Matt, Miriam and Timothy

Merry Christmas to everyone back home in Australia. We celebrated Christmas in Thailand this year, and as our time here quickly comes to an end, I still notice new things that I’m learning even just before we leave. I’m sure back in Australia everything apart from service stations are closed, everyone heads off to visit family and friends and all enjoy the day together gorging on food, sharing and receiving gifts and hopefully manage to remember to give thanks to God for sending His son in there somewhere…

Well it’s a little bit different in Thailand… for one thing schools are still open, so all the kids are still at school today, the garbage collection is still on today and pretty much everyone just treats today as another day, I’m sure a lot of Thai’s know that it’s some sort of special day on the western calendar but it really doesn’t seem any different here. We enjoyed our day with the Mum’s and kids living on our property and had lunch with them, one of the boys even went of to school today, and we had a lovely time having a picnic just outside our house on the grass. Later that evening we joined the kids and family at Home of The Open Heart for a BBQ tea, well pork and sausages on little coal fire pots, not a real “barbie” just a Thai style one.

We did have a wonderful day as a family and Timothy really enjoyed getting some books and a car for Christmas, as much as we missed family and friends on Christmas day it is really a blessing to be able to experience Christmas living in another culture. It makes me look at what we do, and why we celebrate and hold particular traditions we do as meaningful, we made sure we sat down in the morning as a family and gave thanks to God for his Son, and prayed and asked God to be a part of our day, I mean there’s no reason that  you have to wait until your about to say grace to give thanks, the only reason we have Christmas is give thanks to Jesus for coming to earth and what he did so why not thank him all day?

Anyway here are a few pics of our Christmas, the one with Timothy and baby Alex is cute as we think Timothy is looking forward to being a big brother, can’t wait to get home and see everyone again, share our stories and adventures, and here how the past year has been for everyone back in OZ. Hope you had a great Christmas and a Happy New Year, look forward to seeing everyone in 2010…

So as our time comes down to a week in Thailand, we are trying to enjoy the last few days we have here as well as finish off any projects, work or commitments that we have. We went on a family picnic yesterday which was really nice, it was at Prong Prabhat Waterfall, which is only a five minute drive away from our home, and on Saturday we went for a ride as a family, on the family motorbike of course, to the airport for yummy chocolate drinks and biscuits to watch the plane takeoff. Timothy’s getting very excited about his upcoming plane ride but well wait and see how he is after several hours of being stuck in a seat. We’re doing the overnight flight so we are praying that he sleeps during most of our flight from Bangkok to Melbourne, and that we, Mummy and Daddy, do as well…

We’ll during the building of the hospice I did manage to fall through a scaffold… thankfully with not too many bruises and my head still attached, but the Thai workers are here at the moment and they blow me away with the daredevil ways they climb out onto the Thai version of scaffolding. I can’t say that I’m going to go out there and give them a hand.

It amazes me that the whole thing is held together with wire, bamboo and rope. I love that one group of guys came and put it together and then another group came in the next day and started to clamber all over it, safety here in Thailand seems like an optional extra… just like motorbike helmets!

Well it’s been nearly a year for our time here in Thailand, sometimes it feels like it was only yesterday that we got here and then other times we can’t wait to get out of here, depends on the day. We’ll as far as Matt thinks he’s pretty happy with what he’s been able to achieve on the hospice project at Home of the Open Heart, the roof is currently being tiled and the other type of tiles, floor tiles, are being laid in the bathrooms. Matt recently got to finishing off some brick handrails on the second floor and is now busy tying up any loose ends so that there isn’t a paper trail left over that doesn’t make sense, of course this means tidying up the previous one, but that’s what he’s here for. All in all the roof should be tiled and guttered before the end of the year and Matt might even have a camp out up there for something to do, then he can say he’s stayed in the building he helped make, and before we know it we’ll be back in Adelaide and trying to get life going again in that part of the world. All said and done it’s been an amazing and challenging adventure for all three of us and we can’t wait to see what we’re called to next…