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.
