Thailand July 6-20, 2009

This blog is designed for you to be able to get information about your upcoming trip, ask any questions that you may have and see cool pictures and hear great stories of the place you will be spending a part of your summer.

It is our hope that we can interact together on this blog and get to know each other a bit more before we embark on this life changing journey. Please feel free to ask anything you may be curious  of, even if it seems silly or bizzar and we will answer to the best of our knowledge, or we will just make something up that sounds good.

We hope you enjoy.

For your time in Thailand, if you are not in the village, you will be staying at the Akha Youth Development Center. This is the center where they run the school for the Akha youth. There are houses and classrooms on the property where we will be meeting, sleeping and eating. The campus is approx. 20 minutes from the city of Chiang Rai.

Our time will be mixed with training and outreach. The training will consist of times of worship, teaching, prayer, justice focussed issues, and sharing. I am very pro interaction, so a lot of the times we will have together will be discussion based. I think that we learn better that way, by sharing how we feel about issues and talking it out together. During these times we will be praying for each other and for the ministry and people we are going to be working and ministering with in Thailand.

The training will be mixed with times of outreach. For example, we will spend some time at the beginning of our time talking about the Akha people, then after we will go on a prayer race thought the city of Chiang Rai looking for different places, meeting people and praying for area’s of influence, such as education, government, media, health care and the family. We will always take time at the beginning and the end of our ministry times explaining what we are about to do and afterward talking about how it went.

Some of the other things we will be involved in during our time there will be helping out at orphanages, working with HIV/AIDS children, running children’s programs in villages, and at local centers, visiting and working in a local village, fishing, playing sports, preforming music, visiting a leper colony (dependent on the state of the colony), and working with local churches. All of these things I believe are close to Jesus heart and are things that are going to bring change and encouragement to the Akha people.

I will be posting more when I get more details from Rusty, our host in Thailand, but if you do have any questions please leave a comment or a question on the blog. I hope this gets you even more excited than you already are about the trip, I can’t wait to hang together.