On our way to Mu Bahn Chang
Mu Baun Chang on our P-day.
Update:
Hello faithful readers! Every week here in Surin just continues to get better. I love serving here with all these wonderful people!
Lately for our service hours, Elder Harding and I have been helping a member with her yard. About two weeks ago, there was a ton of trash everywhere and random giant piles of dirt. We threw away all of the trash in her yard, spread the dirt out, and made some pretty cool flower beds. All we have left to do is plant the flowers. Her yard looks so much better now and this lady loves making us food too. Bonus!
There is a man named Soam Kuwen that is a frequent investigator of ours that we teach. He is a security guard who just kind of sits there and does nothing for work, so we usually come and teach him while he is working, but this week he was not there. There was a different worker who had replaced him for the day, so we asked him if he was interested in learning about Jesus Christ with us. He seemed very edgy and was not interested in learning. Suddenly, he got a phone call, which turns out to be his 13 year old son. The dad said that he was talking to white people and he was busy, and we could hear the son yelling into the phone, "I want to talk to the falangs!" over and over haha. He finally just said okay and gave my companion the phone. So I just kept talking to him while my Elder Harding talked on the phone. When Elder Harding was done calling, he just said, hey, your son wants us to come over to your house next week on Thursday. It was pretty funny because he didn't want to meet with us, but his son just set up an appointment for him.
Last P-day, we got to go to a place called Mu Bahn Chang. This place was way out the way of just about everything. Being in Surin, I am already on the middle of nowhere, but out there, there are very few white people who have ever been there. It is so fun being able to think about that. So the name of this place, Mu Bahn Chang, literally translates to elephant village. It is named that for a good reason because the elephants are just swarming everywhere. It was a blast.
At the end of the day on Christmas Eve, we were about to get on a 3 hour bus ride to go home, and one lady stopped us and said she was a teacher at a school. She said that tomorrow (Christmas day) she was going to teach her class about Christmas and what it represents. Then, she asked us if we could help her, we thought that would be a great idea! On Christmas day, we woke up at 4:30 in the morning and went to the Seven Eleven. We bought about 1200 baht worth of candy so we could give it to the kids we teach. It is crazy because that much bought reverts to about 40ish dollars, but with the amount of candy we actually bought, it probably would have cost 200 dollars in America. I love how cheap everything is here in Thailand. Anyways, we got onto a bus out to the school that we were teaching at, and basically slept until we got there. We showed up at this school, and trust me, I will never have an experience like this for the rest of my life. The school was a bunch of classrooms in a big square with a big field in the center. We walked up to the school into the field so all of the kids hanging out outside their classrooms could see us. All of the kids started running away from us. They were all around age 7 to 12 and they were running into their classes, hiding behind trees, and just staring at us from far away. They were so scared of us. Every once and a while, there would be a brave soul who sees how close they can get to us, but we say hi to them and they would run back to their hiding place. It just slowly escalated from that until they were about 100 kids just slowly walking towards us. Not sure if we were scary or nice. We were just completely surrounded by these children on every side. Eventually one of the kids was brave enough to walk up to us and so I gave them a high five. From that moment, every single child at this school wanted a high five from the tall white guy. I have never given so many high fives to so many people is such a short amount of time. They started climbing all over me, wanting me to lift them really high, taking me to their class room, or just straight up punching me as hard as they can. I am not going to lie, I didn't know if I was going to accidentally step on one, or they would tackle me and trample me to death first. It was one of the most fun days of my life! This really reminded me of my little brother Sarger and all the times we wrestled and I roughed him up a bit. It was so much fun!
We finally found the lady who wanted us to help teach her class, and it turns out she was the principal of the whole school! It ended up being an entire pep rally with the whole school. So we walk into their auditorium and there are 200 kids sitting in front of a stage. The principal hands me the microphone and says "Alright, go teach them about Christmas. Speak in Thai please." I was just like uuuh yeeeah... Okay... It went great! I just felt words coming to my head that I forgot were in there. I definitely believe God was helping me while I was speaking. After we were done, we were brought to these nice chairs and we were brought hot chocolate and treats while a ton of the students did dances to Christmas songs on the stage. It was totally fun. After a while, I asked if we could go up on stage and dance with the kids. She said yes so we ran up and I started doing the worm and other dance moves in front of everyone. It was so fun.
It was sad that I wasn't with my family for Christmas, but that was one of the best Christmases I have ever had!
This week I got to call my family. They seemed like they were doing great. It was so much fun! I can't wait until next time I get to call them.
Some weird food I got to eat this week was pork, except there wasn't any actual meat. It was literally all just the fat and the skin. I don't understand why whoever gave that to us thought we would like it, but it was fat, the skin was rock hard on all the fat, and most of the pieces still had hair on them. I still ate as much as I could bear to be polite, but it was enduring.
Have a great week this week!
-Elder Barron
