by Dr. Doug Beyer
Pastor Emeritus
email: dougbeyer@juno.com

Thai Team Pictorial

Thailand Journal

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Since I was a child I have sung the song, "I’ll go where you want me to go, Dear Lord, o’re mountain, or plain or sea; I say what you want me to say, dear Lord, I’ll be what you want me to be." But never has my sincerity been tested so severely as in my "retirement" years. Steve Jenkins, Youth Minister at First Baptist Church, Temple City, recruited me to join Thai Team IV to bring water to a remote village in the hills of northern Thailand with Missionary Mike Mann. He didn’t make it easy for me by downplaying the difficulties of the mission. He even quoted Mike as saying the project would be beyond anything the X-treme Team would undertake. The "X-treme Team" are those who prefer missions with high risk and adventure to ease and comfort.

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On three previous trips I sent mission teams to Thailand with my blessings and prayers but excused myself from going because of my responsibilities as senior pastor of First Baptist Church. Now I no longer had that excuse. So with great reservations about my usefulness to the team, I signed on for the greatest adventure of my life.

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I never worked harder, got dirtier and enjoyed it more than the two weeks I helped build a water system in a small, desperately poor village—and I never want to do it again. To help me cope with the high heat and humidity Martha sent with me a small battery powered fan. I never used it. Why not? The discomfort is easier to bear when you don’t think about it.

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These are missionary hands. They belong to Mike Mann who directs the Integrated Tribal Development Project (ITDP) bringing water, agriculture and sanitation to remote areas in Northern Thailand in the name of Him who said, "For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward." (Mark 9:41)

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He and his staff are highly trained professionals doing what would appear to be secular jobs—but with a difference. All his staff are Christians and relate to whatever Christians are in the villages they serve to encourage and facilitate church growth. As a result whole villages have been converted from pagan animist worship of evil spirits to Christian faith. ITDP has brought water to about 150 villages. Mae Kae Noi is the 14^th this year.

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The first village where our church worked five years ago has already embraced the Christian faith and joined the Lahu Baptist Convention. As a result of our water project and Christian witness in Mae Kae Noi Mike Mann expects this village to be evangelized and join the Karen Baptist Convention within two years.

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To live in the tiny jungle village of Mae Kae Noi is to step back 3,000 years to the late iron age and experience life with people cut off from the rest of the world. With amazing ingenuity and resourcefulness they supply all their basic needs through hunting, trapping and subsistence farming.

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The only firearm in the village is a homemade muzzle-loading musket.

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They build their own huts from native bamboo and teak. The hill tribes of northern Thailand were unaffected when the Thai economy went bust three years ago. That’s the good news. The bad news is that for them life is always very hard and painful and (often) short.

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Both men and women smoke homegrown tobacco in homemade cigarettes, cigars and pipes.

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They grow their own cotton,

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remove the seeds with a homemade press,

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spin it into thread and

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weave it into fabric

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which they sew into garments.

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They decorate their skin with ugly (to our eyes) tatoos. Another clan of Karens wears brass rings around their neck to stretch it to grotesque length.

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The Karen women of Mae Kae Noi wear colorful clothes and bands of wicker around their ankles which form a cone up their legs.

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Mae Kae Noi is divided into high and low areas connected by a trail of 96 steps up a steep embankment cut into the clay/mud by machetes. All the Christians live on the high ground. That seems appropriate. Those who live in the lower area are all animists whose religion teaches them to fear evil spirits in nature.

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There is a big difference in the way Karen men and women dress. The women wear colorful long dresses with fancy fringe. They are remarkably clean even in the omnipresent mud. Men, on the other hand, wear 2^nd hand western clothes—often showing the effects of hard, dirty work. Mike says that the poorer the village, the more traditional the women dress.

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It is impossible to overstate the value of clean water to a village’s health and welfare. Before we came to Mae Kae Noi their closest water was a polluted stream 375 steps down the mountain.

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When a village gets running water the men are able to spend more time working in the field instead of hauling water in old anti-freeze cans and bamboo tubes. Their health improves and the government is more likely to allow them to continue living on the land. They are also better able to obtain and retain a teacher for their children. Right now only 1 or 2 children in the village walk over an hour to a neighboring village for classes. The rest of the children and all the adults are illiterate. All that changes when the village gets running water.

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Our journey to Mea Kea Noi began with a wake-up call at 4 a.m. After a hearty breakfast at the Downtown Inn in Chiang Mai we packed our clothes and supplies into three pickup trucks.

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I rode in the passenger seat with Mike,

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but most of our team rode in the back of the trucks hanging on tightly to the rack. No seat belt law in this part of the world.

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It was a lot of fun until it began to rain.

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We tried to cover them with protective tarps, but ended up covering the supplies and letting the team get soaked. Better the kids get wet than our supplies.

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Along the way we stopped for pictures at the beautiful Obluang National Park.

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It is a dense forest along the banks of the Moi river that marks the boundary between Thailand and Burma.

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Remembering that there are malarial mosquitoes in the region, we dope up with insect repellant.

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As we got closer to the village the paved road turned to dirt and the dirt turned to mud. This is the wet season. It rained every day of the 18 days we were in Thailand.

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Just when we needed them most, we rented four elephants and drivers who took some of us the rest of the way on elephant back.

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Getting on the huge beast is another adventure. First you have to climb up a ten foot ledge or tree trunk. (The elephant is not going to lower herself for your convenience.) Then the driver by sign language tells you when to step on the elephant’s head bobbing out in space with nothing to hold on to. Then when I’m stepping on her head I hear the driver giving instructions in a language not even the Thais understand. What was he saying? "Careful! You just kicked her in the eye and now she’s getting mad, you fool!" I haven’t a clue.

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Some of the girls/ladies wanted to ride them, but the drivers said the elephants were all females who had been trained by men so female riders made them jealous.

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I don’t know whether that is true or not, but who am I to dispute the word of an elephant trainer? And I sure didn’t want to do anything to make an elephant nervous.

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The elephants took us along a mountain stream though the jungle. We sat on two narrow boards in something like a large wicker basket on the elephant’s back.

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It became a bit painful after about an hour of bouncing up and down. I felt like I was living out something on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic except this was real.

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As we neared the village I remembered an old joke: How do you get down off an elephant? The answer: you don’t get down off an elephant. You get down off a goose. Well I got down off an elephant by stepping from the elephant’s head to the elevated deck of a bamboo hut. The bamboo slats shifted with my weight, but they held long enough for me to reach the ground safely.

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Those who didn’t go by elephant braved the most difficult road I have ever seen. On a scale of 1 to 10, it was a 12.

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With 4 wheel drive and every wheel in mud chains and the motor racing in low gear we powered our way up steep narrow inclines

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and across rice paddies.

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Sometimes the one lane road would have a sheer drop of several hundred feet on one side and be so close to the mountain on the other side that Mike folded back the external mirror so it wouldn’t be damaged. No worry about on-coming traffic. We were the only fools on that road. And going fast is not an option.

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If we got stuck, there’d be no one to help us out. AAA doesn’t do service calls in the jungle. I was reassured by the powerful winch First Baptist Church gave Mike for his pickup truck. With it his truck can climb a tree.

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We got to Mae Kae Noi just as the sun was setting. (That was the reason we left so early. No street lights here! In fact, no electricity.)

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Each team member was assigned a "battle buddy." Brad and I became roommates in the bamboo hut where we lived with a village family who shared their sparse accommodations with us.

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While we filled our air mattresses and hung our mosquito netting the cooks prepared a meal of rice, greens, leeche nuts and scrambled eggs.

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Steve Jenkins pointed into the darkness where he said a pit toilet had been newly constructed for our use. (I didn’t find it until the next morning.)

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Our hut is on 10 foot stilts with a picture window facing the valley. By "window" I mean an opening—no glass in this part of the world. It is constructed, like all the other huts, mostly of bamboo. And what isn’t bamboo is teakwood—a demonstration of utility and primitive elegance.

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At the door of the hut there was an ingenious foot-washing device made from a hollow bamboo log filled with water. I made the mistake of washing my shoes and, though I don’t speak Karen, I think I heard the lady say, "I didn’t carry that water up from the creek for your muddy shoes!"

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While we were eating our first meal it began to rain turning the clay into slick mud. Someone decided it would be a good idea for the two oldest guys (Brad and me) to have the hut furthest from the toilet.

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To get to the toilet from our hut we had to walk an 11 inch wide foot bridge across a little stream and climb up 60 steps cut into the clay earth. That got us to the eating pavilion. The toilet is another 50 steps down the other side of the mountain. Definitely not something you want to try at night without a flashlight.

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When nature called in the middle of the night I was not about to wake up the village with my flashlight climbing up and down the muddy hill in search of the latrine. So I just peed through the open window down the mountain. I’m not sure that is acceptable here, but, as the saying goes, "necessity is the mother of invention." This worked pretty well the rest of the week—as long as I took care of my business before dawn. I don’t know how those with diarrhea coped with the situation. I didn’t ask. Don’t think I want to know.

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The first sounds of morning were the crowing of the roosters about 4:30 a.m. How do they know morning is coming when the sun hasn’t risen? Then came the sounds of pounding rice. The villagers beat the rice with an apparatus that separates the hull from the grain.

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The chickens get the hulls and the family gets the grain.

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Our meals are mostly green veggies with hot peppers, chicken, fruit and always rice. They are nutritious, filling and healthy, but a lot the same.

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When the team began to get hungry for beef, we bought a cow which one of the extension workers killed and slaughtered for us and the villagers.

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It provided beef for a couple of days, but since the cook always boils the veggies in water and deep fries the meat until it is dark brown in the same oil, it all tastes about the same.

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I’m not complaining. Remember, there’s no refrigeration. So the boiling and frying probably killed a lot of dangerous bacteria.

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The Pwo Karen tribes are hunters and trappers. If anything runs, swims, flies or slithers, it’s food. So we had several "special" meals of porcupine, dog ...

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and tarantula. I think the tarantula was marinated in soy sauce and roasted over a wood fire. All I got was one leg. It had a nice smoky taste, but there wasn’t much of it.

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The villagers caught a cobra, but the extension workers wouldn’t eat it because they knew it had a poisonous bite.

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I’m glad to say the villagers didn’t share the snake meal with us.

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They also trapped a flying squirrel. It graced somebody’s table, but not ours.

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We all ate together on teakwood tables outside under a canopy. Normally the team ate first, then the extension workers, then the villagers got what’s left. Twice the team prepared an "American style" meal of vegetarian chili and pasta which we served to the extension workers.

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One memorable meal was a "pot luck" dinner provided by the villagers in which they brought whatever they cooked in their huts and watched us eat it. That is a little like a kid with chocolate all over his face wanting to give me a kiss. I appreciate the sentiment, but I’d like to find a polite way to decline the offer. I doubt their hut kitchens would rate very high on the cleanliness scale. And they use hot pepper spices that burn our lips, tongues and sinus.

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I think the beetle nuts that turn their teeth black must also kill their sense of taste. My first devotional had two points: "Where He leads me I will follow" and "What He feeds me I will swallow." I had to eat my words before the week was out.

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My hut host brought me a plate of jack fruit. I tried to eat it, but it was nasty. Jack fruit is a variety of durian, a fruit that stinks so bad that signs are posted in the Bangkok Christian Guesthouse and the Chiang Mai Downtown Inn: "No durian allowed."

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The second day we completed joining the pipes from the water source two miles up the mountain to the middle of the village.

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Although it was unfiltered and the pipes unglued, it brought an instant transformation to the village. Instead of climbing 70 yards down to the creek and hauling water up in jugs and bamboo tubes they filled them from a flowing pipe in the middle of the village.

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The team put on swim suits and took their first "showers." The kitchen crew washed pots, pans and dishes and we had water for cement. The pipe was merely pushed together and it came apart easily. It had to be glued together and buried.

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That meant two miles of trenching up the mountain through the jungle.

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The second night two village musicians brought their homemade instruments and played and sang for us. Mike Mann took this as a good sign. It usually takes a week for them to warm up to foreigners.

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Later that evening we set up a first aid station for the sick and injured villagers. They lined up and through an interpreter described their problems.

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Then "doctor" Steve or Brad made a diagnosis and handed out medicine and bandages --- mostly aspirin, Pepto-Bismol and anti-biotic salve ---miracle drugs to those without any medical care.

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This woman delivered a baby about the time we arrived in Mae Kae Noi. As a result of intestinal worms she suffered five days of diarrhea and vomiting., becoming so dehydrated that she had no milk to give her new-born. With both near death, we treated the mother for worms and gave them both non-fat dry milk and electrolytes for their dehydration. (We didn’t think to bring baby formula in our supplies.) Brad suggested that we poke a hole in the finger of one of our rubber gloves to make a nipple for the baby. There were other nursing mothers in the village, but it is against their culture for one mother to feed another mother’s baby. We offered to take the mother to the hospital, but she declined thinking she would die on the way. We also were afraid that might happen and that our God would be blamed for "bad magic."

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After another five days of medication and prayer, both mother and child were stronger. You’d never guess this 10 day old infant with her father and brother was so near death. We were there to save lives as well as souls.

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We used recreation as a way of building report with the villagers. Thai Team IV, the extension workers and the villagers played a weeklong tournament of Volleyball

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and Takraw --- a native Thai game that is like volleyball, but with soccer rules. Instead of using your hands, you have to use you feet or head to get the ball over the net. Not surprisingly, the villagers were the Takraw champions and we were the volleyball winnres.

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Our workdays were long --- especially when we poured the cement for the storage tank. Mike likes to pour two sections on the same day. Because the first section had to have time to set up before the next was poured, we started to work at 6 a.m.

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We finished about 8 a.m. and came back to the village for breakfast. Then we divided into three groups. One went up to the water source (2 hours of hard climbing) and worked on the dam. Another (mine) stayed in the village and built the first squat toilet (more about that later).

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The third group continued trenching up the mountain.

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We continued in these jobs until 4 p.m. when we were supposed to reassemble at the storage tank and pour the 2^nd section. But the water source group had problems and we lost the flow of water through the temporary pipe. That meant that we had no water for making cement. So we had to fill gallon jugs in the lower village and tote them up to the tanks.

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This slowed us down so that we had to finish pouring the 2^nd section of the storage tank by lamplight

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Thai Team IV is an impressive group. I believe all the High Schoolers are honor students. Everyone works very hard and long under primitive conditions without complaining. Why? I think it is for the same reason that a marathon runner doesn’t complain about getting hot and sweaty. It’s what we were expecting. Furthermore, living among a people who have never in their lives tasted ice cream or sat under an electric fan, it is hard to feel under-privileged.

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Oh, I hear team members saying what they look forward to eating when they get home, but they continue to eat the same Thai food without whining. I would never agree to do this for money --- it’s too difficult. I think, however, that it’s the things people are willing to do for nothing that reveal their values and commitments. I had the honor of serving with some very special people.

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I heard Mike Mann say that the missionaries of Thailand talk about the volunteer teams from our church. He said, "Temple City’s First Baptist Church is well known as a leading mission church in our denomination. Its reputation reaches from Thailand all the way to Valley Forge." It made me proud, but, I hope not sinfully.

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I didn’t fall over any waterfalls this trip, but I climbed up several. The waterfalls were the easy part. Climbing up slick banks of mud on all fours was the hardest. I always thought I was pretty steady on my feet, but I slipped and fell in Mae Kae Noi mud many times.

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The water project could have been called a sanitation project, but it wouldn’t have had the same appeal. A large part of the village’s serious health problems can be traced to the absence of toilets. Until we arrived, there were none in the village. The first thing the extension workers did was to dig two pit toilets for our team’s use. The seat in them was two parallel bamboo logs. They made a big mistake, however. The seat was much too high even for us tall Americans. At least one team member tried standing on the parallel bars and aiming for the hole. But all that was temporary.

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We began to dig septic tanks

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and installing permanent squat toilets (eventually one for every hut). I laughed when I read the brand name on the porcelain: "American Standard." Then in small print it said, "made in Thailand."

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One little boy enjoyed playing with a bamboo pea shooter. He would gather a bag of beans from the forest and shoot them with a loud "pop" at his favorite team members. Boys and girls acted very differently in the village. The boys ran carefree everywhere.

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These two are walking on bamboo stilts. They followed us everywhere we went and tried to mimic what they heard us say: "Thank you" and "I love it." But I never see a girl away from the village. And when we speak to them, they never respond. I wonder if it has anything to do with the practice of taking girls from tribal villages to serve the infamous sex trade in Bangkok. If I were a hill tribe parent, I’d tell my girls never to talk to strangers and stay close to home.

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Bamboo is the most versatile building material on earth.

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Out of it they make floors, roofs, walls, jars, utensils, ax handles, traps, cages, baskets, pans --- even concrete reinforcement bars.

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The team introduced a culture clash into the village. The villagers found us amusing when we tred to do clumsily what they have practiced doing for generations. They are skilled artisans with a machete or hoe and can climb poles and trees like monkeys. It is easy to feel inferior to their exceptional skills. Which must be the way refugees feel when they come to a modern urban environment where they can’t do the ordinary things we have learned to do from childhood. We are all incompetent, just in different ways.

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While we were in Mae Kae Noi we took an excursion to a hill tribe refugee camp near the Burma border. I had not ridden in the back of a pickup truck since I was a kid on my uncle’s farm in Oklahoma. In Thailand I experienced again the fun magnified by several factors.

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Bouncing over deep ruts, down mountain streams with all four wheels in chains, we traversed a single lane mud road ducking low hanging vegetation.

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It was more fun than any grown-up ought to have. After 1 ½ hours of this excitement I transferred my 66 year old bones to the front seat of the pickup where they continued to bounce, but on a seat cushion.

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We stopped for a stand-up peanut butter and jelly lunch, but someone forgot the peanut butter so we had jelly on white bread—and were thankful for it. We even shared some of our bounty with a native fisherman.

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The refugee camp is six years old and contains about 10,000 Burmese hill tribe refugees. They fled to Thailand to escape terrible persecution in Burma. The Burmese have burned their villages and marched them ahead of their soldiers to find land mines. In Thailand they are considered illegal immigrants and are required by law to remain in the camp. They actually have more services there than the Karen have in Mae Kae Noi.

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They receive substantial international aid and have 3,275 children in school, Kindergarten through college.

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Many are Christians and most of the Christians are Baptists, the fruit of our mission work that began with Adonirum Judson in 1812.

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Nearly all the teachers in the camp are Baptists.

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We visited one of seven Baptist churches and talked to the pastor. The pews are teakwood benches without backs. They are made for sitting up straight and listening.

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On the last day in Mae Kae Noi the youth gave a splendid performance of a pantomime drama called "The Redeemer." It traced God’s plan of salvation from the creation of the world to the death and resurrection of Christ. While it was being performed to music from a battery boom box an extension worker interpreted what was being acted. The villagers laughed in all the right places and were seriously reflective at the conclusion. I was very proud of our kids.

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Before leaving I decided to have one final adventure. I set out early in the morning on a hike up the mountain to the little dam we built at the water source. It was a very strenuous two hour climb along and in the creek bed, but it was worth the sweat I put into it. I’m just glad I didn’t have to carry a sack of cement with me like a couple of our guys did earlier in the week.

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Afterward the sandpile provided a temporary bed for an exhausted hiker.

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Here we gather in front of the tank for a final group picture with the villagers.

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After the pictures we gave them most of our clothes, boots and leftover supplies.

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Then we presented trophies to the Takraw and Volleyball winners. And the villagers honored us with gifts of homemade fabric and clothes.

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We distributed the ABW baby layettes to mothers with infants.

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Then it was back in the trucks for a two hour drive to the boat dock on the Salween River.

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We boarded long boats powered by automobile engines that took us to a "resort" where the Salween joins the Moi river.

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Where these two great rivers flow together from opposite directions they create huge whirlpools before careening off into Burma.

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Steve had obtained free wake boards from the Connelly and O’Brian manufacturers with the promise that he would take promotional pictures that could be published in a wake board magazine showing their gear being used by the first people in the world to wake board at this spectacular location.

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We left the equipment with the missionaries for their continued use.

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After dinner the guest house provided live entertainment with costumed children singing and dancing.

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The nearby village is predominately Christian with a strong Burmese Baptist presence. So the children sang Christian songs which were interpreted by the extension workers.

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Back in Chiang Mai Mike took us to see the king’s palace and the central Buddhist temple on a 3,000 foot hill overlooking the city.

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The queen’s love of roses is evident from the splendid gardens. Royalty lives well in Thailand.

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On the way back we stopped by the Lana Coffee house for cappuccino and latte. Lana coffee is part of Mike’s tribal development project. In order to bring income to very poor villages he has introduced coffee as a cash crop and taught them how to grow and roast it. Villagers who were once very poor with no employment possibilities produced 7 ½ tons of coffee this year and expect to produce 25 tons next year.

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Our last evening in Chiang Mai Mike and Becky took us to a cultural dinner show. We all sat on the floor and were served delicious old Thai cuisine on low tables.

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While we ate we enjoyed live music and cultural dancing. Except for sore legs and backs from long periods on the floor, it was a delightful evening.

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Saturday morning I gave my airplane ticket to Becky so she could fly to Bangkok with the team while I rode with Mike in his car. That way I was able to see the Thai countryside close up instead of at 30,000 feet.

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Mike and Becky took us for a boat tour of the canals that lace through Bangkok.

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We disembarked at the Grand Palace and walked through its richly decorated gates and walls.

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After lunch I took a taxi to see the teakwood palace which was the residence of "Anna and the King of Siam." It was plainer than I had expected and the teak was painted. There’s something offensive about putting paint on fine wood, in my judgment. Now pine and fir might have something to hide, but not teak!

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Our last night in Bangkok we all ate American food at the Bangkok Hard Rock Cafe. Not my choice, but I wanted to go with the group. To my surprise, I enjoyed the food and especially the company.

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One of my concerns in undertaking this mission project was whether my health was strong enough to handle its rigor. There’s nothing like getting sick 8 hours into the jungle that makes an old man nervous. Travel and work in such primitive conditions puts a lot of stress on the digestive system. I am very thankful that by God’s grace I was spared any health problems. In fact, I think I am the only team member who did not at some time suffer from constipation, diarrhea and vomiting. Other than fatigue, I never felt better in my life. That’s an answer to prayer bordering on the miraculous.

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Thai Team IV is more than just the 14 of us from Temple City and Arcadia. It also includes 9 hill tribe staff workers, 20 villagers, 1 missionary, 2 missionary kids, and all those praying for us around the world. Working together we left a small village high in the hills of Thailand with 5 faucets and concrete platforms, 2 squat toilets, a 3,000 liter filtration tank, a 14,000 liter storage tank, a small dam at the water source, 2 miles of buried PVC pipe and much good will toward Jesus Christ in whose name we did it all.

Thai Team Pictorial

Thailand Journal