“We’re glad to have you here."
I sit on the floor of the village leader’s house in a fishing community in southern Thailand. Chickens squawk outside and laundry waves in the barely-there breeze.
It’s like having family over,” someone translates in a low murmur.
I look around at the newly painted blue walls and curtains that flutter in the breeze of the many fans. Air conditioning is too expensive, someone explains.
It’s only 90 degrees but I feel like I’m swimming in sweat.
12 other Americans sit around me, most of them college students in Thailand for the a few weeks to a few months this summer. We’re in the Pak Weep Village in Phang Nga, Thailand, a southern province just north of Malaysia, to do an after-school program for the village children through a local church and learning center.
The leader of this community has welcomed us into his recently constructed home. We ask how he got the materials up the winding roads and narrow dirt path behind his home. He says his children helped him. They bought him a new house after the roof of his old house kept falling in on him. Now, his home is one of the nicest in the village.
If you walk outside his home and look up, you can see the lush, green hills that rise and fall like a tropical hug just outside his village. A tourist’s paradise. An Instagram post. A phone background.
If you walk outside his home and look down, you can see children playing in the dirt outside of their homes that are also nearly falling apart and a bone-thin man crouching in the doorway of his tin-and-brick house next door, watching us. A photo from a humanitarian magazine.
The village leader sits on the floor of his home with us. He is 67 years old this year. He’s funny and lively. He wears a blue wrap around his waist like a long skirt and sits tall with a bare chest, and after a while, he looks around at our modest outfits meant to show him respect and chuckles, “I probably shouldn’t have worn this.”
Sexy! We joke.
Many people in his village comfortably wear wraps as well. I see them peering at us from their windows and gardens, wondering what the shiny clean farangs (foreigners) are doing in their village tucked into hills of poverty and jungle.
“Do you have any advice for us?” someone asks.
He takes a minute to think.
He says, “The only thing we’re afraid of here is drugs. When you are on drugs, only you can help yourself. Not even gods or Buddha can help you.”
I think of the kids we play with each day after school.
Do they have dreams? What are their fears? What are their favorite colors?
They sing songs about Jesus and dance in the rain and understand his love in ways that we in our fancy clothes and unscarred skin and air-conditioned rooms will never know. Who are these kids, and how can we love them well while we are here?
Read part two, part three, part four, and part five here.
G and T, two young Thai Christians, have dedicated a few years of their lives to living amongst the people of small villages in the southern Phang Nga Province of Thailand. The people in these villages live in one of the most unreached areas of Thailand. Without G and T and the Santisuk English Foundation and Church, there would be no way for people here to find out who Jesus is and how much he loves them.
We were able to join them for 10 days to encourage their efforts in loving the people of these villages, playing with the kids and teaching English in their after-school program, and sharing the Gospel through Bible skits, songs, home visits, and prayers that God would find reach these people through our hands and feet that serve them.