Thailand Trip - July 2023

As I said in my last blog post, we are currently in Seoul, Korea and will be here for a bit longer. However, before we came here, all of us (Zoe, Yena, and I) spent a week in Thailand in the Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai areas, so north Central Thailand for a week on a sort of mission trip.

Zoe had gone on a mission trip to Thailand fo ten years straight from 1998 - 2008 while she lived in Korea with her church before she went to the US with me. She has always kept in touch with the missionary and his family and we have met and visited with them several times in Korea and the US throughout the years. Zoe has always wanted to go back to Thailand and this summer it was finally able to happen.

We met a lot of different people from college students, to older people in villages in the mountains, to kids from kindergarten to high school at the Korean mission foundation where there is a public/private elementary school and private high school. We prayed, worshipped, shared, and did our best to serve with our gifts and talents. I ended up for the last two or three days mainly teaching English classes all day to the kids and high school students. I even made a PowerPoint presentation and had an hour long meeting with the few English teachers there and tried to give them some recommendations and tips if they want to have more effective English classes.

I have to say I was struck by many things and God opened my eyes to many things. I went on this trip to just follow God and had no expectations and even looking back realize that I didn't do anything special, but hope that God still used me and my services of praying for others, teaching, and everything we did to encourage the people there.

I could post pictures on here with a lot of different people and kids, but want to respect their privacy and identities just in case. I will continue to pray for them and hope that God gives them bigger visions and dreams to follow! So, instead I have decided to just post some pictures of the beautiful scenary and of some of the cats and dogs that we met along the way.

It was very hot throughout the entire time and there was little relief since there wasn't much in the way of air conditioning where we were. The first couple of days were fairly spring like though when we were up in the mountains and could wake up every morning and look at the mountain on one side and then on the other side see the beautiful valley of rice fields and the big wide sky (please see below). The other places were beautiful, but not quite as beautiful and like I said very hot.