The Annual VBS Dilemma

Today someone asked me if I would teach the nursery class in vacation Bible school this year.

Bring on the tortured mental cogitations.

When I was 15, good-natured old Alvin Helmuth asked me if I would teach Bible school.  I nearly swooned.  SOMEONE had ASKED me to TEACH.

ME!

to TEACH!!

I have a feeling Alvin went home and told Mary, and she said, "Ach, Alvin, didn't you know Dorcas is only 15??  She can't even drive yet.  And she's such a silly little thing.  Ach, I don't know.  Maybe you should talk to Amos about it."

And Alvin said, "Ahhh, Mary, she'll be fine."

Well, I wasn't exactly fine.  I had a class of wild little boys who turned and ran out the back door when I turned my back, and who squeezed the Oreo cookies and hollered that the poop was coming out.  I thought they were a bunch of little heathens and a thoroughly lost cause.

They would not listen to me.

Well, in thinking back, I wouldn't have listened to me either, but instead of recognizing the problem, I poured out my heart to my friend Millie after class, that kids these days just weren't taught to RESPECT AUTHORITY, while Dad sat out in the pickup waiting to take me home, seeing as how I didn't have my license yet.

Wow.

Then I went on to teach every summer for the next 8 years, and after that first year things went pretty well, seeing as how there was no direction to go but up.

I didn't teach Bible school again until many years later when we had been to Canada and back, and I didn't have a baby any more.

That time I had the nursery class, with 21 students, including a little girl who would jump up and take off running for the parking lot during our outside story time, and I had to leave the ninety and nine to go after the one.

VBS lasted for two weeks back then.

It was during harvest.

I just about went crazy.

I remember one evening I came home worn to a frazzle and found all the supper things still spread out on the island.  The guys were lounging around the living room reading the newspaper.

I unleashed all my frustration into a speech that would have intimidated John Brown.  "Just so you KNOW, when I am off all evening teaching BIBLE SCHOOL, I do not APPRECIATE coming home at 9:30 and finding SUPPER all over the KITCHEN when you are perfectly CAPABLE. . . ." and so on.

I think I've taught a time or two since then.

This is what I've found: we are all much much happier if I stay home and keep things going so my fine flock of talented children can go teach, than if I teach myself.

Some years I've had three teaching.  This year Ben and Emily have signed up.

And they still need teachers.

So Alvin Helmuth 2.0 asked me.

I feel like I ought to.  My youngest child is 13, for goodness' sake. Why could I NOT?

Other moms do it, moms with more and younger children, and more action going on, and just home from trips, and leaving soon, and company coming, and gardens, and canning.

So, seriously, why can't I?

Well.  For one thing, I do not handle stress well.  I teeter constantly on the verge of depression.  When I have too much going on or am away from home every night, with no one picking up the slack in my absence, I feel like my head is going to explode, and all my relationships suffer, and it takes a long time to undo the damage.

Yet the word "ought" blinks above me in neon lights.  And I feel the wordless rebuke of those spiritual moms who just teach because it needs to be done, and smile cheerfully, and stay up til midnight doing green beans, and apparently trust God more than I do.

And yet.  I know my life, my limitations, my history.

Can I say NO knowing that God and my husband know the full story, and just rest in that without trying to vindicate myself to the rest of the world?

P.S. Next morning: I think this is why it's such a dilemma: because VBS is a cause I believe in, and someone needs to do it, and I get very irritated when there's a job to do and people take off with a dismissive, "Nope.  Can't do it," knowing good and well it means more work for everyone else.  Well, duh.  There's plenty I could do to make it more feasible for someone else, like cooking supper for them.  As my Facebook friend Gertrude said, "Sometimes when you can't do a task, you can enable someone else or make their week easier: fix a casserole for another teacher's family to have for supper, send cookies home with all the teachers,snap a bushel of beans, etc. -- or whatever you do well, you can do for others."

The Annual Birthday Tea

Here in the Valley we are knee-deep in summer and harvest.  Five children are at home, two of them sacking seed, which involves large amounts of food.  When I bought a pack of monster hot dogs, Ben, packing his lunch for his shift at the warehouse, said, "Thanks for getting those quarter-pound hot dogs, Mom.  That way I only have to take three of them."

And Jenny has found that whenever she has her heart set on that last piece of pizza or anything else, it's already gone.


Ever since we got back from Thailand I have been attacking the outside work--scrubbing the porch, weeding all the edges on the place of which there are many, planting flowers.

But today I took off for a wonderful afternoon of tradition, friendship, femininity, and tea.

We do this every year.  Anita the neighbor lady and Lois the sister-in-law both have birthdays on June 25th.  Mine is June 29th.  So we get together to celebrate.

This year Lois and I turned 50 which is not as unpleasant as it sounds.

We had our party a month late because on the 25th of June I was half dead with jet lag and Anita was about to have another grand-baby.

But today it worked out for all three of us and Lois didn't need to drive the seed truck and no one close to us was having a baby.

 Anita is a woman who has a ministry of beauty and serving and listening.

 Here she is writing some nice words in the book she gave me.

The decorating theme was "berries."  Anita picked all these herself, from behind her own house.

 


 

Of course the conversation never lagged.  We covered menopause and grandbabies as you would expect, and also wandered off into books, authors, Kip Kinkel, moms' reactions to their children leaving the Mennonite church, how to get hydrangeas to change color, Jane Kirkpatrick, Beverly Lewis, and much more.

 

  Me and Lois

 

Lois is not a cutesy-poo gift-givvy sort of person, so she always brings a stack of secondhand books and lets us each pick one.  This year Anita and I were both secretly hoping she would keep this up.  And she did!  So I got one of my favorites--Daddy Long-Legs.  The devotional book is from Anita.  We all know my too-strong opinions on Beverly Lewis, but Anita told me I really should read this one, that I just might like it.  So I told her I would.

Then for about the last hour it was time to go, but it is very hard to pull away from conversations with those two.  Finally Anita gave us each a piece of cake to take home, and we left.

Then it was back to reality and teenage boys and bread to put in the freezer and dishes to put away.

And I am already looking forward to our tea next year.

Letter from Harrisburg

This month it's about Thailand, of course. 

Click here.

Thailand Tales 11

I was sure I'd find myself in an orphanage at some point in Thailand, since I always do, no matter where I go.

The closest I got was the Chiang Dao Compassion Home.

The IGo students have a service at Chiang Dao on a Sunday morning every three months, we were told.  And we're welcome to go along.

Jenny was sick with a stomach ailment, so Paul stayed with her and Steven and I went.  It was up in the mountains about half an hour past the elephant camp we had visited shortly before.  Steven rode in one of the IGo song-tows [pickup truck with seats along the side] but I got to ride in air-conditioned comfort with Lee and Joyce, the IGo pastor and his wife.



I had a hard time piecing together just what this place was.  No, it's not an orphanage.  And it's not a school, either.  It's a hostel.

Hostel?

After pestering too many people with too many questions, this is how I understand it:

Thailand has its modern cities such as Chiang Mai and Bangkok, with well-paved roads that extend out into the countryside.  But it also has very wild and wildernessy mountainous areas with very remote little villages way back on impassable dirt roads.

At some point the government decided that rather than try to reach all these villages with teachers and schools, they would build and staff hostels in more accessible towns.  The children from the hill tribes would come out and live in these hostels and attend the local public schools.

So that's what they've done.  Now imagine your child, say 8 years old, away from home for most of the year, living in a dorm with 50 other kids and not enough supervision.

Yes.  Like that.

So a sister organization to IGo, called GTO, started a hostel called Compassion Home in the town of Chiang Dao to provide a more wholesome atmosphere for some of these kids whose parents were ok with them being in an overtly Christian environment.

A Thai pastor and his wife provide leadership, and various cooks and staff people, including a young man from Delaware, help out.

This is the thing with so many mission/relief/helping situations--things aren't perfect, and you do the best you can with the imperfect situation at hand.

As you can imagine, I could hardly stand the thought of these little kids being away from their parents.  Surely if the government has enough money for nice paved roads an hour up into the mountains, they'd be able to provide little elementary schools up in the villages.

But the Thai government never asked my opinion the whole time I was there!

Also, and this is a whole other subject worthy of much soap-boxing, there is the whole abyss of prostitution for which Thailand is famous.  A whole web of cultural, religious, economic, social and other factors work to funnel girls, especially from the hill tribes, into the cities to work as "bar girls" as they are euphemistically called.

And the one thing that helps most to keep them from such a life is an education.

For which they need to leave home and live at a hostel.

So we spent a Sunday at the Compassion Home at Chiang Dao, and if you had to send your child away in order to save them from a worse fate, it would be good to know they were in a place like this.  It seemed warm and happy and safe and generally making the best of a very unfortunate situation.


It's good manners to leave your shoes at the door and go barefoot.


The church building reminded me of so many simple little country churches I've worshipped in--in Canada, Mexico, and Kenya.  But this one had a PowerPoint.



The guy from Delaware is teaching the kids to sing.

 Asians know how to feed a crowd.  Plain rice, plain cooked chicken, a simple soup with potatoes cooked in the chicken broth with a bit of parsley.  And then the bland rice was jazzed up with a scoop of hot sauce.  Simple, inexpensive, delicious, filling, efficient.

This guy took seconds.

 These student girls were all 13 years old, and they gossiped and giggled like girls all over the world.

 One nice surprise about Thailand: cold filtered water everywhere we went, even in little open-air restaurants and mountain villages.


 Steven found this handsome guy hidden in a bookshelf.

 After lunch, the students played with the students.

And then we left and went back to Chiang Mai, where my daughter was recovering, and her dad who would give his life to protect her was making sure she was taken care of.  Think of it: Jenny has a whole huge enormous network of family, church, society, law, economy and culture to keep her home with her parents until she's an adult, at which time she can figure out what she wants to do with her life and has a thousand good options to choose from.

It's not fair, but I sure am thankful.

Thailand Tales 10

“Thai people are not accustomed to black people,” we were warned.  “They might be standoffish or rude to Steven.”

So we were watchful but not paranoid.

Well.

He may have been stared at a bit more than the rest of us, which wasn't much, but otherwise all was well.  And this we now know for sure:  older Thai women have no problem with a young African-American man.

No they do not.

Particularly:

Steven and I went to Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s for the last time on Saturday.  I tried to explain on Friday, when we dropped off the clothes, that this was our last visit and we would be leaving for America. When I stuck out my arms and pretended to be an airplane, she understood.

So when we went to pick up the clothes they were all neatly folded and in bags instead of on hangers.  I paid her the last 100 Baht we owed, then she grabbed my hand and patted it, then prayed a prayer of blessing over me in Thai, then gave me a hug.

Steven stood there a bit awkwardly during this exchange.  I wondered if she would say anything to Steven and sure enough, she did the same—grabbed his hand, held it for a prayer, and gave him a hug, smiling happily.

Steven was very gracious about this.

I should add that Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle is a Christian, one of the .5%.

Yesterday we went to “The 10-Baht Place,” also known as “The Hole in the Wall” with Lee the campus pastor, who had been telling us for three weeks that we need to go there and get the kao put guy, which when people say it too fast sounds like “cow pie,” one of about 25 Thai words that are the same as unwholesome English words, such as the Porn-ping Tower that we ate at one evening and it’s actually a tall fancy hotel rather than the sleazy video stand you might assume.

Yes, well.

So we (our family, Lee and Joyce, and an independent young man named Mike who is good at speaking Thai) drove the back way out of the “mooban” or subdivision and around the corner, and there was a little pole building down a little dirt driveway.

An older couple stood behind the little counter and chattered excitedly with Lee and Mike.  We ordered our lunches, all at 10 baht per plate.  I had kao put guy, which is like fried rice with chicken and bits of egg.  Others had pad thai, which is a noodly semi-sweet food with bits of tofu.

[I'm always curious, in other countries, what the work/money/food ratio is, and I calculated that with what Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle charges for washing and drying and ironing just one pair of pants, she could come to this little place and buy an adequate lunch.

So then I didn’t feel so guilty for how little we paid her to do our laundry.]

We sat at a little round table and ate while guys in white Toyota coveralls wandered in and got their food and flipped through a grocery-store flyer.  Meanwhile we asked Mike Thai-culture questions. 

As we got up to leave I started taking a few pictures.  Thankfully Thai people love to take pictures and have them taken, so you don’t feel like you’re being rude.

Well.

Mrs. 10 Baht saw me.  In seconds she was right there, grinning and laughing and chattering away.  About something that meant a lot to her.  What in the world?

Suddenly she stood beside Steven.  With a mischievous grin she grabbed his right hand andslung it around her neck.  Then she reached over and snatched his other hand and held tight.  And then with her free hand she gestured at me that she wanted her picture taken.

I was happy to oblige despite the fact that this was slightly disturbing to watch.

She giggled like the girls at the ACE conventions when Steven is around.

If Jenny would try such a stunt Steven would roll his eyes and shake her off with a disgusted, “Gaaah!  Jenny!  Seriously?”

Amazingly, Steven calmly grinned through this cozy encounter.

Mrs. 10 Bhat giggled some more.

We didn’t ask what her patient old husband thought of it, looking on.

Mrs. 10 Baht chattered at Mike.  She wanted a copy of the picture to hang above the counter.  You know, the way places like “Mo’s” display pictures of Johnny Cash eating there in 1976.

We left with promises of a copy of the picture, and with Mrs. Ten Baht still giggling nervously.

I have had plenty of worries in years past about Steven the poor orphan child adjusting to normal life.

I have a feeling I have been worrying about all the wrong things with Steven and there are some other things that I really should be worrying about.

Wow, that guy.  He is something.

 

Thailand Tales 9

Random bits and pieces:

It's 47 steps from street level to the top floor where Steven and Jenny stay.  And if that's not high enough for you, then you can climb a welded-pipe ladder that's bolted to the wall and goes up another 12 feet to a little balcony area up by the roof.  I haven't yet figured out the purpose of this.  I had thought I might go up there sometimes to just get some fresh air, since there's no good place to just go and sit outside and breathe in private.  The trouble is, it's just sort of bare concrete, and the guys' workout/weightlifting area is also up there, just across the rail, so I don't feel too comfortable.

Speaking of ladders, that ladder always makes me think of "the trembling ladder, steep and tall, to the highest window in the wall." Last Saturday night there was a talent night here for entertainment, and Jenny recited Paul Revere's Ride.  We were also treated to singing, skits, expressive readings, and such.  Six guys acting out the Cinderella story?  That was priceless.

Jenny was sure those bites on her legs were from bedbugs.  So we Googled "bed bugs" and crawled all around her bed with a little flashlight, lifting up the sheet and inspecting.  If either of us found the smallest crumb or specimen, we conferred over it like frowning delegates at a NATO conference.  At least once, what we thought was a little black bug was a needle hole.  No bedbugs, we finally decided.  But it was a great mother-daughter bonding time.

You really need to go read Emily's Fathers Day tribute to Paul here.

We enjoy getting to know people.
Jenny says she TALKS with people and I VISIT with people.
This is Talking:
Hi Allison!
Oh hi Jenny!
How are you?
Great!  How are you?
Fine.  See ya.

This is Visiting:
Hi Allison!
Oh hi Dorcas!
So how are you doing?
Fine!
[Leaning forward, earnest look on face] How are your classes going?  I hope Paul isn't giving you too much homework.

 Steven actually had a few elephant pictures on his camera that I didn't know were there.  Here:

Thailand Tales 8

I have dozens of stories I'd like to tell and a hundred pictures I'd love to post but sadly my hands are giving me fits with that tendinitis/carpal tunnel stuff that flares up every so often.  So I'm saving them for the writing in the class I'm taking and also for redoing my email address list so people [you know who you are] can finally get the last three Letters from Harrisburg.

I'd appreciate your specific prayers for my hands.

Other than my hands we're doing great and have only 4 days left in Thailand!

Thailand Tales 7

A Visit to Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle

It is hot here--you've heard me say that before, I think. And very humid.

So we change our clothes a lot.  Which makes lots of laundry, even if there are only four of us.

We have a little washer in our apartment that does its best, but we have to dry everything inside on stair rails and metal racks, which leaves everything stiff and wrinkled. But we also have an iron, so I was ironing outfits for each of us every day.

And then I found out about Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.

Of course that's not her real name.  Her name is Mae Wan and her shop is just down the street a couple hundred feet.

But among our family we call her Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle because she is just as charming a laundress as the original, in the wonderful Beatrix Potter book where Lucie goes exploring and comes across a little hedgehog in a cap and apron and petticoats, with her skirts tucked up, and she's ironing in her low-ceilinged room, and she says, "Oh, yes, if you please'm; my name is Mrs. Tiggy-winkle; oh, yes if you please'm, I'm an excellent clear-starcher!"



You can read it here for free.

So now I wash our underthings here, since it's bad manners to take them to a laundry lady, and the rest of our clothes, along with sheets and towels, I stack into baskets and then I recruit a certain reluctant teenager and we haul them down the street.

 But first we haul them down two flights of stairs.  (The black plastic bag has hangers that I'm returning.)




Then it's out the door and left and down the street.

At Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle's shop, we take off our sandals and leave them outside.
 

She smiles a welcome and I put my hands together and say "Swaa-di-kaaa" and she does the same.  She pours our things into her baskets.
 

 And in her notebook, on the page with a tab for me, she figures out how much I need to pay.  I paid 500 baht to start with, then when that got used up, I gave her more, and so on.
 

Her shop is full of fresh, ironed shirts and dresses.  She really is an excellent clearstarcher.

 

Then she says, "God bless you," in English, and we smile and bow a bit, and take our baskets, and put our sandals back on, and go back to our apartment.

Steven stops to admire the bird-bath lily-pond.

 

The next morning we head back to Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle's.  We take off our sandals and step inside and smile and say Swaa-di-Kaaa.

Our clothes are hanging there, clean and pressed like they've never been pressed in their lives.


The dresses and shirts are on hangers.  The athletic pants [also pressed!] and towels and jeans are in bags. 

 

Mae takes out the notebook and we settle our accounts.  For this astonishing service she charges only 10 baht, or 33 cents, per piece.

 We thank her profusely and she says, "God bless you."  We fill our arms with fresh-smelling laundry and slip on our sandals and leave.

In another 3 or 4 days we'll gather up our dirty and sweaty and bedraggled things and take another trip to Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle's .

 

 Maybe someday we can even sit down and have tea.

 

Letter from Harrisburg

We interrupt our Thailand programming to take you back to our front yard in Oregon via today's Letter from Harrisburg.

Thailand Tales 6

After a busy week we decided to take a touristy expedition as a family on Saturday and go see The Elephants.

Paul has been really busy with teaching, even though it's only an hour a day, since he left most of the preparation to do here.  I'm taking one class and trying to do the homework, plus keeping Steven and Jenny busy, tidying up the four floors of our apartment, doing laundry, and running up or down a flight of stairs if I want a drink of water.

Paul borrowed a car from the campus pastor for the day.  I was nervous about this, as they drive on the left side, but all his Kenyan driving skills seemed to come back to him.  It helps that Thai people are just about the politest drivers in the world, and there are very few pedestrians or pedal bikes to dodge.

We drove through the city and then out into the countryside and up into the mountains, on well-maintained paved roads all the way.

The MaeSa Elephant Camp was like that one children's story book I used to read to the children, kind of a "Where's Waldo?" where the more you examined the pictures, the more elephants you saw peeping out from behind trees and buildings.



You can probably see some here if you look close enough.

These are Asian elephants, of course, which are smaller and much more teachable than African elephants.  They didn't exactly roam free, but they didn't seem very tied up either.  And everywhere you looked, you'd soon see an elephant back behind the tree or building.

Each elephant has a mahout, a limber young man who climbs up and down the elephant and sits on his head like he grew there and directs the elephant with subtle gestures.

First off, we took a ride, Steven and Jenny on one beast and Paul and I on another.  It felt like we were up very high, and at times, going up or down these muddy mountain slopes, it felt pretty perilous.  But just a fun, amazing experience, lurching along, step by slow ponderous elephant step.
The next picture might show you why it felt kind of dangerous going up that steep slippery slope.

 
Steven and Jenny had the cameras with them, so the only shot of them we can offer you is this one of their feet on that leathery back.

Toward the end of the half-hour ride, someone fed our elephant a big bundle of grass, and it seemed he wanted to stop and eat instead of climb up that last steep slope, and the mahout urged him on by nudging his knees into the back of his ears, step by step.

I had a sudden flashback to our old horse, Fern, trying to pull the buggy up Bears' Hill in Ohio.

 The elephant finally made it up, unlike Fern, without all of us piling out of the buggy.

We got to get up close and cozy with several elephants who hugged and kissed us.  And set a hat on each of our heads and took it off again.

I was less thrilled about that elephant kiss than some of the others.  It was like a huge, rubbery, sandy vacuum cleaner hose up against your face, with the vacuum very much "on."

They took all the elephants down to the river for a bath.  A few of them used the river as a latrine, and a woman who did not at all look grossed out by her job stood downstream with two baskets and scooped up the elephant poo as it floated downriver.  I was told it is then rinsed off and the undigested plant material is made into paper.  Which you can buy in the gift shop, made into nice picture frames and bookmarks.

 Then we watched an elephant show.  It was unbelievable, the level of discipline and training.


 They even painted pictures.


Elephant art, which sells for $70-$100 each.

 

See the harmonica in his trunk?  They all played harmonicas and danced.

 An elephant can kick an oversized soccer ball a lot farther than you can.

 
And we also fed bananas and sugar cane to the elephants, and saw some of the babies.

Steven says, "The elephant looks better than me in this picture."

And then we went home, and Steven and Jenny had a big argument about which would be the better pet--a monkey or an elephant.
"An elephant eats a lot but a monkey, you just feed them two bananas and you're good!"
"A monkey can get me stuff."
"So can my elephant!"
"It looks better to have a monkey on your shoulder than an elephant."
"An elephant has a noble brow!"
"Whatever.  It also gives loud kisses."
"Mom, that should be the title of your next book: In the Backyard the Elephants are Roaming."

Paul the Practical told them they can't have either one.