Hi! Glad you found us.
Thailand is Calling is a website about the work we, the Bryans, are doing as we seek to spread the gospel of Christ to the world around us. Currently, we are living in Bangkok, Thailand and working with the Somprasong 4 Church of Christ.
Our wonderful church family, the Highland Heights Church of Christ, in Smyrna, TN sent us to Bangkok and oversees the work we do in Thailand.
On Sunday morning, June 16th, our good friend and long time English student, Lynne, was baptized into Christ. She’s been a regular around Somprasong 4 for a few years now, and we can’t be happier with her decision to give her life in service to God.
This website has been quiet lately for a coupe of reasons. We’re still recovering a little from a computer crash recently. I’ve been busy teaching English. Dalissa’s been busy being pregnant; as of today we’re D-Day plus two.
Speaking of English students — We started up the Engilsh program again at the end of last month. Right now I’ve got about 25 students who still come every week. A small group of Aggies are here teaching English as well. They’ll be here through end of July/beginning of August.
On Sunday afternoons, we invite all of our students to the church building for some activities with Christians. One Sunday the Aggies were out of town, and we were in charge of the activities. We decided to play a Family Feud style gameshow with our students. During the week, we handed out a survey to all of the students. Some of the answers were pretty funny.
What is your favorite color?
Name an animal you find in the zoo.
What is your favorite “Western food”?
Who is your favorite movie star?
What time do you go to bed at night?
What is the best animal to have as a pet?
Name a flavor of ice cream.
The Cha-am Beach Bible Camp ended a little over a month ago and I have yet to post anything about it. I was waiting on finishing a video, but I didn’t think it was interesting enough, and I thought that it was going to be entirely too long. I may still complete it, on Dalissa’s insistence. Look out for it in our new Videos section after a while. Maybe.
I also wrote about the camp in our latest newsletter. Here is the excerpt:
Each year the church at Somprasong 4 organizes a Bible camp at Cha-am Beach, in the Petchaburi Providence of Thailand. Years ago, at its outset, camp was intended only for teens and young adults. As those teens grew up into adulthood, they continued to come to camp each year. Now, this year, close to 500 people attended camp from all over Thailand.
This is the second year we’ve been able to attend. We got to reconnect with a few friends, and I got the opportunity talk to a few different church leaders from other parts of Thailand, as well. The camp was 4 days long, and had 12 different guest speakers - all preachers from different parts of the country.
I was given the opportunity to teach the young men’s class on the life of Timothy. For a split second, I considered trying my hand at teaching in Thai, but as I began to prepare my lesson, I was quickly put back into my place by my language shortcomings. Maybe soon. Luckily Bhee, an elder’s son at Somprasong. helped with translation, and we had a great class on Timothy.
Below is a slideshow of about 240 photos chosen out of 1,200 taken at camp. You can see the set at the Flickr photo page.
We hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and that these first couple weeks of the new year have already been blessed. This site had a vacation as well. Well, we’re back, and we’ve got a new suit on.
First, if you haven’t read our latest newsletter, we hope you’ll take a look at it. I think its the best one yet. I’ll pick up here where it left off.
Just after Christmas, we finally got the opportunity to travel up to northern Thailand and visit the cities of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. We visited the work going on at Payap University in Chaing Mai, and stayed with Robert Reagan and his family there. He and his wife, P.Jan, have two wonderful children, Branson (11) and Erika (14), and we are so glad that we were able to spend a good 4 days with them. P.Jan, by the way, is the brother of P.Sam, one of the workers at Somprasong 4. P.Sam is our biggest help right now over here, helping us get everything together in our continuing battle to get the right visa in place to be able to stay here.
After being in Chiang Mai for a few days, P.Petch and his family, along with Bao, drove ten hours from Bangkok, picked us up, and took us along with them over to Chiang Rai, another couple of hours away. We were there for the New Year, and had a really great time visiting with P.Petch’s family and traveling with them around the area, taking in all the sights.
Hang tight as I am slowly getting all of our photos up on the web and available to you. You’ll soon be able to browse through our trip and see some of the really interesting things northern Thailand has to offer.
I met Spiderboy, really named Ting, outside of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. He and two other kindergarten-aged girls where out targeting tourists with over-priced postcards. It is a gross understatement to say that these kids were persistent in their pursuit to separate me from my money. I met their teary-eyed, whiny pleas of “you buy post-cards, sir” by asking if they could say the days of the week. I think they secretly loved the change of topic as they played along with me in reciting “Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Sunday.” I did as much as I could in way of helping them put the days in the right order, but they dashed off in the blink of an eye as they saw a police motorcycle turn the corner. After a while, they came back to continue their panhandling/unrequested English lesson.
Juu, one of our English students, was baptized into Christ on 2 December 2007.
Today has been a rather exceptionally bizarre (insert any other synonym for “strange” you can think of) day. As I start to tell you about it, I’m not really sure how much detail I’ll divulge. I think the gist will suffice.
Our day started at 2 a.m. when we left for the Thai/Cambodia border. We are having some slight visa complications. We were issued a three-month visa by the Thai Consulate in Washington, DC before we arrived in Thailand, but it has taken longer than that to process our one-year extension. It’s a wonderfully bureaucratic process that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies (whoever they might be). This means that we had to leave the country before Monday, November 26, or face a rather stiff daily fine. This process is a pretty common one among tourists who would like to stay longer than the typical 30 days they are given by the Thai government; that is, leave the country, get your passport stamped by the neighboring country at the border crossing, and come back into Thailand, where you will be given an additional 30-day visa.
I wasn’t sure what to expect at the border crossing, so I did as much research as I could online. All I found was scary story after unpleasant incident after horrible experience with these “visa-runs”. So neither Dalissa nor I were very excited about what the day had in store for us. (As I am writing this, I feel that the “gist” is turning out to be the whole cannoli.)
The Cambodian border is roughly five hours away by car, but with P.Neung driving, we made it in four. (By the way, I would like to thank P.Neung, Aka and Gone for giving up their sleep and making this unpleasant trek with us.) The border doesn’t open until 7:30 a.m., so we had some time to kill in front of a 7-Eleven for a while. Also, in typical Bryan male fashion, I went off and left the passport-sized photos we needed to process the paper work for our Cambodian visa at our apartment. So we had to get those remade, which turned out to be surprisingly inexpensive. We then set off for the Cambodian border.
It really wasn’t as bad as everyone had made it out to be. As soon as we got out of the van some guys came up to us to offer “help” in making the visa-run run more smoothly, all for a ridiculous price. In Thai, I told them that I didn’t any speak English, but they didn’t buy it. After successfully ignoring this first group of guys on the Thai side of the border, we moved through processing out of Thailand. This consisted of standing in a very short line (it paid to get there just as the border opened), filling out a departure card, and getting our passport stamped by a man wearing a very tight shirt behind a very tall desk. This took three minutes, tops.
The real fun didn’t start until we set foot inside Cambodia. We instantly found ourselves being led around by a short man (who, from now on, will be referenced to as “our shadow”) with the number 9 drawn on his back with a Sharpie. Having never done this before, we weren’t exactly sure where to go, and our shadow pointed us into the direction of a room where two official looking men were filling out visa applications for three men from India. I say “official looking” to mean they were wearing official government uniforms, badges, insignias, ranks, boots and all. One was smoking. They told us that they would be processing our Cambodian visa for ฿1,000 ($32) per person. Well, the research I did told me that that was indeed the cost of the Cambodian visa, so we handed over our passports, passport-sized photos, and ฿2,000. They filled out the paperwork for us, left the room and came back roughly ten minutes later with the completed visas applied to our passports.
The next step in the process is to get your passport stamped as having arrived in Cambodia, and then stamped again to say you are leaving the country. Our official looking officers generously offered to do this for ฿500 a piece, which is five times the cost if you were going to do it on your own. We politely informed them we were not going to pay any more than ฿100 per person. After that, they stopped being so “helpful” and sent us on our way further across the border, our shadow having now caught up to us. We then found out that we should have picked up the visa forms from a tiny, barely-marked window on the opposite side of the building our shadow led us to. Seeing that we didn’t spend any more money or effort to get this far in the process, I thought, “no harm, no foul.”
We asked another official looking man at the real visa window where we needed to go to get our arrival and departure stamp, and he pointed to two more official looking men standing behind a table. They informed me that the cost of this arrival stamp was actually ฿200 per person, and that they would be processing it for us. We went back and forth and to and fro, from pillar to post about the price of this arrival stamp, and finally I told them that I didn’t even bring ฿400 with me, but would give them the remaining ฿300 I had if they would go ahead get us in and out of Cambodia. Fifteen minutes later we were walking back toward the border, heading into Thailand, with our visas successfully stamped, signed, dated, and officiated; our shadow right there with us.
Getting back into Thailand was a breath of fresh air. We walked straight into the building in which we needed to be, being clearly marked with a sign that said “Arrivals”. We walked directly to a stand that had the arrival cards for us to fill out. We were immediately called forward to process our new 30-day tourist visa by another tight-shirted, smiling man, and weren’t charged a penny in the process.
I have said all of this to say: I love Thailand. Out of all the countries in Southeast Asia, I am thankful to God that we work in Thailand. I also want to say that I have a newfound respect for our friends who are working in Phnom Penh, Cambodia - Nathan and Cheryl Wheeler and Andrew and Natalie Hayes. I learned a lot about how the world works over here just by spending 30 minutes at the border crossing in Cambodia. As the Wheelers and the Hayeses are daily laboring in this environment, though it may not be as bad as a border town, they have plenty of extra challenges that we don’t have to face. This makes our short, 12-hour journey, and subsequent 30-minute stay in Cambodia seem much less of a chore than it was.
This last Sunday evening we attended a joint worship service of the five the congregations of the Lord’s church here in Bangkok. They have been, as I found out, been joining together to worship once every 3 months for about a year now, a different church hosting the others each time. This month, the Soon Sayam church played host and there were close to 75 people in attendance from all 5 congregations: Soon Sayam, Watcharapohn, Soi Ari, Ban Mai, and Somprasong 4.
This is the first time we’ve been able to meet this many people from the different congregations in Bangkok, which is something that I have been anxious to do for a very long time. We had a good amount of contact with the Watcharaphon congregation last year, but have yet to meet anyone from the other 3 congregations here.
That evening, I was able to observe something that I hadn’t seen before. Before the worship service, leaders from the 5 congregations got had an informal meeting together; a time where they could just come and talk to each other. This might seem like such a small thing, but I think it is something truly great. They started by talking about plans to improve future meetings of the congregations. They then had each group update the others about the things that are happing at their home congregation. Things like Watcharaphon planning to produce a series of DVDs of the Bible courses they teach, or Somprasong hosting a group of Christians from Singapore later on in November.
Never before have I seen the leaders of separate congregations actually sit down and have a simple conversation together about the Lord’s church. I am glad to see that the churches in Thailand have recognized the importance of this, and that they are talking, sharing, planning, and worshiping our God as one.
I just want to throw a quick post in here to let ya’ll out there know that our Halloween party, though in November, was a lot of fun. I’ve got a new photo album up which I hope you will enjoy.
On October 23rd, Thailand celebrated Piyamaharaj Day. The weekend before the 23rd, one of the deacons at Soi 4, who works for the Thai telephone company TOT, invited us to spend a couple of days with his family at the campground his company owns on top of Khao Kho. This mountain is located in the Petchabun Mountain range, and is located roughly 350 km (217 miles) north of Bangkok. This was the first time we’ve had the chance to get out of the busy city since setting foot on Thai soil, so the change of scenery was much appreciated.
The mountainside campsite had a nice view over the valley below, and the lake at the bottom was shaped like equestrian horse jumping an obstacle. We really didn’t do much while we were up there. We did visit is an old military installation on top of the mountain that was used during the Royal Thai Army’s war against the Communist Party of Thailand from the 1960s through the mid-80s. It was an artillery outpost on the very top of the mountain.
I’ve posted a new photo album, if you’d like to see more pictures.
