Getting going...

Wow time has flown and I haven't blogged in months! That's partly because I'm lazy, but mainly because we have been very busy. So what have we done?

Our goal was to find a place in town that we could rent to use as an outreach centre from which to run English teaching and various outreach events in order to meet people and form relationships. Once again the social network kicked in. This time, our co-worker Richard, whilst out playing golf with some old retired guys, mentioned that we were looking for a place to rent to use as a centre. The one old retired guy's daughter had just such a place. We took one look and decided to go for it.

It is an old wooden house that has been used as a restaurant for the past number of years. It was pretty run down and needed a lot of work but it met with our criteria - location, size and price, so we took it.

Next I had to find a builder who could do the fixing up for us. As the quotes came in we despaired - this wasn't going to be cheap! Work started and as I saw the mess I had to keep the anticipated end-result in mind!


















3 weeks later, it was down to the finishing touches and all that remained was to furnish The Lighthouse (a name we had chosen in the meantime).


Fortunately, we got some cash from a donor in South Africa and we were able to buy some furniture and equipment, such as desks and chairs, a fridge, music system, data projector, etc.


What proved to be a real challenge was finding a graphic design person to help us with our logo and printing. After a lot of hassle, we finally found a place that could do our sign for us and another place that could do the printing of our brochure - still waiting for these things, but I'm confident that we'll have this soon! Meanwhile, we had our first outreach at The Lighthouse last night. It was a Mother's Day outreach (today is Mother's Day in Thailand). We had the mother of all thundershowers which started 10 minutes before our planned program, but despite that, we had a fairly good turnout and a great evening was had - we hope and pray that The Lighthouse will indeed be a source of spiritual light.

The First Steps

Having moved into our nice new home, our first challenge was to get to know people in our new town - actually, that was probably our second challenge - the first challenge was to be able to go into town, find a shop that sold what we needed and then get home again without getting lost!

We'd been in our house for exactly one day, when our landlord (who happens to live across the road) invited us to a Thai Songkraan ceremony, where people show respect to the village elders by pouring water over their hands. What a bonus for us! In one fell swoop, we were publicly introduced to our entire village (or neighbourhood). That made things somewhat easier for us in terms of introducing ourselves to our neighbours.

Next up, we needed to order tracts to hand out to people and have a stamp made so that we could stamp our details on the back of the tracts. We also needed to have business cards made. An easy task? No! First of all, it took about 2 days of hunting around and asking questions before we finally found a place that could do the job. Then it took another 2 days of fixing their mistakes on the business cards before they were ready. We were lucky though, in that the one place, made both, stamps and printed business cards. (We did find another shop that made business cards, but they wanted me to provide my own paper!!)

From there, we decided that we would start in one street in town and go from shop to shop, introduce ourselves, strike up a conversation, give them a tract and a business card and move on the next shop. So far its been going well, but it is rather slow going. The shop owners on the whole are very friendly and we find that we only do about 3 shops an hour. At that rate, its going to take us the next 10 years to work our way through town!

We're also on the lookout for a shop house to rent, to use as an outreach center. So once again, we're relying on the network system to find a suitable place. We have already had two shop keepers tell us about places that they know are to let.

Its slow going, but we're slowly but surely getting out there, handing out tracts and business cards - now we wait for the Lord to open doors and provide divine appointments:-)

New Beginnings

We moved to Lampang on Friday 25 April 2008. We had returned from a 7-month home assignment on the 3rd of that month and had been living at a friend's place (Phi Anake) in Mee Jo, just outside Chiang Mai. Those first days back were hard - we were guests in someone else's home, we were struggling with the heat, we had no vehicle (only my motorbike and a rather clapped out vehicle that Anake had lent us). We all got sick. In addition to a bout of flu, I also developed an ear infection. Trish and I were fairly ratty with each other - so all in all, not a great time, and yet, we were also happy to be back in Thailand and fairly positive about being back and getting stuck into ministry. And Anake has a stunning place, with lovely lush green gardens, and a pool!

Our first priority was to get a car, so that we could travel to Lampang, 100 kms south of Chiang Mai, to take care of our most pressing priority - finding a house. Apparently, a contact of Anake's had found a couple of houses to let and all we had to do was go and choose one. I was very excited and anticipated that finding a house would be a doddle. Anake had arranged that his PA would take me to Lampang to meet the contact and check out the places he had found. Well, it was a disastrous trip as I was shown one dump after another! Eventually we ditched Anake's contact and went driving around by ourselves in search of a house to let. Nothing!! I went home that night in a black mood.

A few days later I went down to Lampang again. On my motorbike, by myself this time. I rode around all day looking for houses to let and once again, I went home disappointed - this time I had a sunburned face (riding around town without a helmet) to add to my woes.

In the meantime, we had been telling our Thai friends in Chiang Mai that we were looking for a house in Lampang and slowly but surely, people were calling us and telling us that they knew a friend who had a place available, do we want to look? So a few days later, having purchased a super-dee-duper family vehicle, the whole family went to Lampang and booked into a hotel - we were not leaving until we had found a house. (Unfortunately all this happened over the Songkraan festival time, placing a delay on everything, but that is the subject of another blog!) From our hotel base in Lampang, we then set off to check out the various places our contacts had found. On the second day, after lunch, I struck paydirt! I was finally shown a house that was decent - it was in our price range and big - maybe a little too big and too fancy. We were so desperate though and had seen so much junk, that this place was like a dream come true, a prayer answered, manna from heaven and so we took it. Two days later we moved in!

What lessons have I learned from this experience? The rental market, or more precisely, the marketing of rental properties, in Thailand is unique. There are no classified sections in local papers with a "to let" column. There are no community notice boards outside the shopping centers with ads. There are no estate agents with rental properties on their books (if there are, we didn't find any). There are no Internet sites with rental listings. So, one has two options really; drive around until you see a place with a handwritten "to let" sign on the gate and phone the number. (I also contacted those which had "far sale" signs up, in the hope that a desperate seller would be willing to rent). The other option is the social network. You need to know someone, who knows someone, who has a friend who lives in a neighbourhood where there is a house to let. Through our network of friends and contacts, we found not only our house, but 2 other houses for our team mates - and we made a couple of new Thai friends and contacts in the process!