Church, Food, Childlife Kids & Flowers

It's Sunday again on the border in Northern Thailand.

Today is a special church day for two reasons: first, one of our friend's daughters is having a birthday.

For her birthday Daeng did flower arrangements for the service today.

The second reason today is special is the kids from CHILDLIFE are at church.

Hlong, Daeng's sister-in-law, is doing much of the cooking for over a hundred folks, mostly kids.

That is a lot of noodles!

Because the church is small and will only seat about 70 people many of the kids stayed outside, sang hymns and played.

Daeng and I hung out in the cooking area and played with the kids, as well. At my age, I'm pretty much back in the child stage, again anyway.

The other nice part of being old is I now can do things that people criticized me for in the past and now they just say: "He's old, leave him alone."

After the service the big folks ate inside the church area and us kids ate outside. The noodle soup with pork and vegetables was wonderful.

I watched as many of the kids ask for seconds and thirds. There was plenty of food for all.

I spent a little time talking with Pastor Lota about his plans for the week.

We did get a call from a family member that, let me try and get this correct, Daeng's sister-in law's Father was very ill. He was about three hours drive north of the Myanmar (Burma) border.

We had made arrangements last week to go into the mountains to see the kids and the shelter in the AKHA village of Ban AYO. We talked it over and decided to go into Burma with a few other family members to see him.

We'll make the trip on Tuesday.