The Daily Sched

Dear Friends and Family,

Our time in Thailand is flying by! It is hard to believe that we are in the middle of our second week and only have a few more days working with the Garden of Hope. We have been busy serving in various ministry opportunities which has been a good transition from the many preparation talks we sat through last week. Here is a run day of a typical day in Thailand:

We have our team meetings in the morning at our home, the YMCA. These meetings tend to be a time of praise, reflection, discussion, and prayer of the previous day's activities. We spend about two hours for this time and it really sets the tone for the entire day.

For lunch we typically eat at a Thai market place where ordering consists of pointing and nodding, or one of our fabulous drivers arranges the food for us. It is always an experience, but we are getting much more familiar even though sometimes we end up eating something we did not mean to order.

We come to the Garden of Hope (GoH) drop-in-center which is in the perfect location on Loi Kroh Road, one of the most popular tourist and red light areas in the city. We have devotions with the GoH staff and then split up for various activities for the afternoon. We visit the slum homes of the children who come play with us, we do prayer walks, we teach English, we play with the kids who come by, and we pick up trash on the streets. We are all wearing these bright purple shirts given to us by the GoH, so hopefully we will start to spread the word about their ministry and services. We share a delicious homemade dinner at the drop-in-center with the children who come everyday, women, and any other person who is in the area. We are all learning a lot from the Thai culture's great hospitality.

The evenings are full with going to the bars and playing uno with the women working there, going out on the streets and playing with the kids we find, staying at the drop-in-center to play with the kids here, and going out to talk with any other farrangs (foreigners) that we may see to talk up the GoH.

We arrive home late at night, completely exhausted, trying to pen in our journals the happenings of the day before we fall asleep.

Thank you for your continual prayers. We are going to be sad to leave the Garden of Hope at the end of the week, but we are also looking forward to learning about another ministry in Thailand, Remember Nhu.

We are all doing great and are learning a lot. I am sure we will have many stories to tell.

On behalf of the Thailand Team

Love

Laurie Brown