Back in Chiang Mai

We were welcomed into Chiang Mai on Sunday afternoon by a heavy downpour of rain.  Usually, we would be excited about such a rainstorm, but we were not considering all of our belongings were packed in the back of the truck with no shelter from the rain.  Moving back into our home in Chiang Mai was a little wetter than we would have liked, but laughed at the irony.  We were thinking of coming back to Chiang Mai on Saturday, but stayed in Thoeng one extra day since the pastor of the church told us that the church would like to give us a gift on Sunday.  It was nice to see the church members before leaving and also say thank you to them for allowing us to come and help.  The ironic thing is, that part of their gift to us were some nice towels.  They must have known that it would rain on us coming home.

Yesterday, we taught our first English classes back in Chiang Mai at TLC English Center.  This will be the last Java Talk course of the summer since students will be returning to study at the university in June.  For this Java Talk course our focus is discussing movies.  During the two week course we will be watching two movies, our first movie is Secondhand Lions, that have a motivational moral message.  Each day, we will watch about 30 minutes of the movie and discuss related questions.  The first day of Java Talk went well and the students expressed their excitement for the course.  We are also teaching an advanced class at 5:00pm using our conversational English curriculum.  The students in this class are all new students to us and we look forward to getting to know them.

As some of you may know already, Thailand is experiencing politcal unrest.  Demonstartions in Bangkok by a group called "red shirts" that began peaceful have become more violent as the military has been fighting back with live ammunition.  The red shirts are protesting for a dissolution of Parliament and calling for new elections since the red shirt's political party was not able to participate in the previous elections due to corruption charges.  So far negotations have not been successful and the violence continues.  Some reports say that the number of casualties have reached 35 people, but the actual number is not clear.  Please join us in prayer that the violence does not continue to get worse and a solution is in the not to distant future.  Please also pray that through all the chaos, people will turn to Jesus and see the peace and love He offers.