Hilario's Zone: Thailand November to December 2009

Greetings from us here in Khon Kaen Thailand!

The City Gate of Khon Kaen

Legoland Lego Blocks Thai Style!

Greetings once again from Khon Kaen Thailand!

It's December already and we pray that you will all have a wonderful Christmas and New Years Celebration. This will be our first Christmas without both of our children so please pray for Jonathan & Joanna that they too will have a meaningful Christmas! We are so grateful that we can get together with both of them in New Zealand late in February 2010. We will celebrate our Christmas then and all of our birthdays too. Joanna will be 18 in January and Jonathan 22 this December! (....Oh so maybe that's why the wrinkles and grey hair are appearing more and more...)

We will take our 3 month, 3 yearly furlough in New Zealand from late February until early June 2010. Please reserve some time on your busy calendars for us. We would love to catch up with you! It will be strange to be back in a land with many Caucasian people. I (Brenda) am one of very few Caucasians here in Khon Kaen. Mostly we see men with Thai wives. I have only seen two other white women here....However while we were in Vientiane City in Laos last month we saw more white people than people from Laos!

Hazel (one of our students who is from the Philippines) came with us to Laos to renew her visa too..here we are pictured in Vientiane City Laos..
The city is preparing for the SEA games that will be held there in the month of December

We have now ended the fourth week of lecture phase of the Thailand Family Ministries School . Yesterday we fare welled our guest speaker Linda Bubod from the Philippines who taught on codependency, addictions, and forgiveness. We are always so blessed with her wealth of experience in counseling and in teaching counseling. Linda is presently working as a professor at a seminary in Singapore heading up the counseling program. Many of the students had breakthroughs in the area of forgiveness especially towards significant people in their lives

Linda Teaching with Poie and Oom our Thai interpreters..one speaking Thai and one writing Thai

Each week the students are continuing to respond well to the teaching and are beginning to work through issues in their personal and family lives.They are all looking forward to the renewal of their marriage vows ceremony in a few weeks.

We were planning a one week midterm outreach but have had to cancel it due to lack of funds. As of now only one of the student couples have paid their full fees and all the others are doing the best they can little by little. As I wrote earlier that many of these students are from Buddhist backgrounds and have been provided for by the YWAM Centres that they have served in here in Thailand. However this financial help does not usually continue into their taking training such as the FMS or FFL.

So instead of the one week field assignment we will continue on with the lecture phase and teach the students how to celebrate Christmas over the 24Th & 25!! Christmas is just another day here. However last week a huge shopping mall opened here in Khon Kaen and we saw the first Christmas trees and decorations! We hope to also have some outreach into the community.

Opening of the new shopping mall with drums and a Christmas Carol!

Last week we went to the opening of this new shopping Mall as YWAM Khon Kaen have opened a Korean restaurant in the food court of this mall All of the profits will go to the Thai YWAMers to help them with their financial support and ministry. We were all blessed to eat dinner together at this new restaurant and to see a fireworks display and maybe see also the whole population of Khon Kaen!

YWAM Khon Kaen Staff working in the restaurant.

Presently Mel is down in Bangkok picking up our next guest speakers Jim & Jean Hatton. They will speak in the school for two weeks on Shame, Anger and Boundaries and how all of these things affect the family. Pray for their time here as in past FMS schools their teaching and ministry usually brings about significant change in the students lives.

This weekend Mel and I will take another trip to Laos to apply for a two month visa for Thailand. Please pray with us that we will obtain this visa as we have three more weeks of teaching coming up in the last two weeks of December and the first week of January. Our topics will include Families in Missions, Differences between Men & Women, Family Styles, Intercultural Marriage, Discipline in Parenting, Active listening and some basic Counseling Skills/Tools, Personality types and more!

Hope you are enjoying all the pictures ..here are some from Vientiane City Laos (we live about 3 hours from the Laos/Thai Border...)