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

Pa was an amazing person and was very fun and encouraging to be around.  A father, friend and an amazing trials bike athlete.  He was hit and died while driving his scooter.  This short video was all I could do in his memory.  We will surly miss him and riding will never be the same with out him.

It may seem like a long post but please read it all.

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.

Again like I always say.  This post is long and waiting as they always are.  Since I last wrote on this blog so much has happened I can’t even remember everything.  First of all just to inform everyone about Abigail.  She did fall off a chair and hit the back of her head real hard.  After a while she began to throw up and became very sleepy.  We happened to by right by the hospital; so we just went in the ER.  After a skull X-ray and a brain scan everything turned out ok.  She really scared us as she lay in the ER room lethargic and unresponsive.  We were afraid we would lose her or some of her.  After a couple hours she came through and was acting like her self again.  We left the hospital and went to eat at a restaurant.  Not soon after we ordered our food a specialist called us and said we need to come back to the hospital because she has a skull fracture.  I guess some how they missed it the first time.  So we went back and stayed over night in the hospital for close observation to make sure she was ok.  She is doing fine now but shouldn’t hit her head for the next few months.  That is almost impossible as she is always falling down.  I have decided to stay home as much as I possibly can to keep close to her.  We also have a new member in our family.  His name is Kim and he is a seventeen year old orphan.  He isn’t in school and is working for my landscaping business while he studies for his GED.  So now we have three teenagers, (Park, Tinglee and Kim) two of Prangs brothers, (Ton and Koi) and Abigail and Eli.  Yes and Eli is doing excellent.  A very big and chubby boy.  The other day we let him suck on an orange and he loved it.  We couldn’t take it away with out him screaming for more.  We are also taking on a new adventure in the village.  Growing coffee.  Now we are just in the planning and researching phase.  It definitely looks like something that the people in the village could really make a profit out of.  We will keep everyone posted.

Not much else to say other than be praying for Abigail’s skull fracture to close up and that she wouldn’t hit her head again.

Kim and Sean

This past month has been more busy than normal so I haven’t had any real time to be on the computer.  I’ve been busy with all the normal things.  Running the lawn care business, the rice mill, lots of maintenance at Im Jai House, and even a few side electrical jobs.  Plus our vegitable garden at home is growing and is getting bigger all the time.   

We’ve had a few guest come and go.  First Emmet was here, then Adams parents and his aunt.  Then my friend Len from Iowa was here too.  He comes almost every year doing different things with orphanages and teaching English.  He is now going to be building a hostel in the mountains for kids to live while they go to school.  A much needed thing as most of these kids live too far from any school to be able to attend.  I’ll be doing what I can to help, including building a reverse osmosis drinking water system.  Something of which I am in the process of learning at the moment.  I know enough now that I was able to fix Im Jai Houses system.  We may make a video and try and do a little fundraising to try and build more systems and place them in different needed places.  Like orphanages and hostels for kids.                                                             

The rice mill had a great start but it seems to be slowing down at the moment.  I’m not sure if that’s because of the time of year or other reasons.  It seems that people want their cake and eat it too.  We built a rice mill because people wanted to process their rice.  But now they are complaining that the bran that is discharged from the machine isn’t enough.  They use the bran to feed their pigs.  Other machines apparently give more bran than the machine we installed.  There is one discharge part on the machine that spits out stuff you can’t use and another part where the bran comes out.  My theory is that the other machines which are much smaller and lower quality (which they are used to)  don’t separate the bran out from the other discharge as well.  Thus you get more bran but with other stuff in it too.  We are doing what we can to solve this problem to try and bring more people in.  These are just the things that when going into this thing I had no idea about and we are now trying to figure out.  The learning curve is high.

The family is good.  I know most of you already know but Prang is pregnant again.  Yeah!  Abigail is doing good and has started to talk up a storm and really enjoys singing.  She’s a lot better than her dad who can’t sing at all.  Park is doing well and should be getting off of his one years probation here soon.  Ton and Koi (Prangs two younger brothers)  still live with us and work with me when they are off from school.  Ton should be finishing his civil engineering degree here soon too.

A lot of new things are happening in our life over here in Thailand.  The biggest new thing is that as of this Saturday Nov. 29th we will have a new member in our house hold.  I wont go into much detail now other than he is a seventeen year old orphan who Prang and I know pretty well.  He no longer has anywhere to go and it’s either our house or juvenilehall.  This is basically his last chance to show he can be responsible enough to be on his own as a man soon.  We spent some time with him tonight eating out and bowling together.  We all had fun and are looking forward to our new life together.  Hopefully this will be what he needs to get it into his head that he’s got to get his act together before he’s own his own is a year or so.  God knows where I was at his age and that wasn’t too long ago.   So I’ve got heaps of hope for him.
Secondly, thanks to a generous investor whom I have yet to meet and is a friend of Adam’s has committed a big chunck of money to help get our rice mill project up and running.  You can read more about this project by clicking on the link.  As of now we are working out the details about the electrical service and should be able to have the main machine up and running within the next month.  I’ll keep everyone posted as things progress.  We hope for this to be something the village can really benefit from.

On top of everything else I have ben busy with many other things including maintenance at Im Jai, fixing water pumps, managing the care of a new soccer field, planting vegetables,  paid electrical jobs, our lawn care business and even built a new dinning table for our house.  This week we will have Thanksgiving with some 25 people or more incuding the Heine’s, go to a friends wedding and pick up our new house member.  Life seems busy at the moment but we are happy and doing well.  Please keep Abigail in your prayers.  She came down with the same bronchial infection thing that she keeps getting.  We believe that it may be from allergies but we aren’t sure yet.  All we know is that it has accrued three times in the past two months and it’s really hard on her because she looses the ability to breath well.  Pray for her, we are doing what we can to make sure she stays healthy.  Also check out our new pages on the right hand side.  “House builds” and “Videos.”

Our dog Steak.  Who is only just over one year old just had seven puppies the other night.  So now we have a bunch of “Steaklets.”  Sometime late in the night or early in the morning I was woken by our dog screaming.  I went out to check on it and there she was with three puppies in her hole under the house which she dug a week ago.  So I went back to bed relieved thinking to my self, “Ok only three; I can handle that.”  But to my surprise in the morning when I woke up there were seven!  Seven!  What the heck are we going to do with seven puppies!  We are looking for homes and giving them away for free.  We already have a home for one.  We just don’t want a bunch of ”steaklets” running around when we already have three dogs as it is.  You can check out more photos by going to the ”most recent photos” link.

After Prang not being granted a visa into the United States “moving forward” has become the attitude we are being forced to maintain.  Though she took it rather hard at first, she snapped back into her usual happy, peaceful self in no time.  We are both convinced that Thailand is our home and we are happy to be here.  Though it would have been good to visit everyone and have everyone meet Prang and Abigail, we still haven’t given up hope.  Though trying to get Prang to go back into the US Consulate is going to be really hard.  She never wants to even look at it again.  But I haven’t given up and I am researching a little bit more and will try and apply for a green card for her.  It’s a long and expensive process with a few initial set backs.  One is I don’t have a real official job or a set income so proving that I can support her in America is close to impossible.  Hopefully I can pull some strings or someone can step in for me and we will be able to get things moving.  I’m still not sure if we have to live in the U.S. and wait for the green card or not.  Again I’ll keep everyone up to date on what happens.  For now I’ve been catching up on some of my work at Im Jai and started “raising” (I don’t know if that’s the right word to use or not) mushrooms at home.  It only took 18 dollars to build the mushroom hut and another 11 dollars to buy the bags the mushrooms grow in.  We’ve got a total of 100 bags that will apparently grow mushrooms for three or four months.  This should be enough for not just our house but Adam and Cindy’s as well as another friend’s house just down the street who are fostering orphans.  I’ve also been planting various vegetables and just trying to become more and more self sufficient.  I am still looking around for a rice field to rent and am still trying to get a rice mill started soon in the village.  You can read more about that by clicking on the rice mill link and you can see plenty of pictures by clicking on the recent pictures link.

So we finally have a nice soccer field for the kids to play soccer on at Im Jai House. When Im Jai was first built the contractor promissed they would put in a soccer field for free but never did. So thanks to a generous sponser we finally have a soccer field after almost three years. I’ve ben busy making sure that someone takes care of the grass and that the sprikler system is kept up and running. Last week I brought in two eight meter, cement lighting poles and dropped them a meter deep in the ground and then poured concrete. Soon I’ll have to climb up to the top and mount some spot lights for the late night games. Click here for more photos.