We know our lives are far from normal when we spend our Saturday night hosting a community meeting and then laugh for hours with other people’s kids. But, this was our Saturday night.

Part 1: The community meeting went better than we could have expected! We had over thirty adults show and everyone was very responsive. We told them about the summer program for the kids we are starting this week–every Tuesday & Wednesday for six weeks we are going to have what we’re calling a “summer program” from 10am-12pm. We’ll have English practice, math practice, English songs, and Burmese story books. We’re trying to reach four to sixteen year olds, in our house, in the hottest part of the year–so we’ll see how that goes!

We also had to have some difficult conversations about immigration and police changes in Mae Sot, and some ways we can no longer help due to the risk. We also had to address some “abuse” of the system. It gave us a chance to share our heart to help, our heart to be here and to love, but also that we are humans and we have limits. And since thirty of them showed up, they all have huge families, and we are two people–the math is simple enough. With time, we’re working on developing mutual respect.

As everyone left about 8pm, we were hoping to sit down to dinner.

Part 2: John called on FaceTime. We’ve been trying to cross paths with John where he could talk to some of the kids after visiting a few weeks ago. Since everyone had just left from the meeting, Stephen went over to Musana & Zen Yaw’s house to see if they could come talk to him. Musana was eating and said she’d come when she finished, but within a few seconds was running after Stephen. “Did you finish eating already?” we asked.  “No. I’ll eat later!”

She was really excited.

With limited communication, we thought it’d be a shorter call, but the kids were all hooked. Right away they could see that it was day behind him, so we had a little lesson on what side of the Earth we’re each on and how the Earth moves around the sun. With each new kid that joined, the first thing they’d say is, “We’re calling America! It’s morning! It’s 9 o’clock! The SUN is out!”

There were seven us there by the end, and we’d toured John’s entire house. We explained how a house can have three floors, and how a basement can be in the ground. We saw the front of his house and the back, and tried to explain–extensively–why our house in America isn’t on his street. We saw his oven and dishwasher (a very good machine, they declared) and saw his fireplace light with a button. We saw what was in his fridge and identified different foods in English. We saw what his bathroom looks like and looked at American money.

To John’s credit, he was spectacular at making things interesting that, well, aren’t. The kids were amazed at the whole thing–every turn and discovery. Minds were blown, repeatedly!

They played Rock, Paper, Scissors and gave high-fives over the screen. There is also this game the kids taught us while he was here–they say different words in English and you have to do them, so it’s quite simple. But so is their vocabulary, so it’s mostly:

Walking. Walking. Walking, Sitting. Walking. Walking. RUNNING! Sitting. Standing. Walking. Jumping! Jumping!

Also, they like to combine them, like Sitting-Walking and Sitting-Jumping, which is just as hilarious as it sounds. So John did a few examples of those for us.

Part 3: When John had to go it was already nearing ten, but Stephen had the great idea of pulling out Photo Booth. Excuse how small these photos are and cherish the hilarious faces and egregious laughter!

I haven’t heard the kids laugh this hard. Ever.

As they went home and we went off to cook and eat dinner, Musana asked, “Can we do this again tomorrow!?”

When a couple of the kids asked about the washing machine last week, I didn’t think much of it when I let them climb on top and have a look.

I was surprised when they spent the next twenty minutes watching it do what it does best–wash clothes. It sounds similar to watching paint dry.

I was even more surprised when Zen Yaw came in days later and ran straight to the washer. “Kelli! Kelli! Come, come! Water! Water! Go!”

He started banging on the side of the washer. I told him I didn’t need to wash clothes–I’d just finished a load, and we’re still so-so on the water situation. I didn’t want to push it.

“We’re not washing clothes right now.”
“YES! WATER! GO!”
“No, we’ll wash tomorrow.”
“No. Now.”
“Tomorrow.”
“No.”
“…Tomorrow.”
“No.”

I let him turn it off and on a few times, “On, off, on off…”; open and close the lid, “Open, close, open, close.” We had a little language practice for both of us, but no clothes were washed.

Until this morning, when he arrived at the door to say hello and I asked if he wanted to wash clothes.

“WASH! WATER, WATER, WATER!”

His older cousin wasn’t quite as excited, but enough to join him and spend thirty minutes of summer watching the clothes spin. I talked them through how to start it, where I put the soap, and what buttons to push. We got out a snack of fish, a headlamp, and then we watched the clothes spin.

For thirty minutes.

It’s probably the cutest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Each time the cycle changed, it made a sing-song noise, or anything changed, he’d give a loud, “Oh?” with big eyes. He loved watching it spin and telling me when water was coming in.

Towards the end I had to go make Flour & Flower deliveries. He left begrudgingly, took of the headlamp begrudgingly, but accepted the fish as a peace offering. When I returned four hours later, he ran in the house and went straight to the washer.

“Water! Water!”
“It’s finished. The water is gone!”
“It’s not finished.”
“Yes, it is. Finished washing.”
“It’s not finished.”

So that’s the newest thing on the block! My neighbors are the cutest.

We had a friend in town visiting this week, which is always just a fresh perspective. While this is foreign to them and I watch them adjust and explore, I find myself thinking over and over again: I live here. This is home. Sometimes that is amazing: beautiful kids and laughter and Bingo games to win laundry detergent. Sometimes its exotic and we enjoy fresh pineapple and avocado smoothies before we visit a waterfall. And sometimes it is poverty, and the kids play in our trash and stay at our house to avoid drunken fathers and we hear fighting in the street.

All of these are true, for better or for worse. But it is still home! So here are some pictures of the beautiful parts of it.

John was a huge hit with the kids.

We bake bread on Thursdays with young moms. One of the little babes is 7 months, which is just enough to get around and out of reach. Yaminoo was recruited to babysit, which brings along her brother, Lay Tah Oo. And Pyo Pyo’s son, Pyint Soe, gets to play, too, since his mom bakes. My favorite is watching Yaminoo multitask as she reads an ABC book and keeps little Win Mo moving with her feet.

And then they decide they want to sing the baby to sleep–with blankets, in nearly 100 degree weather, with two ovens and stove top running. It’s official summertime, so many of our friends are heading back to Burma to visit family and friends! Here we were helping a family get to the border.

Bingo is a big thing. We recently expanded to “real” prizes, which include laundry detergent, toothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, sponges, and noodles. We hope to help meet more practical needs in a fun way, and it draws in more adults. We  are also finding that most kids over 6 will choose laundry detergent over candy, so it seems its meeting a known need.  We visited a few waterfalls while John was here. And even during the driest part of the year, there is fun to be had!

Isn’t she just beautiful? And its so fun to have the littles grow up with us and not be afraid of white skin and beards! She loves to have Stephen throw her up in the air.And some days, we sit on the washer and watch the clothes wash. For the older kids, we talked about what each button means and how it all works and watch the countdown until it finishes. For the littles, they exclaim over and over, “Water coming!” and “Whoa! Fast!” Instead of Saturday morning cartoons, we have thirty minutes of technology exposure!And this–this will be a photo I cherish forever. This house has so many stories in it. So many smiles, so many shaved heads, so much tanaka powder, and so many friends

While adults are often messy, these kids give us smiles and joy day after day. There are a few good things as of late that need not be forgotten.

There are a lot of babies in our lives right now, and six more on the way in the next seven months!

While calling Bingo every Thursday, I try to make sure there is a baby in my arms. While I look overly focused on calling numbers and maintaining my sanity–forty or so adults and children playing Bingo in a hot community space while the young kids shout in a tent and play trains in a bit chaotic, to say the least–look at this baby’s sweet face!

And with babies come older siblings with lots of responsibility. The newest tactic is to place the baby in a tire in our driveway, where they can’t escape, and then the sibling is left to play. I came outside one afternoon to three tires full of babies and no adult or older sibling in sight! They were off playing hide & go seek.

In this photo below, the top child is actually a baby, unable to get out of the tire. The child on the bottom is three and just climbed in to join the fun!

Sometimes it’s an adoring older cousin, too.

House Church has been fun lately as we’ve been going through the Gospels. We’ve tried to come up with ways to make the stories more tangible, including a snack of five loaves and two fish–

–and planting cilantro or flower seeds in good soil.
We also taught the story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet with perfume last week and gave each person a small perfume bottle. Which was very popular with them, but less popular with our own noses. Whoa.

The kids have been asking to help more in the kitchen and house, so the past two Saturdays have found them chopping vegetables in the kitchen. The first week they helped me make a tomato-pumpkin pasta for the band at our OneHouse worship night.

The second we we made chicken pot pies for us to take to a family for dinner and drop a second one by a family with a newborn. They certainly love to help, and they don’t mind having to wash their hands when our soap smells like oranges. And I don’t mind having help to chop a pile of vegetables when their hands are clean 🙂 The littlest sibling doesn’t mind it either. Who wouldn’t want to come to the house where they let you stand on chairs to see what is going on?

Pretty thankful to practice language and love on kids in a way that makes us all smile!

Later last year, Stephen and I felt like God put the “youth” of the community on our minds. We have so many opportunities to get to know the kids–our doors are always open, and their schedules often are, too. We have lots of toys the kids like to play with, they have no reserve for invading our home, and we have just about their level of vocabulary. It was a destined success.

And we’ve watched our opportunities with adults in the community increase, through tea shop visits, market trips, small business ventures, and adult bingo nights. And while these are good, growing relationships, they are often messy and complicated, too.

But we found there was a group in the middle: the kids too old for playing in our house and yet not quite old enough for business ventures. They often get left out of events we hold as they are left with responsibility for the younger children, laundry, or making meals. Or if they do get to come along to bingo or house church, they bring crying children. They often have to leave in the middle to get a bottle or new pants.

And we often found this group was a pretty vulnerable one. They are vulnerable to huge responsibility in the family: they are old enough to care for needs of younger siblings, help with business, and take care of household responsibilities. It helps that they are often sober, and thus even more capable. If they are too capable, they often find themselves pulled out of school and loaded with even more responsibility, sometimes a full time job.

Meanwhile, others in this group aren’t given enough responsibility and manage to find themselves with free time to drive motorbikes without a license or helmet, drink & smoke with their friends, and other generically destructive habits.

We just felt there was a need for a safe place. For some, a place for safe, positive fun. For others, a place of fun and freedom, safe from responsibility and younger siblings and more work.

We just aren’t really sure how to create that, but we’re trying.

This week we hosted our first youth game night. We haven’t miraculously solved the problems of local youth, but it was a start. And they loved it.

LOVED IT.

We included kids aged 13-18 years old. After we saw who entered, we know it should have been 14 at least, and we had one mom with a baby join, so we probably should have capped it at 17…

They loved the old-school Nintendo games Stephen set up on our projector. He had Street Fighter & Rush 2 for them to play. We laughed as they kept choosing the truck to race with and then driving on the opposite side of the road, even when the game would place them on the right.

We attempted to teach Uno, Pass the Pigs, Sorry, Dutch Blitz and Sequence. Sorry was a huge hit; and Pass the Pigs brought a lot of laughter for some reason. Sequence was declared too difficult and turned into a gambling game; I didn’t think of the cards and three colors of chips setting them up perfectly. Thankfully, we’ve already addressed this on countless occasions and we have an official stance on gambling: it is not in the act itself, but the money involved. The kids are allowed to “gamble” with rocks, paper, and whatever other little pieces they wish, but “no money, no money.” (This is repeated by the kids often, similarly to “No fighting, no fighting.”)

The biggest hit of the evening might have been our stool that spins, rises, and falls. Y’know the 90’s desk chairs that fall when you lift the lever? It’s like that, and apparently thrilling. They’d come to us over and over, “It’s broken! It’s not working!” We’d simply have to sit on it ourselves, because even these teenagers don’t weigh enough to make it work. We kept telling them, “No, it’s not broken. You have to be fat. See?”

The younger siblings still couldn’t be completely left out, so they propped themselves up on barrels in our yard to see in and watch the games on the projector.

We had snacks, and I know next time not to include fruit with seeds as they were discovered everywhere for days. I also know not to wash the couch cover the week before: it’s simply discouraging.

Otherwise, it will be happening again!

It was one of those weeks in the community, and this past weekend found us needing space–a place where nobody knew our names. So we found this:Which was a lovely, restful place, until our motorbike died on the way back from dinner, and we were now stranded in this lovely place where nobody knew our names.

Kelvin & Laura came to our rescue on Saturday and we took our motorbike to the shop, but we were overall less rested than we hoped.

But better things were coming. On our way through the market, we found that it was bunny season again! And my husband oh-so-sweetly agreed to another one.

Just for me, really. He plays along because he knows I love them!So meet Yoyo. Our previous little bunny was named Kayak, but this caused some confusion among the kids. We noticed that some of the kids thought “kayak” was English for “bunny”–and actually still do, because they still call this little guy Kayak..whoops. So in Burmese, bunny is “youn” with an emphasis on on the beginning, so “yoyo” is really just “bunny bunny” for the kids.

And, as a side note, also happens to be the name of one of the kids in the community.Yoyo is a big hit among the kids, of course. He is currently housed in the community space, and it kind of feels like we have a class pet!

Sunday morning found us up early for a race in town. There was a 5k and 12k, so I signed up for the 5k. I really haven’t been running much at all lately since we’ve mostly been swimming and biking together. But, I’m too embarrassed to stop in races, so I’ll keep going and push myself more than I will just running down the street. I thought it was an easy way to get a good run in.

These friends all ran the 12k because they are actual athletes.

I chugged along and made pretty horrible time, about 13 minutes per mile. It was amidst a hoard of teenagers, because they get extra credit at school for participating. And then the few of us who came because we believe in running. I think there were only 9 in my age bracket, and five of us got medals.

So basically, the medal says much more about my competition–or lack thereof–than anything of my ability.

But–a very big but–it was pretty fun. Who wouldn’t take someone cheering them on with a ridiculously oversized medal? I kind of want to sign myself up for every other race I come across, and maybe even begin to try. First feels within reach for the first time in my slow-paced, unathletic life!

I’m still not sure what to do with the trophy, though. It’s absolutely huge, and I can’t stick it away in a closet that I don’t have. I’m also slightly embarrassed to tell people what it’s actually for, so I’m tempted to hand it off to a child that will proudly put it in their house. We could even have our own little competition in the neighborhood and re-award it!

It does seem like the perfect story to tell someday, though. Can’t you just see the huge trophy coming out a box, awaiting a glorious tale, and really it’s just the slowest 5k anyone’s ever run in a race where they didn’t even understand “Go!”

And then we woke up early again on Monday morning, and opened our doors at 6am. A friend in town had a sling box back in the States, allowing us to project the Superbowl onto the big screen, complete with US commercials!

We had a whole lot of people in our little house and served up about fifty homemade cinnamon rolls. {Photo credit to our friend Jamie.}

What a weekend!

Though we don’t have snow, it is the coldest it has ever been since we arrived. I don’t even really have words. I can tell you it’s been 59 degrees Fahrenheit all day and all night, but that probably doesn’t seem too cold to you. For here, it’s unheard of. We might get such temperatures at night for a couple weeks during our “cool season,” but it always gets back up into the 90s during the day. We warm up, and then we bundle up for a few short hours at night.

This is a whole new game. We never warm up.

You see, we have no heat sources. Even in our house–the nicest house on the block, if you will–has very few heat sources. We have a water heater for our shower, which only has the capacity to heat the water about 20-30 degrees, which is absolutely nothing when your end result is a 60-degree shower. But the neighbors don’t even have that!

We can close most of our windows, but the houses are built to be open–they are built to let air through to cool you down. There are windows we can’t close, the tile floors remain frigid, and our “wet” bathroom is like standing on an ice skating rink.

And if we’re freezing in our concrete home, we can only imagine what it’s like for our neighbors! The kids are wearing all the clothes they’ve got and most of us are skipping showers.

We heard yesterday that it would be like this for a few more days, so we bought blankets for the community yesterday. Some of the houses are concrete and more like ours, but about half are more shanty-like, built of a collection of bamboo, wood, tin, plastic signs, tarp, and cardboard. We wanted to try to get a blanket to each family in these more shanty-like homes.

I was quite sick, so we sent a friend in to the market to bargain for 35 blankets. She got quite a deal at $6 each for big, soft blankets. We delivered house to house, telling them “our church in America” gave us money to buy them. We were greeted with huge smiles.

And to all those who support us to be here and support the community fund to buy things like this: thank you. Thank you for being the church!

In some ways, I think they were thankful for the practical help of a blanket. But I think in other ways it just gives them hope. When you are living on day to day labor & trying to feed your family, a bitter, rainy day is really discouraging. Sometimes we just want to let them know that we haven’t forgotten them, and ultimately that God hasn’t, either.

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Today was just as cold, so quite a few kids stayed home from school. They told me they are “sick,” but it seems to be just cold. But, when you have most of the kids staying home from school due to the freezing temperatures, you have our local equivalent of a snow day!

So we invited them in to our house, where it’s a little warmer. We set out blankets on the floor so they didn’t have to sit on tile and set out toys they could play with. Within minutes, they had their own school started, practicing the alphabet, days of the week, and colors.

After a few hours of play, they asked for Cinderella, and we pulled out the iPad for some movies.

They bundled up and watched through three movies, with a break for rice & curry in the middle.