The House Collective

sojourn studio.

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Earlier this year we began a partnership with Sojourn Studio, a project of a local non-profit. They are training women and teen girls in jewelry making, and providing them part-time jobs. Two of these ladies are our very own!

They work here in our house two days a week, hand-making necklaces and earrings from start to finish. This includes working with clay, hand-painting designs, attaching metalwork, and they are beginning to learn packaging.

Their work with Sojourn also helps to fund further education for both them–Mwei Mwei is taking Thai classes and San Aye is taking Burmese literacy classes. Sojourn also creates a savings plan for them.

The work is absolutely beautiful, and we are so thankful for this partnership that allows us to keep building into these two ladies. If you didn’t see this last time, watch this short video explaining the project.

You can also learn more about them on the Sojourn Studio website. And, what we are most excited about–you can now purchase a few items online at Etsy!

The world feels exceptionally small when you can hop online to see a pair of earrings that was made by our sweet friends in our house, and have it delivered to your door. We’ve loved partnering with Sojourn Studio and we hope you do, too!

come on in.

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Life in this neighborhood is a rollercoaster.

Summertime here is from mid-March to the first of June, and it is chaotic to say the least. The kids are absolutely crazy: climbing fences and gates and trees before 7am, with so much energy and so little structure. We have kids napping on our porch; there are so many I fear aren’t fed regular meals. They’ll easily spend all day in our yard and on our porch and in our house.

Hence, the summer program. We still do Breakfast Club every weekday morning; we have two days a week of summer school classes, and two more days of play and games. We do mid-day fruit at least twice a week, plus other days of milk and packaged snacks.

Then it gets even more complicated. Many of the kids in the community live with grandparents or aunts or uncles through the school year, and their parents “call” for them over the summer. They will be sent off to Bangkok or places in Burma to stay with their parents for a few months before they return for school.

It’s also common for kids to live in Burma with grandparents while the parents work in Mae Sot. The parents, likewise, “call” for their kids over the holidays, so we have a whole new slew of kids in our neighborhood that we don’t know, but their parents know us, and they are here just for a few months.

And there is yet another group that lives here with their immediate family, but goes off to visit aunts, uncles, and cousins in Burma for the holiday.

It’s a very big, very convoluted switcheroo.

So while we still have The Breakfast Club, we added about fifteen kids and lost about twenty, presumably both temporarily. And while we have the summer program, some of the kids don’t know the routines: what our rules are, the fact that we speak Burmese (but not perfectly; no, I didn’t get that spiel…). It’s a big learning curve for all of us.

And it’s messy.

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This little boy, he left us in early December, just a few days before his birthday. We had a cake early and said our goodbyes as he moved back to Burma with his dad. Then he came back, just two weeks later. He didn’t like it, and came back to live with his mom, older sister, and younger brother.

He and his sister left again at the end of March, to leave over the summer. They said they’d be back for school in June. We gave them hugs and said goodbyes; just a few months, right?

The little brother followed just a few weeks after. I asked Thida last week, and she’s talking now about how they might stay. It is going well with their dad and grandmother–maybe the mother was the problem, and she’s still here in Mae Sot.  Now they might start school in Burma this year.

That might be the last of their living in our community; I don’t even know yet. And I won’t even pretend I can swallow that. We’ve been snapping photos together for over seven years. To say we love them is the understatement of our lives here.

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This little boy: he left us last year.

His parents got in a fight and split; he was left with a grandfather and an aunt. He was then called to Bangkok by his grandmother and yet another aunt; we said our goodbyes and hoped it might be better for his messy little life.

Then he came back, a few months later. His parents are back under the same roof. They are expecting again, and I’m just not even sure what to think.

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This is a family of first-borns, amazingly enough.

Three are first-borns in their individual families, but all sent to live with their grandparents here in Mae Sot. The littlest is a youngest child in every way you could imagine! They are two more cousins & brothers that have joined at different times and then been sent back, just to really confuse it all. But these four have stayed, and made a second little family of over-achievers.

Over the summer, the oldest got a job, which we hope is just for the summer. Reality? With her switch to Thai school last year she was put back into first grade. And money in the pocket is more generally more tempting than the promise of money through education. I’m nervous she might be a nanny forever.

The older boy was called by his parents to go to Bangkok, as was the littlest little guy.

This leaves one. Left behind, not called by his parents; and now having a few breakdowns as of late.

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This girl is one of Thida’s, and we love her!

She left to go to visit an aunt for the summer, and I was so sad to not have her in the summer program. Her smile can light up a place, and a she’s a natural leader.

Thida casually mentioned she called to ask after her daughter, and they said she was in Yangon. Thida laughed about all the fun she was going to have.

I have been praying all week for her. It terrifies me to have her traveling on her own, generally a paperless young teenage girl, in a world and region where human trafficking is rampant.

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One of our Breakfast Club families is in a hard season: in the past six months they have moved into a field, living in a shanty hut with no water or electricity. They are unable to afford the insurance program we are offering and supplementing; and it’s putting us in a challenging position.

Her baby was due for vaccinations last week, and while we are no longer driving out to the clinic, I did agree to drive her to a free vaccination clinic in the market. As she got in the car, Thida asked her if her husband was working that day. She said no, as her husband was hungover from yesterday and unable to work.

Thida later told me this is her second husband, and shared their sad story. Apparently their are two more kids in Burma, and it’s just messy.  We talked about how we just aren’t sure how to help, because if we help with one thing, it will just be another.

______________

This little boy moved to Bangkok to join his mom and dad, aunts, uncles, and cousins in Bangkok last year.

We have visited him there, and while we missed him terribly, we were hopeful.

But his grandmother & primary caregiver didn’t like Bangkok–not enough people to talk to during the day–and wanted to move back to Mae Sot with him. This week, we helped move them in a shanty room off the main road, amidst a rough crowd.

______________

One of the bread ladies is unexpectedly pregnant again, struggling with morning sickness with a toddler and unsure about the coming season. This week she said her husband’s boss left town–he had a great job installing windows, and the boss owed him a month’s salary when he left.

This happened last month to another bread ladies’ husband. A month’s salary owed, and the boss skips town.

______________

The Breakfast Club is no easy task. Creating a summer curriculum for forty kids in your house in 100 degree weather sans air con is not to be taken lightly. Sharing your kitchen with a breakfast service and bread business is challenging.

The hard part, though: It isn’t serving breakfast to 50 kids before 8am. It isn’t even the hot, sweaty kids shouting out their ABCs.

It is opening up your door to fifty kids with broken families, painful stories, instability; and saying,
Yeah, COME ON IN, with all that baggage.
Every day before 8am.

whispered needs.

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It’s been almost a year since Mwei Mwei came back from Bangkok. It’s been just over two years since she left.

I remember sitting with Thida after summer program in 2016, trying to use my limited Burmese to explain trafficking and why we were worried about her thirteen-year-old going off to Bangkok by herself.

I remember sitting with Mwei Mwei at an ice cream shop in Bangkok, after we miraculously found her in January 2017. We showed her pictures of her family and tried to gauge the danger of the situation she was in. She cried, and we left worried.

In Sara Hagerty’s book Unseen, she writes, “To meet any need, I first have to hear God’s whisper about that need.” I think that’s what happened as we sat with her over ice cream. We didn’t know the details of what she was in, or where it would go, or what was true. But we knew he had whispered that we needed to do something.

We told Thida we’d create her a job if they’d bring her back to Mae Sot, even if we didn’t know how we felt about hiring a fifteen-year-old. We weren’t really sure what it was we needed to do, but we felt there was a need.

And then she arrived back to Mae Sot just as we landed back from America, and we scrambled to get her into a sewing training and ultimately, to come up with a plan.

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The past year has been a lot of “coming up with plans.”

While we tried to create additional sewing work for Mwei Mwei, our regular seamstress–who had a contracted job with a local organization–lost that contract. We now had two ladies, both coming from painful, rough situations, looking to us for work.

There were a lot of weeks of made up projects. I have a whole stack of zipper pouches and bunting and bags that we made samples of as I tried out new ideas and chased new prospects.

While her family has told her she’s not the smart one, we knew she had so much potential. We didn’t want to see her end her education. Somehow, we wanted her getting some education while she was able to work and be viewed as a contributor to the family.

But coming up with education opportunities wasn’t easy, either. We created a group English class for her join, but she hated it. We had our church come teach a group Thai class, but she sat in the back silently. I worked with her in math, and it was like pulling teeth. I tried to have her read Burmese books and write book reports, and then spent ages trying to read them myself, realizing this wasn’t a time-efficient plan as her “teacher.”

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In the end, we found solutions. It just took a little time & chaos.

For work, we are so thankful to be partnering with Sojourn Studios here in town. This is a project of a local Christian nonprofit, training teenagers and women to make ceramic jewelry. Both Mwei Mwei & San Aye make jewelry for them two days a week, and Mwei Mwei also participates in their Youth Program, where she makes jewelry with other students her age and participates in a life skills course.

Sojourn Studios plans to have this jewelry for sale internationally in coming months, but for now–watch this video, and be inspired!

We are also just beginning a partnership with a local Bible school. They screen print on to t-shirts, and we are partnering with them to sell reusable grocery bags with screen prints on them. We hope this will be available internationally soon, too.

Either way, they both have steady, sustainable work, right in our home! 🎉

_________________________

We found a few solutions for education, too.

First, we bribed her. I couldn’t get her over the hump of her multiplication tables, but I knew she could do it. I gave her three weeks to memorize them, with a reward of an extra weeks’ salary as a reward. She couldn’t give it to her family collective, though–where money traditionally goes. She’d go on a special trip to the market with us to spend it on her.

It worked 😁

More than anything, I think it showed her she could. Since then, she has completed all her multiplication lessons and passed the “exam” I gave her with flying colors. We’re on to division, and she says it’s easy. And I am loving that time with her every week.

Second, we let her vote on what she actually wanted to learn. And we’ve learned: if she wants to learn it, she gives it her all.

English got ousted; she just wasn’t interested. She hopes to open a nail salon someday (as you can see in the video above), and if she plans to do that in Thailand, we wanted her to start learning Thai. So now a portion of her salary ifrom Sojourn Studios goes to hire a Thai teacher once a week. She has just started, but the teacher already says she’s doing great.

We also offered her most of the things we know and could train her in: and photography was voted highest. Enter Stephen. He now is teaching her photography using our Canon DSLR & Mac software on our computers.

Mwei Mwei’s also becoming a bit of a teacher herself. San Aye is becoming literate in Burmese, and has a teacher that comes once or twice a week. However, she requested more practice and study time. As part of her work time, she now studies with Mwei Mwei helping her three days a week.

And still further–she’s one of our teachers for the Summer Program this year! Two mornings over the summer she teaches Burmese, Science, Math & basic English to the younger kids in the community. She is absolutely thriving in so many things these days.

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She celebrated her sixteen birthday a few weeks ago. It fell right near when the two Reinforcers were both turning seventeen, so we hosted a party for all three! We told them they could each bring five friends, and pick what day & time, the menu, and what movie we’d watch on the projector.

They initially picked Saturday morning at 8am for hamburgers, which surprised us a little.

Our laughter led them to think that wasn’t cool, so it was switched to Saturday night at 5pm. They still picked hamburgers, but wanted chicken.

{Beef is pretty expensive and not that favored by Burmese, so I asked if they wanted some beef and some pork. They all made faces of disgust–“Not beef! We like chicken.” Right. Chicken hamburgers, coming right up.}

They invited a collection of friends and family, including two toddlers…so it wasn’t we expected by any means. But, hey, we had chicken hamburgers and sodas and cake and popcorn. We watched Spiderman. And Mwei Mwei fell asleep, so… 🤷🏼‍♀️

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We gifted her a set of nail polish and nail care kit for her birthday. She loved it. She came the next day with her nails all done and I snapped this photo.

I don’t want to forget where we’ve come.

I don’t want to forget how her demeanor has changed since we sat with her in the ice cream shop last January. I don’t want to forget the day I had to use broken Burmese to ask her if she was cutting. I don’t want to forget the scowl on her face at every math lesson, Thai class, and English class.

I don’t want to forget the day she passed her multiplication tables. I don’t want to forget the day we talked about how much we believe in her. I don’t want to forget the day she thanked us for her new Thai class and teacher. I don’t want to forget my pride for her as became an excellent teacher in the Summer Program.

I don’t want her working alongside her mom, chatting and laughing, to become so normal that I don’t give thanks for the gift it is. It wasn’t there a year ago, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful growth.

So much has changed in the last year, and it’s been messy. I’m so glad she’s sixteen, because somehow that feels less ridiculous that we’re hiring her. I’m so glad we have some sustainable work solutions, because we were just pouring money into ideas.

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It still feels unfair, sometimes when I look at who we have hired: it’s uneven; it’s random. We have three ladies making bread, one lady making flower bouquets, two ladies making jewelry and sewing. We have one woman making breakfast for fifty & overseeing the community space. We have two boys running sound. Some work one day a week; some two, some five. Some have savings plans and some don’t. Some have extra education built into their hours, and some don’t.

The only pattern is that they are needs God whispered to us about. And I’m really thankful we felt the whisper for this need.

another home.

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You never really know how the cookie will crumble, and we have the privilege of being reminded of that daily.

We’ve been discussing a trip to Burma: we wanted to see the towns and villages many of our neighbors come from. We have the knowledge that as soon as we are placed for our adoption, we’ll be “stuck” in Thailand for at least six months; and we learned just recently that we also have another visa run we need to make in May…it’s a long story. But visas often crumble a different way than you think 😉

It was mid-February when we realized the easiest time for us to go to these towns and villages was on our current visa, which needed on February 22. That gave us a four-day window between a Reinforcers gig and our visa expiring.

So we applied for our visas to Burma, and they fell into place. So we went.

Some friends wanted to go that week, too, so we explained we could all go together, but we just couldn’t shift our dates at all because of visas. They seemed game, so we all crossed the border after church on Sunday and grabbed a car to take us to their village. It was Stephen & I, our bread baker Nyein Nyein and her husband Kyaw Htet, and their two-year-old Sai Bo Bo.

It’s kind of an event to go to Burma to see family, so Sai Bo Bo was all jazzed up in his best clothes.

In short, many of our neighbors and closest friends–maybe 75%?–are from this one particular town and surrounding areas. And one village just outside is where one bread lady is from, the flower lady and one Reinforcer, Thida–as you can see, a lot of families came from this little fishing village.

That evening we just stopped by, but we did get to see Nyein Nyein’s family. They used to live in Mae Sot and moved back about three years ago, so we knew them all. It was so fun to see the girls grown!

Unfortunately we can’t stay with friends in Burma: we have to stay at foreigner-registered hotels. Their village didn’t even have a store, so no hotels there. We went about thirty minutes further into Thaton, where there is one foreigner-registered hotel, and stayed there. We spent the next two days exploring Thaton while Nyein Nyein spent time with her family.

We spent the majority of our time biking around the city, our favorite way to see a place. It’s just fast enough to see a lot of it, but slow enough to actually see it. And you get exercise while you go! We biked just over 42 kilometers in two days and got to see so much of the city. We actually went about 5 kilometers out of the city in all directions, so…it’s a small town 😊

And it’s a beautiful town.

Our favorite building.

I think I will always love Burmese markets in particular.

We also climbed the local mountain, which is also a temple. Most of Burma & Thailand, at least from our experience, loves to build a temple on top of every mountain. And they love to make concrete steps that go all the way to the top. As a Westerner that prefers sloping, swerving hikes on real dirt and rocks, it isn’t my favorite. But it’s growing on me. I’m learning to love the views out rather than the feel beneath my feet.

So we climbed 903 steps.

My favorite part was near the top, when I was sitting to have a snack and water. A little boy came up to where he could see me over the steps and immediately turned around and shouted, in Burmese, at the top of his lungs, “Brother! Sister! There’s a white woman up here eating a snack!” I smiled and said hi, and asked why he wasn’t at school today. Instead of answering, he turned back around and shouted, “And she speaks Burmese!” 😂

By far the most fun part of the trip was just how natural it felt. We knew the language to get around, to get directions, to order. It was so simple compared to Mae Sot, where we are constantly switching languages or smashing them together.

We also knew the culture in a way we don’t usually. Mae Sot is such an extreme melting pot, and while we’ve learned the culture of this town specifically, we often feel at a loss when we are in a large Thai city or even meeting with our adoption caseworker. But the culture we know best–right in the neighborhood around us–just exploded into this town, and it felt oddly familiar. Yet another home.

On Wednesday, we went back through Thaton and visited Nyein Nyein’s family again before heading back to Mae Sot.

Nyein Nyein’s little brother and two little sisters spent so much time at our house growing up. Now they are attending school in Burma, and it was so lovely to see them.

Part of the village many of our friends are from. It’s right on the river, and they say every family has a boat. Fishing and shrimping (?) are the two primary livelihoods.

And they took us to the temple. It’s kind of the only thing to do in most towns, but especially villages of this size. They also fed us shrimp, because that’s the village!

Really, we loved the whole trip. We continue to be amazed as God shows us the pieces of the stories we know: learning more about each family, their history, their path to Mae Sot; the path of us becoming friends in the most unlikely ways. And also just how he keeps redeeming each individual relationship.

And somehow, how he’s made another home for us around the world.

all in a week.

by Filed Under: house calls, house church, housewares, kelli, onehouse, photos, playhouse, stephen 1 Comment

Whoa, what a week.

We took this crew to church on Sunday, including the marijuana hat. And snail hat was left behind.

The left hat caused me to write down this note to myself (hat@church), which I later came back to wondering why I was reminding myself to hate church. 😂

Sunday ended in a large community fight, involving a beer bottle being thrown at one woman’s head and a sword being drawn. We went to the hospital for emergencies twice on Monday night, and the teenage girl who came with us to help was locked out of her hut, because I mistakenly said I’d bring her back in the morning for school when I tried to assure her dad she wouldn’t stay at the hospital but be able to go to school in the morning. She ended up watching some Avengers with us over popcorn and sleeping at our house.

Stephen is teaching The Reinforcers to type in Burmese, and they are working on typing up all our songs for church so they can run them on the projector in coming months. I’m super impressed with all of them, but particularly the husband who can teach them how to type their language and provide them with so many new opportunities.

Wednesday we did a special Valentine’s Flour & Flowers delivery!

And had a flat tire.

And made little gifties for the kids: red off-brand Pocky sticks and pink strawberry yogurt drink. (Do you guys even have on-brand Pocky sticks?) I know you’re jealous.

This was confiscated from an eight-year-old, six-year-old and three-year-old playing with it at our house.

Girls are becoming teenagers and spent their week whispering about boys and things behind curtains. It’s adorable.

Stephen sent this to our little friend in Bangkok, who writes us on Facebook all day every day, and we mostly send photos, emojis, and stickers back and forth. My husband is awesome.

This girl can multiply! After bribes and weeks of practice, she’s got it, and I’m beyond proud. We’re moving on to division!

Stephen made a trip to the border to pick up our Burmese teacher’s wife returning from Burma. And he took this great picture with a great friend.

We did our Friday laundry load of towels and rugs, which is my favorite load of the week. I love what it represents: the feet wiped on the rug on the way in, the bread loaves baked, the breakfasts served, the hands washed before playing computer. It represents a full, active community space that requires so many towels.

We got matching button-up shirts for The Reinforcers that will soon be logo-ed, and we made badges with their names. They’re official! We announced it to the Mae Sot community last week.

And they had two gigs this Saturday! They started at 7am, doing an amazing job at a celebration for a local non-profit. There were over 800 migrant students present at the local university stadium. In the evening they ran sound for a worship night for another local ministry.

Somewhere in there we also had two significant meetings this week, working on two new and very promising connections for the two ladies sewing in our home! We’ll share more info soon, but for now, we are so thankful to see prayers answered and God providing work for them.

We also applied for and received a visa for Burma, and we leave tomorrow afternoon with one of the bread ladies and her little family.

We’re never bored, friends. We are never bored. 😊

our biggest fan.

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A few months ago, Thida found out she had a cyst in her uterus. I don’t know what the standard is stateside, but she was told to wait three months and come back for a followup. At that point they said it would either be smaller or have disappeared, and thus be nothing to worry about; or it would be larger and likely cancerous.

She was nervous, for obvious reasons.

Meanwhile, she’s one of my best friends here. We talk all the time, about so much these days. We’re often chatting about faith–what Stephen & I are praying for in the community, some of the challenges of living here, some of the challenges of working in the community. We’ve talked about the church giving money and how things like The Breakfast Club happen.

She told me recently that her nine-year-old son, Jor Gee, wants to be a pastor, just like our pastor Ah Tee, and he asked her if that would make her proud of him. She said yes, she’d love that. He’s one of the sweetest kids and is always looking out for the younger kids, the one who doesn’t have a snack, and anyone underprivileged. He’s always helping out.

Oh, and he’s always copying Stephen, because he’s his hero. Just recently Thida said he’s been praying for Stephen & I to have lots of money, and she asked him why (i.e. why pray for them to have money rather than our family?!). He said, “Stephen and Kelli give money away to all the Burmese people, so it’s better if they have a lot.” 😭

Thida and I have been talking through all these things–what the future holds for her kids; why we gave her daughter Mwei Mwei a job; why her oldest daughter hasn’t had kids yet.

She’ll teach me new recipes when I ask and helps me learn new words in the market. If anyone asks about me speaking Burmese (nearly every week) she uses it as a moment to brag on us. She tells random folks how great we are.

She’s probably our biggest fan around here, and we’re definitely hers. She’s one of our best gifts over the past year in particular.

So when she’s had this concern, I’ve been praying. And as we drove to the hospital on Wednesday, I asked her if I could pray with her. She seemed grateful, and said she was so scared. I prayed while I drove, and honestly, it was adorable how she folded up her hands so tight and placed them right in front of her face. It was like a Precious Moments kid. (Did anyone else’s grandma take them to the Precious Moments chapel as a kid? Anyone?)

And guys, when I saw her that afternoon at Playhouse, she was giddy. It’s gone, and she was just thrilled. She said thank you for praying. She said it was because we had been praying.

Honestly? I don’t know what God is doing in her; in that family. I have no idea how they view this faith thing.

Honestly? I don’t know why he answered that prayer so apparently, and not others. We’ve been praying for Aung Moe to have his vision back for years; or even just a plan for him. We’ve been praying for Daw Ma Oo for nearly a year, and while she’s improving, she’s back in Burma for another round of treatment and followup.

Honestly? We love that family so, so much. And I’m so thankful that God answered such a big prayer for her!

treasures: part 2.

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This week’s jar of clay brought to you by Flour & Flowers.

Friday found us baking & delivering 25 loaves of bread, 105 tortillas, and 19 pans of cinnamon rolls. This started at 5:30am and included all of the following disasters.

We made three batches of bread with the incorrect amount of sugar, which had to be redone. The three batches were still baked in the end, and will contribute to our neighborhood watermelon & bread party this weekend. (Why do we have 60 watermelons? Check out our Instagram @thespurlocks.)

A training that began at 9:30am for our two seamstresses, in one of the rooms. Since one of our seamstresses usually watches the kids during baking and the other has a child herself, that left me with 4 kids under 2 and under while Stephen was at a Burmese lesson and got back with lunch.

Then we attempted to feed them all and get them sleep. It was a mixed bag. (If you were in a bag and shaken up with four toddlers. That kind of mixed bag.)

We then ran off to swim oh-so-quickly in the one hour break before deliveries.

At one house, Pyo Pyo’s two-year-old managed to lock all the doors and lock us out. Thankfully I’d left the back hatch up for flowers, but after trying to teach him to open it…well, I climbed through the back of our SUV over flowers and bread in my dress. It was probably not completely appropriate, but I was out of ideas.

Not too many houses after that, we returned to restart the car and found a dead car battery. Stephen and a friend with a car came to our rescue (because motorbikes aren’t great for recharging car batteries).

Just another friendly reminder that we are perplexed and struck down, but this Flour & Flowers thing is still a treasure! We made profit amidst the chaos 😊

And I’m thankful for the calm, chilly Saturday morning that followed.

treasures.

by Filed Under: house calls, house church, housewares, kelli, on the house, onehouse, photos, playhouse 1 Comment

2 Corinthians 4:7-10

But we have this treasure in jars of clay
to show that the surpassing power belongs to God
and not to us.
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not driven despair;
persecuted, but not forsaken;
struck down, but not destroyed;
always carrying in the body the death of Jesus,
so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.

As I read this verse yesterday, I immediately thought of the treasure all around me: our community.

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Flour & Flowers is a treasure. I never thought we’d make it this far, and we’re over three years in. Somehow we’re weekly providing salaries to four families by driving around town with a car load of flower bouquets and bread. Those relationships, the miracle of it making profit and creating a savings plan–these are treasures.

And it rests in jars of clay. It rests on a foreigner market that flows in and out. We are losing and gaining customers nearly every month. It rests on a small store in the market that may or may not have the exact ingredients we need; or might have a different size pan this month, or perhaps a new type of flour. It rests on changing weather and a kitchen that is practically outside in that weather, so that some weeks the bread rises like a charm and other weeks we’re re-doing batches into the afternoon. It rests on second language learning that sometimes leaves us going in circles. It rests on women who haven’t completed high school, and sometimes keeping count of how many tortillas they’ve rolled or writing down the time the bread started rising is a challenge. (Just this week, the paper where they are to write the rising start time said “40 minutes,” and I had to ask, “But what hour?” It took us awhile to sort that.) It rests on changing government and laws; it rests on families dealing with the challenges of poverty.

We’re three years into me wondering if we could possibly keep this up every week. So that every week, when we finish and the books balance and salaries are handed out, I know that God made it happen again.

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The Breakfast Club just keeps growing. More kids, more days, more meals.

Every evening I wonder if it’s too much for Thida to be making breakfast for fifty every morning at 6. Every morning she awes me with her grace–her uncanny ability to predict portions, her kindness to the kids, her ability to check in on so many while serving so many others. Her checklists of each kid, while also reminding me of who needs to go to the clinic and who needs medicine.

And she reminds me if I forgot to give money for Aung Moe, the blind man in our community, eat, she reminds me, which has happened more often than it hasn’t…🤦🏼‍♀️

Because while Breakfast Club is amazing–a treasure, for sure–it rests in jars of clay. It rests on funding from around the world, on records that need to be kept up, on early, tired mornings.  It rests on a sacrificed kitchen.  It rests on Thida, whom I love and thank God for regularly, and who is herself a reminder of God’s surpassing power.

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The kids still come to play in the afternoon. (And they still ask every morning if we’re playing at 4 o’clock.)

It’s a treasure to see them pile in the door for Storytime; to see them clap and dance to If You’re Happy & You Know It. It’s a treasure to hear them sing Praise Ye The Lord outside our door on Saturday. It’s a treasure to see them learn to say thank you. It’s a treasure to see them master Minecraft and the alphabet. It’s a treasure to see them beat me at Mario Kart. It’s a treasure to see them win at Memory with pride and confidence. It’s a treasure to watch this girl come in every day to grab a pillow and a blanket and curl up on the floor.

But it’s one big jar of clay. It rests on me not losing my temper when one child throws a toy at another child. It rests on my explaining in broken Burmese why we don’t bite each other. It rests on getting that crayon off the wall. It rests on cleaning up water off the floor and having specific towels for cleaning up after un-diapered kids.

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Many of our most treasured moments of the past 7+ years have come in medical & trauma needs: women going into labor and babies seizing; women running from their machete-clad husbands; bloody wounds and broken fingers; stitches and daily bandage changes. In these moments, there are treasured conversations, treasured assurances, prayers and miracles.

But it all rests in jars of clay. I hate stitches, and they make me horribly queasy. I hate blood. I hate changing wounds. I hate hospitals. I am one big mess of clay when it comes to all of these, and yet–it’s a reminder.

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Light of Love Church is a treasure in our lives. This week I got to watch these two teenagers–off to the left in yellow & red–sing and worship together, while Stephen played guitar with the band, and two teenage boys ran sound by themselves.

And it sits in a jar of clay as we attempt to get everyone there before ten (and often “tiptoe in the back” with fifteen kids). I am a jar of clay when another kid gets shoved out of the back of the car on his birthday and eats concrete.

As I sing the Burmese lyrics and we pray together as a congregation, I’m often feeling the treasure. When we’re halfway through the sermon and I’m struggling to make the words into anything…pulling out every little word I understand: I aware of my clay, breaking.

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Our newest treasure is The Reinforcers. As we are struggling to finalize a logo and create some promotional materials for around town, they had three gigs over the past two weekends. It’s working and the guys are doing amazing.

But it is in jars of clay, too.

We received incredible gifts that made it possible to purchase the speakers–but not without usually Thailand-level difficulties of three hours on Bangkok public transit to sign a credit card slip, or picking up the delivery in multiple trips to town because the Mae Sot branch office offers “no service.”

We haven’t gotten the correct modem in the mail yet, so we’re currently using an old one we had. It works sometimes, but two times gave us a scare that it wasn’t going to. But when it worked in two last-minute miracles? A treasure.

Stephen had to bike home with one of them at 11pm on Friday, after a day that started at 6am, because the kid is still only 15. His mom waiting for him at the door with a huge smile of gratitude: a treasure.

We don’t know how it will all unfold; how popular it will be; how it will balance with the boys’ school and exam schedules. But we know it’s a treasure to get the time with them, to see it working. And we know that every little unknown will point us to it all resting on the surpassing power of God.

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This little community holds so many treasures for us. And we can’t control or handle or manage one of them.

We are afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down. {Read: This isn’t easy. Some days I’m done. Some days I want to “go home,” wherever that is.}

But we are not crushed. We are not in despair, we are not forsaken, we are not destroyed.

Instead, we are reminded every day of clay that we are. We are reminded every day that the treasures only happen by the surpassing power of God.

makro.

by Filed Under: housewares, kelli, on the house 4 Comments

We have a store in town called Makro. It’s similar to a Costco or Sam’s, sans the membership, where you buy things in bulk for cheaper.

They also have a song that they play in the background. While you can’t hear it over this blog, I’ll tell you it’s a catchy number:

Makro, Makro, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Makro, Makro, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

It then carries into verses, but these are all in Thai, so 🤷🏼‍♀️

While the two of us don’t really need bulk groceries, we buy some of our breakfast and bread baking supplies there, so I go nearly every week. Stephen used to come to help, but this led to him getting the song in his head and singing it repeatedly. It took about three days to get it out of his system…at which point I was only four days away from going and hearing it again.

And it’s not even a real song.

(Tesco also has it’s own theme song, so if we went there in between, well…🤦🏼‍♀️)

Anyway, when Breakfast Club took off, we made weekly market & Makro trips a part of Thida’s job description. She and I go every Wednesday to buy all the rice, soy milk, flour, salt, meat, veggies, yeast, butter, oil…We buy it all.

And if Thida goes with me, then Stephen doesn’t. And if Stephen doesn’t go, no song. #winning

Fast forward six months, when I really think I’m winning. I only have to listen to the song once a week for about twenty minutes, which is reasonable for any human to handle.

We’re all happy.

Then, last week over breakfast, I hear Thida in the next room, teaching the Makro song to her three-year-old granddaughter. Teaching it to her, like it’s a real song. #thewinningisover

And then this week as we’re shopping around Makro, and Thida sings along with the song and comments, “Ha, ha. Stephen loves this song!”

I want to shout #itsnotarealsong! at the top of my lungs.