life of me, I can stop smiling and clinching my toes. She looks up at my attempts to hold in laughter every once and a while, and chatters to her friends massaging next to her in Thai. I’m thinking that she’s mocking me, but considering how good this feels, I don’t care.

But why am I partaking in this rubbing of the feet? Well, that’s because every Sunday at four o’clock, our most athletic and energetic members gather to play “the beautiful game.” Football, or soccer as you probably know it, is great fellowship. We use it to forge bonds between us and non-Christians who are friends with us, to reach out to others we might run into or play against, and to just have fun.

I am not a footballer. That’s because I can’t run well, I have poor foot-eye coordination, and I haven’t ever played much. But I have something that few Thais can bring to the table. I’m over six feet tall.

Now unless the ball needs to be headed, that doesn’t help too much for most positions. But one position on the field is greatly aided by a tall player with long arms and legs. It’s a crucial position, but one not many people gravitate toward.

I am a Goalie. A Keeper. The last line of defense preventing the opposing strikers from scoring that final, decisive goal. It’s not always a fun job, because each shot taken means a ball is rocketing at the area I’ve pledged to protect. Each goal scored means you’ve let the team down, and they have to work that much harder to overcome your mistake. But that’s the life of a Keeper. Each shot grants an opportunity to either make a spectacular save, or to become the goat. Turns out I’m a decent Keeper. I’m not great by any means, but I have my moments.

Our matches are played on one of two stages. The first is a dusty field, with two movable goals at the ends of the field. The other is a cement basketball court, with makeshift goals of metal about two feet tall by four feet wide under the hoops. I greatly prefer the field, because the large goals can accomadate true goalies. The court is so small with such tiny goals that having a Keeper use his hands would make it impossible to score.

Today was not my day. We didn’t end up playing the other team we’d been promised. Without the extras we were counting on, we didn’t have enough to play on the field. This meant my cool Goalie gloves were not going to help me out at all. They would be sitting in my backpack safely, while I stood in front of the goal.

Turns out my feet and legs became the opposing teams target practice. In two hours, I only gave up three goals, which isn’t to bad. two cam in the space of three minutes, both by the same kid. The third was right as the game ended, so I wasn’t happy at all about ending on such a bad note. But over the course of the game, I did make a lot a good saves, so looking back I’m pretty happy with my performance.

Well, the lady is almost done reviving my aching feet, so I’ll leave off here for now. I’ve also got a new slide-show in the works about our trip to the waterfall yesterday. Be looking for that and more this week. Until then, blessings!

Sorry for not posting very often this week. It’s been a bit hectic, and I’ve had some unexpected technical difficulties.

My main problem i that the two new videos I want to show y’all, one of the entire Princess Skit and another giving you a tour of the church and my living quarters, are both rather large files. It’s proving tricky to get them uploaded to youtube, thus difficult to post on my site. Hopefully Kaz will be able to help me remedy this ovr the next week. Until then, I ask only for your prayers. I’m down to less than three months here, and I want to make them meaningful and focussed months of hard work.

In other news, last week I weighed myself for the first time in a month or so. I have reached 188 pounds, which is the most I’ve ever been. Maybe it’s eating multiple plates of food at every meal…

Well, I feel like I’m really settling in to the schedule around here now. Basically weekdays minus Monday are really similar. Wake up, study Thai or have equipping time with Robert, eat lunch, hang out with whoever’s at the Zone, teach English classes from three until six, each supper, and hang out with more people until it’s time to hit the sack.

Lately, we’ve been attracting more and more students for our English lessons. Yesterday each of my one hour slots were filled, for the first time. I’m now teaching about eight classes per week, and I’ll probably keep gaining students until they’re are filled.

Some of my classes end up being super easy, while others are difficult and can be frustrating. I’ve found that when my student or students have very little English knowledge, class become very difficult. I have the ability to explain myself eloquently in English, but that doesn’t help when I’m teaching the meaning of “shirt” and “pants.” Luckily, years of improvising when faced with trying to teach kids at Camp have made me able to roll with the punches fairly well. Take yesterday’s class with Joy…

She has learned how to sound out and read words off of paper very well, but doesn’t have a clue what they mean. We are studying lesson two, which deals with clothing, so when I realized that our handout was missing some important pages, and that it wasn’t going to last the full hour, I started to think. Joy and I continued working through the worksheet as my mind raced, trying to think of ways to both teach and stall simultaneously. First, I defaulted to the educator’s standby…

I drew stick figures on the board. I then drew on them the best semblances of different articles of clothing listed on the sheet, and asked her to identify them. This worked well for a few minutes, but some of them weren’t easy to draw. (How do you make someone understand ’suit’ using a stick figure on a white board?)

Once that had run it’s course, I commenced our next activity, identifying what we were wearing and what color it was. Unfortunately, I was only wearing a T-shirt, blue jeans, and a belt. What a day to give my CotH hat some time off! To make matters worse, she was only wearing a skirt, a shirt, and a watch! I knew we had to find a way to expand this idea. Then it hit me. Explore the Zone.

We went into the main room and sure enough, there was a slew of people, many wearing different items of clothing. I would direct Joy to someone and ask her to tell me what they were wearing. This got us to the end of our time, and seemed to be helpful, so I felt good.

My easy classes aren’t quite as structured. For Troy and Rit, I’m basically an editor and tutor. They bring in their homework, and I help them understand it better, correct grammar and usage problems, and define difficult words for them. By far my favorite part of teaching is working with them, because it’s easy to talk with them. They aren’t looking for a crash course in the English language, they just need a little confidence boost and grammatical editing.

Moving on to food, I still can’t get enough of Thai food. I’ve found some nearby foods that have become staples, and I rotate them based on how I’m feeling. My newest addition is a dish known as Pad Thai back in the States. Noodles, chicken, and sprout-type veggies with a lime squeezed over them. It typically includes eggs and peanuts, but I’ve gotten good at informing Thais of my allergies. More than a month here, and no significant allergic reactions. God’s taking care of me.

But what happens if I start missing American food? Well, we found a place that caters to the unhealthy American. It’s called “Mike’s Burgers,” and we three apprentices have fallen in love with it. I don’t know where you ate the best burger of your life, whether it was in your uncle’s backyard, at Storm’s in the hill country, or at some big barbecue, but mine was right here in Thailand.

When you’re metabolism is as fast as mine is, you’re almost always hungry. Combine that with Asian foods propinquity for leaving you hungry an hour after you eat, and you have a recipe for a man who wants a heavy meal.

Mike’s specializes in providing that very experience, as well as the experience of heartburn. My order is typically a burger, a hot-dog, and an order of fries. The key to making it a thing of beauty is that they are covered in homemade chili, onions, and ketchup. Add in a ice-cold Coca-Cola, and a few onion rings, and I might as well be back in America, at least for that moment in time. It’s great to get that homey feeling back, even for a moment.

I’m looking forward to a great week coming up. It’ll be my first Valentine’s Day that I won’t begrudgingly call “Singles Awareness Day,” which I’m pumped about. Beyond that, our Valentine’s Day Party on Saturday night should be amazing. The Birthday Suits are going to be playing, we’re having lots of games, great food, and a surprise from Kaz and me.

We’re in charge of putting together some skits for the time in between activities, and we’ve got some great ones lined up. The Thais have already told us they’ll have video cameras ready for these, since they missed the opportunity to capture our previous skits on film for Blackmailing purposes. And yes, both Contagious Office and the Princess Skit will be featured for a largely unsuspecting audience. Maybe the videos will make it to this site. Until then, blessings!

Well, it’s been an eventful few days, to say the least, which explains why I haven’t updated much. I’ll try to catch y’all up on what’s been happening.

My student who I taught about public speaking, Troy, came by to see me today. He couldn’t stay long, because he was helping decorate his dorm for the Chinese New Year, but he wanted to let me know that he knocked his speech out of the park. He was so well prepared that his teacher had to cut his time short. He felt great about the presentation, and I can tell he’s excited about learning even more.

Robert is now back to his old self, minus a few pounds. It’s great to have him back around the zone.

I’m now teaching eight English classes per week at an hour apiece, and taking six hours of Thai lessons, plus time out for homework. I may gain more students yet, because people just keep showing up.

I’ve been invited by some of my new Thai friends, Bon, Noom, Thum, and former intern Marvin, to join their band for the time I’m here. We don’t actually play any real gigs, we just go to music stores with practice rooms and they play. They’ve got Thai guys to sing the Thai songs, but they want me and John to rock out the American ones. They call those the Farang Songs. It’s a good chance to connect with thm and form closer friendships. I’ve heard some funny band names before, but they found a good one in The Birthday Suits.

But the nast news I’m going to share is the main reason I didn’t do any blogging over the weekend. You see, I met this girl from the AFC, who was there a few years before my time. She’s been a missionary here before, and right now is doing the same while teaching English in China. Her name’s Haley Edmiston, and we really hit it off. And when I say hit it off, I mean that within a week, we had begun praying about whether God wanted us to be in a relationship. God was faithful, as always, and by Sunday we had our answer.

For the first time in my life, I have a girlfriend.

She’s visiting Malaysia this week, then will be in Chiang Mai the next week, then leaves for Bangkok and then China. While some would count that as a bad thing, it would be really hard to focus on ministry with a girl as beautiful as she is around, so I’m counting it as a blessing that we’ll be starting our relationship in the midst of putting God ahead of our own wants. I’ll still be able to communicate via email and SKYPE once my day is done, which is a blessing as well.

After years of hearing that I’d find the perfect girl once I stopped looking, I finally believe it. The past month was the first time in my life I wasn’t actively seeking a girlfriend, and lo and behold, God drops an amazing, Christian girl into my arms.

I’m going to upload a picture of us, so you can get a better idea of just how blessed I am. Until my next post, blessings!

So, Friday may have been one of the best days ever. There were many reasons, but I only want to share one of them right now, since I don’t have a lot of time before church starts.

So, the Chinese students who I taught on Thursday signed up for Wednesdays and Fridays, so they showed up Friday. Since the other group wasn’t there, John and I were able to tag-team them. This was important because our male student, Troy, brought homework to work on, and the girls just came for English conversation. We decided that I’d go one-on-one with Troy because I’m a little better with grammar and word usage.

After going through some of his graded homework, taking a look at each question he’d missed and why he got it wrong, he told me that he had a speech due on Monday. He had done no preparations for it yet; in fact, he had never even been taught how to present a speech.

Now I’m not the best public speaker ever, but I’ve taken two excellent speech classes from amazing teachers. I can’t remember every detail of what I learned, but what I could recall was more than enough to give Troy an edge over his classmates.

Maybe it was standing in front of a student who was hanging on my every word, or that he was taking notes about everything I said, or that I was writing on a dry-erase white board, but I realized that I absolutely love teaching subject matter I know. He listened in rapt attention to my suggestions and advice. In turn, I revealed more than just the basics of a good speech, but delved into how to keep from being nervous, how to prepare, and many other lesser known parts of a speech.

His talk is one of many that will be given this week, all on the same subject: health. My first suggestion was to brainstorm all the ideas he could think of dealing with health, regardless of how good they seemed, then we would narrow his talk down to the three strongest points. (This is a little trick I picked up from listening to my Mom talk about meetings at her work. She’s great at stimulating thought.) Though I gave him a little help in the process, he came up with most of the six or so ideas on his own. From there, he said that his strongest three would be eating the right foods, exercising, and spending time enjoying life and having fun.

Secondly, I took him through the basics of an informative speech. I explained the purpose of an introduction and conclusion, how to organize his points based on strength, and tips for catching the attention of the audience. w set his points up with his strongest point, making sure to take the time to enjoy life, as his final point, his second strongest point, eating right, as his initial talking point, then squeezed his weakest subject in betwixt the two. We worked on creating a hook to grab people’s attention early, and a good summary of his thoughts for the conclusion.

After we went through those basics, we dove into each of his main points. He would suggest details that he could talk about that supported his overall point, and I’d encourage him while writing them down on the board. After we got done with the first one, I sat down and told him to present the first point to me as if it was his real speech, using his notes. At first, he wanted no part of it, but after some coaxing, he got up in front of me. It wasn’t the best presenting I’ve ever seen, but I could tell that he understood the basics of what I’d been saying. Not only that, but his fears of not making the time he was set were blown out of the water. He was able to talk about eating right easily for two and a half or three minutes. He even was able to maintain control when someone came in to borrow a guitar, which was a distraction I was afraid might cause him to lose track.

By the time we got done with that, we were running behind. We decided to run through the second and third points quickly, then finish up with some last minute tips. For example, he told me that his teacher counted off for not making eye contact, but when he catches someone’s eyes during a speech he forgets what he was saying. My remedy was to just look like he was making eye contact, by looking at peoples foreheads, scanning the room without letting his eyes stop on a certain person, and looking barely over the heads of the back row. It was cool to see how these ideas affected him. He began smiling at the thought of being able to feign eye contact whilst maintaining his train of thought.

Lastly, I gave him a motivational talk, citing his superior preparation and tutoring as reasons to be confident. I told him that confidence is the biggest factor in a good speech, other than preparation. I told him to just practice it a lot over the weekend, then go up there knowing that he had a great speech that he knew well. He seemed almost excited about it when he left, twenty minutes after we were supposed to end. But it was well worth the extra time, and my five o’clock had canceled on me anyway. It felt great to help someone out that much, and know that I was good at it.