The House Collective

youthfulness.

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This might be our favorite crew right now. We have been spending more and more time with the youth in the community, and we feel like so much is happening for them. The hope is vibrant.

For many of these students, we’ve known them since they were six or eight. Now they are teenagers, in high school or finishing it up. They are making vital decisions about how they will live; how they will emulate their parents and brothers and sisters or how they won’t. They are working outside of school, and we’re desperate to keep them attending. They are on phones and at football fields after school; we’re doing our best to be involved and be present.

Many of you know of The Reinforcers, students Stephen has been training in live sound reinforcement. As the kids have grown and situations have changed, this is changing often, too. But in short: it’s growing! And it’s amazing.

We currently have three Reinforcers: Pyint Soe & La Point are brothers, and Yedi is a cousin. We’ve all known them a decade! Pyint Soe is taking his final high school exam this week and we’ll be celebrating his graduation this weekend. He’ll be continuing with us in a heavy part-time roll as he waits to get his exam results and decide about university options. La Pyint & Yedi are working extra over the summer with some recording projects, and partnering with two other youth from a local Burmese church. Stephen is teaching recording and coordinating projects every week for all five of them.

We also recently hired another teenager, Thaw Thaw, who is our new Computer Manager. We have three desktop computers available for the older kids to play games and video games together during our open house hours. It’s our effort to keep kids in a safe place, encouraging collective community play, rather than individualized phone time or the nearby questionable hangout.

Thaw Thaw has been learning new games and teaching the younger kids, while managing it all weekly.

This group is now called The Reinforcers+, since it’s a broad sweep! We’re trying to meet with them regularly in a mentoring capacity. We are addressing difficult topics and trying to give them openness into our lives and our decisions, while challenging them to be intentional with theirs. This past month we met to talk about phone and computer safety and addictions.

They all happened to show up in yellow, then voted for us all to match!

Throughout the year we have a weekly English class for the youth, and we’ve expanded it for the summer. Every Monday, we are watching Planet Earth and doing a workbook about what we are learning using a curriculum created by a local non-profit. We then play games and talk together, again providing safe fun and conversation.

The students are also a part of our Summer Book Club, which I am so very excited about. More on that to come.

And beyond that, we do whatever we can do bring the students together for fun! We want them to trust us and know us. There is a youth worship night held in town every month or two, so we’ve been inviting them to come along. They absolutely love it.

There was also a breakdancing competition a few weeks ago that boys went to watch. And Stephen took one of the guys out for ice cream and games yesterday afternoon.

We’re really excited to have these friends in our home a few days through the week, for English and cajon and guitar and worship nights and games. We love that Oak knows their names. We are hopeful for breaking some generational patterns within the community, and we are really hopeful for their futures!

2019: in review.

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

I don’t want to attempt to quantify a year, but sometimes I look back on these numbers in awe. It’s incredible to see what God has done.

Long-awaited and quite miraculously, we adopted one little boy.

We spent 230 days as a family in 2019.
It was a good year. 🥰

We celebrated ten years of marriage!

Throughout different projects, eleven friends were able to have regular employment opportunities in our home.

2,900 Tranquility necklaces were made in our little border town and shipped around the world to be sold through Noonday Collection. Over half of these were made by three friends in our home.

202 bouquets of flowers were sold.
1,026 loaves of bread were baked.

And thanks to a local restaurant deciding to source their tortillas through us, a whopping 7,160 tortillas were rolled out!

This year, The Reinforcers project brought in 37,600 baht, or $1,245, which was then poured back into training and weekly work opportunities for a few teenagers.

Kelli took a regular self-defense class with a small group of young women. They completed a twelve-week program, followed by six months of regular review.

Throughout the year, we managed to renew three drivers licenses in two countries, renew a passport, renew a work permit, extend a visa, and acquire a new visa. And while I think I could count the number, I’d rather not know how many days I spent in government offices to accomplish this. 

I had set some personal goals for the year, but I didn’t do incredible at reaching them or even knowing if I did. 
I read 43 books this year, not meeting my goal of 52.
I memorized 51 Bible verses, and I’m working on the last one.
I kept running.
I kept swimming.
I kept biking.
But I have no idea how far I went.
I know I took this little guy along for quite a bit of it.

It was a good year. 🥰

the collective christmas 2019: christmas eve.

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Christmas Eve was really beautiful. We had a worship service outside, where two of the girls from our church came to help Stephen lead a few carols in Burmese. This is particularly special for a few reasons–one of the girls is Yaminoo, who we’ve known and loved for nearly ten years now, and is a young woman learning more and more about her walk with Christ every day. Also, Stephen sang and led entirely in Burmese, which is beautiful in its own way.

The Reinforcers ran sound, our church came to support and participate; I ran Powerpoint with Oak on my lap.

Really beautiful in more ways than one: so many of our favorite things; so much of our heart, sweating around candles on a balmy Christmas Eve on this street.


Then Stephen shared why Christmas is important to our faith, and invited everyone to a Bible class we’re going to offer in a few months. As you read this, take a moment to pray for this class that we’ll be hosting in March.

Following our Christmas Eve carols, we opened our Christmas pajamas as a family. This is also when Oak discovered all those packages under the tree had good things inside for him!

And while we had all the community gifts and Oak’s wrapped by Christmas Eve, we hadn’t finished wrapping for one another. So Stephen and I sat on either side of this door, wrapping presents while we watched a Christmas movie!

the collective christmas 2019: family dinner.

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Our first big event was our last Family Dinner of the year: our Christmas party!

We had a lovely meal together, and then I shared a bit of our hearts for them. This was one of the times I really felt God was asking me to be direct with our closest friends about how much we love them, as well as how much we are praying that they will see the truth of Christ.

Sometimes just saying what you really feel & hope for is very freeing, and I feel that even looking at this photo.

We then followed it with gifts, which was easily one of the highlights of the year. This group of friends are our closest friends in the community, and we know them well. I felt like I knew exactly what they’d want, and we picked out individual gifts for each person. Watching them open, exclaiming in joy; shouts of, “Thats just what I wanted!” We found affordable, locally-made cajons for the two students learning cajon with Stephen, and they were both so excited and surprised. We bought a suki set for Thida that she had been eyeing at the store each week we went together; the week before I’d actually talked her out of buying it because I already had it wrapped for her! It was just so, so much fun.

And then we played games!

We played Pin the Star on the Tree, a Jingle Bell Toss, and a jar guessing game. Really, it was just so very much fun!

the reinforcers: new staff!

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Over two years ago, Stephen began working with two teenage guys, training them weekly in sound reinforcement. We soon found out it was important they learned some other skills, and it just became an apprenticeship. Stephen taught them a variety of things from soldering cables to wrapping cables, from saving files to typing in Burmese, from how starting up a computer to using iCloud. He taught them how to set up speakers and ground a system if you’re getting shocked. He taught them how to run a projector and even to appreciate coffee on long production days!

After just over a year of training, one of The Reinforcers graduated and needed to move on to a full time job. His job in town is every day until six, so he wasn’t able to to work with Stephen anymore. We were down to just one Reinforcer.

We have been looking and considering who we might add into the mix. For this year, we didn’t feel an urgency, and more importantly, didn’t see too many options due to age, maturity, and other factors. Stephen instead focused on Pyint Soe, strengthening the relationship, expanding his skills, and investing in his future.

This year, he’ll be heading into tenth grade, which is the final year of school here. It’s an intense year as the students prepare for Myanmar’s final exam–a six-subject test spread over six full days, with a pass rate of around 30%. Students often have extracurricular study early in the morning and late into the evenings, sometimes over the weekend.

We still aren’t sure how this will play out for Pyint Soe, and we’ll do our best to continue investing in him in the coming year and hopefully further. But it did become clear over this summer that we needed to have another trainee moving in. And thanks to a few projects Stephen has taken on, he’s been able to train Pyint Soe further and cover two weekly salaries!

Enter La Pyint. This is Pyint Soe’s younger brother. {Let me interject here to say this community turns out to be just a few big families. Everyone is everyone’s brother and cousin and auntie.} We’ve known La Pyint since he was six. Now, at fifteen, we both felt like he was at a great place to move into the role. He’s shown so much consistency in the past year, coming to cajon lessons weekly and English lessons once or twice a week. He’s also been increasingly interested in computers and music both.

And since they get along quite well, they were both excited for the collaboration!

Now, they’ll both be attending church with us weekly, continuing to learn and manage the sound system & PowerPoint. They also train one night per week on basic computer skills & typing in Burmese. Currently, Pyint Soe has another day or two a week he works on recording projects with Stephen, which we hope to bring La Pyint into with time.

Both of them are taking intensive English classes with me over the summer, and La Pyint will continue to cajon. Stephen hopes to meet with them monthly for focused mentoring when the school year begins.

And we love them. They are like brothers to us: making us laugh, teasing us, & teaching us. We are getting to know them more and more with each week, and we love that.

And while I was initially skeptical of the name, it’s grown on me. We are loving The Reinforcers and all it’s growing to become! It’s still serving to invest in teenage guys in our community, and perhaps doing so more than we even hoped. We are thrilled that one young man was able to finish high school, and that we have another preparing to graduate in just under a year. We are really hopeful for what the boys are seeing & absorbing; we are hopeful for their futures.

Meet The 2019 Reinforcers.

a long time coming.

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Sometimes dreams take a long time in coming.

Years ago Stephen wanted to work toward unifying the multilingual Church that surrounds us. There are so many different languages and backgrounds, but he wanted to have worship songs available in different languages in a way that it would be easy for everyone to sing together in the language of their choice. Ultimately, he hopes to have resources like this available to churches around this region, including recordings in difficult languages, translated chord charts, and more.

To start, it was a worship night, that has taken on different looks in different seasons of our life and of the Mae Sot community.

This month, Stephen worked really hard to gather together young leaders from the Karen, Burmese, and Thai community around us. They worked together to gather what songs are already translated and have the information available. They practiced to sing together, with different verses being led in different languages.

We also partnered with multiple para-church organizations in town to have a big enough space in the rain and to have a full band.  It was a group effort to say the least, and that made it more amazing to see it happen last night.

Fifty or sixty people came, from different countries, backgrounds, statuses and ages. We all sang together in four languages.

It was beyond beautiful, and a really lovely step into this dream.

The Reinforcers were both scheduled to run sound, but only one was able to come due to a family situation. Because of the system Stephen chose for them, The Reinforcers are able to run it all from an iPad, which allowed him to sit in the audience with friends and sing along while he ran sound for the whole event. And while I don’t really know how to describe it to you–because you have to know him, to know his story, to know how much we pray for him and love him–but to see him using a new skill confidently among his peers, while singing along in Burmese and English; to see him really enjoying himself at a “church event”–it was a great opportunity. Sometimes church here can be very structured, for lack of a better word, and we want so badly to show this community how loving Jesus can be fun and natural and a part of your life; not just a boring sermon on Sunday.

We also had three teenage girls from the community join, able to sing alongside Christians from their school and in their own language, right alongside us.

It was a culmination of a lot of good things, and we are just celebrating that we got to be a part of it!

bits of the chaos.

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International Women’s Day happened–about a month ago now!–and we participated in a local event. The Reinforcers ran sound for a local band, and Flour & Flowers donated & served cinnamon rolls to the audience. Mwei Mwei also came along to practice her newly acquired photography skills.

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I’ve been {attempting} teaching Sunday school at our Burmese church once per month. It’s been a challenge, to say the least. First, attempting to teach Bible (most often presented in very high level language) in Burmese is no small feat, and I’m just not there yet. Second, the kids tend to know they can walk on me. Our neighbor kids are slightly better, but most of the other kids at church know I only understand some of what goes on!

I’m learning.

First, I’ve learned to bribe: they are each promised a small prize at the end if they are good. If they cause problems, it gets taken away. This worked wonders, and was well-worth handing out snacks and toothbrushes.

Second, I’ve simplified. Perhaps communicating how the prodigal son returning to the Lord is a parallel to us returning to our Heavenly Father was a bit ambitious. This past time I set my goal at one verse. I chose Psalm 119:105. We practiced it in English, we memorized it in Burmese; we discussed what it generally meant. We learned a song for it in English.

Then, we each got a pair of $1 flip-flops, which we decorated with the verse and it’s meaning with Sharpies.

And last, I taped paper to the floor to make a human-sized CandyLand game. Each square was either a color, ABC, ကခဂ, or 🎵. They drew and went to the square, where they either had to say the color, the verse in English, the verse in Burmese, or sing the song.

They left with a much simpler understanding, but I also felt like I could successfully communicate it all! I felt like they learned more overall, kept their attention, and for a group of lower-income kids, they went home with new shoes, snacks & toothbrushes.

We also were able to finally get in touch with a couple in Burma who recently translated the Children’s Storybook Bible into colloquial Burmese!

This is an incredible resource, and I’m so excited to use it, both for our summer program & for Sunday school. It should be easy to understand for even lower-education levels, and I’m just beyond excited.

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High school for the migrant schools goes up to Grade 10, at which point the students take their final matriculations. This is a weeklong exam–one subject per day, including English, Burmese, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Math–that is similar to an ACT or SAT for us. It’s incredibly difficult, and how they score not only determines their acceptance to college, but also decides your major for you.

No pressure or anything.

For the past six months, most of the students have lived in a dorm at the school, where they attend regular classes during the day and return to eat, then study together until midnight. They also study in the morning before school from 6am to 8am, on Saturday morning and on Sunday evening–with a 24 hour break on the weekend to visit their families. Every day for six months.

Our sweet little sister, Pwei Pwei, has been living at the dorm for these past six months, and we’ve only seen her occasionally. We’ve gone to visit, we delivered her Christmas present…but we’ve missed her! The day she came back from her exam she fell asleep on our floor, surrounded by fifty screaming, playing kids.

She’s now one of our teachers for the Summer Program, and we’re so glad we get to see her everyday!

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Thida and I were on our weekly market & Makro trips. I was looking for ant poison because, well, I live here. She asked if I knew anything that could work for rats, as they had some at their house and she just didn’t know what to do about it. I helped her pick out some glue traps and explained how to use them.

As we unloaded things from the car, her son saw the picture of the rat on the front of the package and asked what they were. I explained they were to kill rats; and he said, “Oh! We need these!” He was relieved to know his mom had bought them.

Just two days later, she told me they worked great and she was so pleased.

“Oh, have you caught some already?” I asked.
“Yes! Ten!”

😳😱

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We came home last Wednesday to the two ladies sewing in the Housewares room, per usual; and then four kids asleep on our community floor.

I have no idea.

In general, I have a hard time understanding the fleece blankets when it’s April, and ’roundabout 100 degrees.

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With our new duplex-style living (with one house ours and one house for the community) we have a new front yard area that is kid-free. We have recently put in a little grill, an outdoor table, and a lovely hammock!

But this “kid-free zone” has a gate that a few tiny little kiddos can squeeze right under.

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I received this Facebook message from one of our community friends.

I have no idea. But, unfortunately, I’m fairly certain that’s a Bitmoji of me.

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Easter weekend arrived! We had a OneHouse for Good Friday, and it was absolutely beautiful. I love hearing worship in multiple languages, and Stephen is doing a great job of bringing people together.


 I had my first attempt at hot cross buns, too!

And at church on Easter Sunday, they had a basket of hard-boiled eggs up front! We were a bit excited, in hopes of an egg hunt for the kids. Instead, we were all handed a hard-boiled egg on our way out.

Almost as quintessential.

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Otherwise, we often have kids around us. And more often then not, they are smiling or making us smile.

So, #winning.

all in a week.

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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. 😊

treasures.

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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.

the reinforcers: the beginning.

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And just like that, it’s a thing. It’s a part of our lives, a part of schedules.

It’s a new project!

And more than that, we’re seeing God working here. It’s encouraging and fresh.

In short–Stephen dreamed this up over a year ago. He wanted to provide a rentable sound system in Mae Sot that comes with two mentored, trained teenagers to run sound. His idea was to get the initial sound equipment funded by grant, which would allow the project to then be sustainable to provide work for two young men and maintain the equipment and allow for growth.

Honestly? When we didn’t get the grant, we were a bit thrown off. Stephen particularly felt so sure he was supposed to start this, but unsure how to go about it without the initial investment. We were nervous to raise it individually because of other needs in the community (i.e. The Breakfast Club–you hate to fund a sound system over a malnourishment program). And we just really wanted to make sure we felt it was the right thing before we spent a good portion of our year’s expenses on it.

A quick budget breakdown: In 2016, we spent right around $10,000 on all the community projects–medical, playhouse, Flour & Flowers, Christmas. In 2017, we added the community center side and added The Breakfast Club mid-year. We haven’t finished crunching the books just yet, we were estimating $15,000 for the year; a pretty significant increase for us. And this project we were estimating at $4,000-$5,000, a very big portion and in 2017 would have doubled our community budget.

All that to say this: what a big God we serve.

As the year progressed, Stephen still felt the need was there for these two boys, as well as the opportunity. Further, he felt the market was available in Mae Sot, and that it just. might. work.

{Cheapskate Kelli was still a little concerned, but wanted to be Supportive Wife Kelli.} So when Stephen felt like we should do a year-end request for this particular project, we did. After a Christmas party, in the midst of chaos, we sent out a choppy video to explain the project.

Y’all, it was amazing to see. We received over double what we hoped for, and we are so excited (and maybe a little nervous) for what God has in store. {While he always provides for what he puts in front of us, sometimes financial provision isn’t the only daunting part!}

Fast forward just weeks, and Stephen was trekking across Bangkok to sign a credit card slip for a whole set of sound equipment!

Fast forward five days after that, the boys had their first gig with the new equipment–running sound for a worship night of fellow Burmese & Karen youth.

Fast forward another six days to this past weekend, when they all ran sound on Friday night for a concert, Saturday night for OneHouse worship, and Sunday morning at church.

Can I just tell you some of the amazing things about this?

– We are still working on the logo and fliers and marketing material, and The Reinforcers have been hired two weekends in a row. The response from expats: positive. The response from the guys: positive. The response from the boys’ families: positive. The response from the Spurlock House: positive exhaustion.

– The guys are getting to work with Stephen on nights and weekends, so they are still attending school and taking exams, but also able to help their families, both of which need the assistance.

– They come to our house for a couple hours after school on Tuesday to practice new sound skills and to learn computer. They are able to get one-on-one time with Stephen and learn skills to set them apart in the workforce.

– We are able to use some of the equipment at church each week to help out our little Light of Love community, too.

– The guys run sound for church every week, where they hear the sermon, learn the songs, and experience the body of Christ in their own cultural context.

– On Tuesdays, Stephen is teaching them to type Burmese on the computer and how to manage Keynote. By April, we hope to be taking our projector to church each week with a database of songs, to save the church bulletin paper while continuing to improve the boys’ computer and literacy skills.

The boys love it, they do. But they are shy. They are hesitant. They are teenagers. We see it the most in the moms, who open the doors to their kids at 11pm with huge smiles on their faces. Who tell us thank you a million times over, because they know that this is opening up great opportunities for their sons and families. And they know Stephen is probably the greatest guy in town for them to be hanging out with 😊

I can’t really capture how excited we are for this, and how much we are just awed seeing it roll out so quickly. Are we a little nervous? Heck yes. It’s a commitment–everything is. But we can also see God’s fingerprints all over it.

Oh, and the name is sticking. The Reinforcers are the newest piece of The House Collective!