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.

It was a Tuesday night, and Laura & Kelvin had invited us over for dinner with another couple. I came in as they were talking about a playground our friend Cole had built for a local organization. He had all the wood cut and prepped, all the supplies, and four students helping him put it together the next morning at 9am, but the organization had just told him they couldn’t do it that day.

It was one of those things that just plays out faster than you can think about it–which I say very, very often about our lives.

He came back with four boys and a truckload of wood and tires the next morning at 9am. We did relatively nothing, except leave our door open for them to have access to drinking water & electricity.

Let me just tell you, that is the best way to do home improvement projects.

So we came home to a new playground for the kids!

There were a few tricky days of keeping the kids off the wet paint. Plenty of kids claimed to have not played on it while sporting green smears of paint in their hair.

There were things we didn’t think through, like the location of playground mere feet from our bedroom window. We are greeted each morning around 7am, as the kids come to our “bus stop”–bags and lunches are piled on our porch and children are piled onto the swings.

But hey, that one morning it was 6:30am showed us that 7am isn’t too bad. And giggles and shouts outside the window are better than blood and fighting! It’s all about perspective.

And really, it has been so fun.

It has been a small way to bring some kids and families back to our street after our little community was disrupted nearly 18 months ago. We are seeing faces we have missed and our house is seeing even a new phase as the hub of the neighborhood.

We are so thankful for those who give our House Collective Fund and provided for the playground supplies, along with Kelvin & Laura’s help!  Cole also did a great job organizing it all, and has already been back to fix the things the kids break.  We are also really thankful for the giggles and smiles filling our yard 🙂

The space between us and our sweet friends in Mae Sot is getting smaller.

Sometimes I am able to see the small ways we are more like each other and learning from each other; making that gap just a little smaller. I have taught them to go in a circle when we play a game, rather than a randomly. They’ve taught me to just be with friends and appreciate silence. I’ve taught them what a blender does and how to use an oven; they’ve taught me how to play with rocks and truly enjoy it.

We’ve taught each other that we’re not so different, and we boast about each other to our friends. I hear them tell market vendors about us and what languages we have learned and how we help them; I show them how I post their pictures all over Instagram and Facebook.

But sometimes there is still a space between us.

A few weeks ago one of the young girls asked me if I wrote all the books on my bookshelf. When I told her no, she asked if my friends did.

She pointed to two pictures on two different, unrelated books, and asked if it was the same girl. When I said no, she asked if they were at least sisters.

How smart does she think I am? Or all my friends, even? I tried to tell her that they were written by all different people about all different things with pictures of all different people. I showed her that some were about God and some were about children and some were about government.

She looked pretty confused. Because really, our worlds are still very different, even sharing the same street.

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We came back from Bangkok last week. We are usually bombarded with people helping us carry our bags in and opening the door and greeting us with hellos (and the ritual “Oh, how fat you’ve gotten!”).  Our bags end up right inside the front door and the kids began helping us to unpack.

We have extremely helpful friends.

They loved to find the toys we had bought at Ikea, and pulled out the train sets and stuffed rabbit and memory games with excitement.

And then they found the Ikea catalogue. They excitedly asked if they could read it and seemed confused looking at the different pieces of furniture. They came to a page with a birthday cake on it, and asked who’s birthday it was. They pointed to each person over the next couple pages: Is it her birthday? Is it his? Who’s birthday is it?

{A few days later being asked that question more times than I could count, I’ve decided who’s birthday it is, and I tell them the same girl every time.}

After a few more pages they found a spread of food on a table. They gasped and started to pretend eat it.

Have you seen kids do this around a picture of food? They grab at the pages and pretend to stuff their faces with this incredible spread.

This incredible spread all designed on a perfectly arranged table with perfect lighting by a whole team of people.

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Sometimes we see difficult things here. Sometimes you come home from a birthday dinner to find a stab wound bleeding out on your porch and you fall asleep in the ER while you wait for him to be stitched up. Sometimes people ask us for jobs or tell us that if their husbands hit them “just a little” it’s okay. Sometimes you see houses flooded up to the knees and watch your friends pile their precious possessions of blankets and televisions on your front porch.

These things can dwell with you and wear you out, it’s true.

But sometimes, its just when a child asks if you wrote all the books in your house or tries to eat the food out of your catalogue. You don’t expect these to stick with you or wear you out, but you can feel the weight.

The weight of knowing there will always be a gap between us.

We will keep learning more about each other and we’ll become better and better friends. I’ll learn to recognize their laugh from far away and find more jobs for them.

But there will always be a gap.

I will always have been born into privilege. And they will not.

Perhaps that is the weight that really wears; perhaps that is really the space between us.

There are three school options for the kids in our neighborhood. There is a migrant school down the road, one of the largest of 70 in the area, that they can go to. Many students have for years, until this year, when the fees went up considerably.

There is a Thai school just across the highway, and according to Thai law, migrants are permitted to go. That said, this town has way too many migrants for the number of Thai schools, so the openings are limited.

And as of this year, a new migrant school moved into our neighborhood, that was cheaper. A lot of parents took this option. It is a chaotic school, and sometimes we wonder how much teaching occurs, but they are certainly trying.

But this past week, they were kicked out of the house & land they were on just around the corner from us. They had to move just a quarter mile or so down the highway.

This meant two things:
1. School was closed for two weeks, which left many, many children at our house all day, every day for two weeks, like a little reminder of the chaos of summer break.
2. Now that the school is down the highway, they have a “bus”–a truck with seats in the back– that makes trips to bring the kids to school.

I’ll give you one guess where the bus stop might be.

Oh, yes. It’s our front door & driveway, the perfect place for kids to wait out of the rain. In some ways, we are so glad to be such an integral part of the community. In other ways, twenty or thirty kids gathered outside your window from 7:30 am to nearly 9, while they eat breakfast, play games, & wait for the bus can be overwhelming…

But I guess we’re the new bus stop!