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:-)