Where have we been?

Well, we've been all around, actually, but the times that we have not been teaching at the Bible college, receiving training in community development, assisting our director as he prepares for a teaching series in Singapore or showing Tiffany and Tamara around Northern Thailand (we had a great time girls! - hope you enjoy Bangkok) we have been in the village.

It turns out that although we do have a new home (video tour in a few weeks) we do not have the ability to get DSL internet, thus destroying our great ideas for video calls, blog posts, study and work from the village. There is a satellite option, but it is rather expensive and we aren't quite ready to make that commitment yet. So, for the time being, we will do our best to get posts up as often as possible - but the will likely come in chunks like you are seeing right now.

We are off to the village again this weekend and will be there for the next two weeks. Please pray for us as we will be beginning our forays into new villages as we begin the Mae Salong Project!

Tags:

• ministry
• update

Holistic Ministry

When we share about our work with the Akha, we stress a holistic approach to ministry. Simply stated, this means we seek to minister the whole gospel to the whole person through the whole church. There is a spectacular article by Ron Sider et. al. over at forMinistry.org if you would like to read more on these ideas.

This focus in our ministry has led us in surprising directions, including living in a village, the Akha Clinic, helping children receive formal education, and patience in the pursuit of definitions in our ministry as we build meaningful relationships with our village.

It has also largely kept us from preaching in church on Sundays or telling people "theological dos and don'ts" as we have observed the culture around us.

This year is the beginning of a new season for us, however, as we are now taking [tentative, deliberate] steps in the expansion of our ministry beyond our village. We are seeking to build relationships with our extended community of Akha, ultimately connecting with the 30,000 Akha living in the Mae Salong Region and assisting them in their journey towards spiritual, physical, emotional and intellectual health.

In the light of this direction we took a little time out of our village schedule to attend a training workshop that was hosted by Community Health Evangelism, an inspirational development program through Lifewind International.

The training was very beneficial to us, helping us to give more details in the way that we would like to help villages in their development as well as helping us to define and to defend why we do the work we do. Even more exciting, however, are the CHE resources which will serve as in invaluable tool as we move forward in our holistic ministry.

The total body of CHE materials now exceeds 1,500 specific lessons covering topics from A to Z. LifeWind manages and makes this resource easily available to trained CHE users. LifeWind also develops specialized materials on topics such as HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care, Maternal/Child Health, and Birth Life-saving Skills (BLISS) as cutting-edge resources addressing critical health issues. All CHE resources incorporate Participatory Learning, a teaching style proven effective in training people of all kinds, especially those with limited {formal} education.
-From the Lifewind website, italicized words are mine

So, we're excited about these tools, and these ideas. We are excited to see holistic development and lives that are characterized by health. And we're excited to see what God does with all these seeds which have been planted in our minds and hearts.

Tags:

• ministry

Signing Time!

This is A-Paw. She is hearing impaired. When we first arrived in the village three years ago, she was an outgoing, playful little four year old who had no idea that there was any difference between her and her friends. Unfortunately, without any exposure to sign language, in the past three years we've seen her eyes glaze over and her temper flare more and more often as she realizes that she doesn't really understand what's going on around her and that she can't adequately communicate her own wants and needs.

After visiting us last fall, our good friend John really wanted to help A-paw and her family, so he donated the first six DVDs in the Signing Time Series. Now that we have our new house built, we've brought up an old TV and started showing the series once a week to anyone that wants to come! A-Paw is a brilliant little girl and, after only a few lessons, has most of the words memorized. We're hoping that this, admittedly limited, exposure to ASL (although slightly different from Thai Sign Language) will give her a bit of an advantage should she ever end up at a school for the hearing impaired. If nothing else, we hope that she can have a few more words with which to communicate with her family and friends.

The added benefit of the Signing Time series is that it's a great way for the hearing kids to learn a bit of English. Our village has been nagging us to teach English ever since we've arrived, but we've been reticent to start official lessons, knowing that most of the kids in our village go to Thai school all day, and then head off to Chinese language school for three hours every evening. We just couldn't imagine that they would have any time or brain power left to sit through another lesson! Luckily, Signing Time seems to be a great solution because it makes learning fun! It uses songs and great visual footage to help the kids remember each new word, not to mention the, signs themselves, which are so intuitive and help the memory as well!

Tags:

• village
• children
• language
• education