After the stove sat around the house for a few weeks I finally managed to find time to install it.  It really adds a lot to the house and came in handy when the temperature dropped to 10 degrees C.  (50 F.)  I know that doesn’t seem cold to most of you Westerners.  But when it’s windy and wet at the same time it seems real cold.  It was difficult to get the chimney to seal as the weather wouldn’t let up.  But we managed.  The stove made completely out of steel heats up fast.  The hardest thing I am finding out is getting the fire hot enough to create the proper draft inside the unit before completely closing it and chocking the flames.  After a couple trial runs we got the hang of it and it works really well.  Now to only completely seal the house to insure proper heating and to conserve energy.  I’m still not completely convinced other villagers will actually desire to have one installed in their house.  Not that it doesn’t work and doesn’t create a safer breathing environment.  But for them it takes away the whole socializing event that takes place every night around an open fire in the house.  Plus grandma can’t use the coals to light her pipe as easily either.  But people in the village are very interested in the stove and are able to see how warm and clean it keeps the house.  Thank you Rick, Nung and Nate for all your help. Pictures

The past few months have been jammed packed with a lot of work and visitors.  You can read more about it by downloading our news letter here.  news-letter-march-2011

First Andre Kempton came in February.  Andre showed us how to bake, spent time in the village working, camping and dirt bike ridding.  Then Ken Blue in March.  Ken and I had a night in the village and drove down to Tak provenance to visit Aaron Blue and the Charis Project.

Everyone in the village seems to be doing well.  The reservoir has a lot of water, people are coming to the rice mill and it is now the beginning of harvest.  We have already picked and sold our first fruits.  We have sent many examples of the farmers produce to three different distributors throughout the country.  We are currently waiting the results on those samples.  We are also trying to see what it will take to bring our water source to the village for use during the dry season.

Those of you who have read our news letter are aware that we are now calling ourselves True Vine.             **A branch can’t bear fruit by itself but only by being joined to the vine**

We waited six months for an excavating machine operator crazy enough to dig us a reservoir.  Finally it has happened.  We had to pay for it, but it looks like we may have a lot of water to irrigate farmland in the village.  At the moment the water is still rising and we aren’t sure how much water we will have.  But it’s already head high.  We are already using the water to irrigate our crops.  This could be the answer to many problems of no water during the dry season.  The potential is big but again like anything else we aren’t sure where it is going to take us.  We are expecting the best.  Again thank you to those of you who have invested in this project to see it go through.  You know who you are.       Pictures

So we have broken in the new year with eight rai ( 3 acres) of cherry tomatoes and japanese pumpkin.  Also jalapeños and other various vegetable’s.  A new reservoir has also been dug in order to supply water for all this during the dry season.  The farmers are working very hard planting, plowing, transplanting, irrigating and fertilizing.  At the moment we have three different farmers growing in three different areas.  We are expecting to ship most of the harvest to a big market in Bangkok beginning in April.  Thank you to all of you who follow, support and invest in our work.  You are helping create jobs, business and self sufficiency for many.  Don’t forget to check out more photos in our photo gallery.

Another Rice harvest has just passed us.  It is very hard and labours work.  For most hill tribe people groups almost half the year is spent just planting, caring for and harvesting rice mainly for personal consumption.  Every year during the rice planting and harvesting season I am in awe of how much work and time is spent in harvesting rice just to eat.  Everyone is busy helping one another out with the work load.  This years harvest wasn’t as plentiful and we walked away with around 100 bags less of rice than last year.  The up side is that everyone will have enough to eat for the year.  Please click here to see pictures on Picasa.

Welcome Rachael to our family.  She is three years old and has been living at our friends orphanage since she was three days old.  It was intended for her to be adopted by our friend who in the end wasn’t able to.  He has given her to us and she has been with us for three weeks now.  We aren’t too sure about being able to adopt her either.  It is a very complicated process.  She will always be our daughter but it may not be able to happen on paper.  Everyone is still adjusting but most everything seems positive with the new change in her and our life.  Abby is enjoying being a new big sister.

Eli is amazing.  He is beginning to walk and will be one year on the ninth of this month.

The house is pretty much finished.  I just finished the bathroom last week.  We brought the girls up a couple of weeks ago while Lisa Gavin was here and they had a great time staining the outside.

We are looking forward to B-ma and almost all the Blues coming here in the next couple of weeks.  We will spend time in the village doing everything from painting, teaching, soap making, cooking, and working in the coffee field.  People in the village are excited and wont stop asking for B-ma.

The coffee is looking great and after a couple set backs with the locals most things seem to be doing well.  In one area we were forced to take out our banana trees because they believe there is an evil spirit attached to the tree that makes them sick.  We refused for awhile and even used the opportunity to speak to them about God.  But after they released cows in our field and threatened my brother in laws life.  We were forced to remove the banana trees.  Since then we have planted a new fast growing, nitrogen fixate, shade tree to replace the banana trees.

Prang is doing well and is busy with the weaving project in the village and even some free lance translation.  We are brain storming and researching many new business opportunities for her.  We are in the process of buying and selling avocado and coffee.  This could some day turn into a business or a company here in Thailand.  We will be driving up to Chiang Rai tomorrow to meet with farmers and with local buyers.   Prang will also be starting school here next term in December.  She will be studying on Saturdays and Sundays to some day become a teacher as well.

The next month is packed with many trips to the village, B-ma and the Blues, soap making, buying and selling avocado’s, taking care of coffee trees, and hopefully at some point having some sort of a vacation.  We have yet to have had a vacation since we first got married four years ago.

Please check out our pictures link. I have many recent photos uploaded

We had a good month in the village.  Two weeks can easily turn into four once the rains start coming.  This is the rice planting season.  Or the season for any sort of planting.  Farmers in the mountains rely fully on the rain for their crops.

For those of you who follow this blog will remember that we had a water project proposed.  Well that project has been funded and completed.  We ran two Kilometers of water pipe to two different places.  This project seems to be a building block for many new relationships.  They see us running water pipe and then all of sudden you have many new friends.  I’m not concerned about their motives.  It’s the relationship that I care about.   This water will be used to ensure the survival of our new 3,500 coffee plants.  Others in the family and church who will be planting coffee or that will be working with us will also be using the water.

Once the rains started coming we began planting our coffee, avocado and banana trees.  We now have over three thousand coffee trees, 100 avocado trees, various different shad tress and a few hundred banana trees.  The shade trees, avocado and banana trees will serve as a shad canopy for the coffee.  We already began micro loaning seedlings out to other farmers and have sparked the interest of many other local farmers who say they want to plant coffee with us next year.  Which is our goal.  We want farmers to invest long term investments into their properties.  A good veriety of different cash crops that they can get a little something from every season.  Now they just battle with the supply and demand of tomatoes and chillies.  Most of the time just wasting their time and money in hoping to get rich once the supply drops and the demand increases.

Our house is pretty much done.  I still need to finish framing in the kitchen area but have run out of wood.  I used the rest of the lumber on the bathroom.  Again I will send some pictures once I can.

We also had a lot of time to spend with people in the church and were sharing and teaching.  Our main theme seemed to be relationship.  To have a relationship with God.  Something that isn’t taught here.  Many people in the church didn’t seem to understand when we explained that that’s what it means to be a Christian.  To have a living relationship with Jesus.  He is your father and friend.  You can talk with him and he listens.  My 15 year old nephew came to me after church one day and said “Thank you.”  He has never heard anything like this.  He said that is was cool to know that we could be friends with God.  It seems that we are mainly just battling with the spirit of religion all the time.  Living in this contractual world makes having a grace filled relationship with the living God seem impossible.  But we are seeing people accept what we say.  Even if it’s just my nephew being able to grasp it.  That makes it all worth while.

Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social, or economic strength of individuals and communities. It often involves the empowered developing confidence in their own capacities.

I pulled this definition off Wikipedia online.  This word has really been grabbing my attention lately.  For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why.  Now I think I know why.  This is what it means to be a missionary.  Or better yet a Christian.  We need to be empowering other people and other cultures.  This mind set has begun to reshape my life and work over here in Thailand.  Or better yet.  It has given me a sense that what we are doing is in fact for their sake.  For the Thai people.  Mainly the underprivileged or marginalized people groups.  They need to do it on their own.  We just need to plant the seed, or the vision and watch them grow and become something bigger and better than what their culture settles for.

The reason I have come to all this is because I have begun to see results in people’s life around me.  One case study would be my brother-in-law Koi.  (Prangs youngest brother)  He has been living with us ever since we have been married.  Yeah really.  So that is coming on four years in July.  He was the reason that I first started the landscaping business.  He needed money to live and go to school and I was sick of him just living off of us.  I knew it wasn’t helping him and he needed to make his own living.  It has been three years since he has been working with me cutting grass.  I had always visioned him running the business and it being his.  But the lack of work ethic and the laziness has never allowed this to happen.  Recently I just felt like God was telling me to give him the business.  And so I did.  Now I am seeing a change in him that I have never seen in the three years he has been working with me.  He wakes up early, gets the truck ready, goes to work on time and at the end of the day makes money and puts it in his pocket.  He seems happier, more motivated and just easier to be around.  I know money is motivating him.  As it does all of us.  But what I am also seeing is him being empowered.  He is growing.  Becoming more and more self capable.  All because I gave him responsibility.  And he had a willingness to do it.  I’m not trying to take all the credit here as I know God is growing him.

The point I am getting at is.  Empowering people to make their own decisions, the ability to access information, and increasing one’s positive self-image can take years.  But I am being able to see this.  This is giving me more motivation with the teenage boys in our house and our work in the mountains.  Someday we may actually see people being changed.  It just may take for ever.