Jump to ChiangMai

Hello Friends,

We just landed in ChiangMai (see map below), northern Thailand. Katherine, a bubbly woman from the UK who is doing multilingual education work in northern Thailand, met us at the airport and drove us to the guesthouse where we are staying. Before we could do that, though, we had to get out of the parking lot. In the few minutes she was inside, someone had parked behind her, blocking her in (this seems to not be an uncommon practice here). They were kind enough to leave the parking brake off, so we just pushed the car out of the way, pulled our vehicle out, and moved the other car back into place.


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We just finished a conference in Bangkok where we learned a lot! The conference was designed for people who don't know very much about LEAD or who are new to the organization, so it was a perfect place for us to get some deeper questions answered. We also spent some great time talking with SIL members who have tons of field experience doing community development. We are looking forward to spending some more time with them in the coming months, seeing their projects and writing stories of the work they are doing. We also learned about the Micah Network, a global Christian community that is committed to what they call "integral mission." Integral mission is the concept that LEAD strives to achieve in all of its projects. The following definition is excerpted from the Micah Network website.

--Integral mission or holistic transformation is the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel. It is not simply that evangelism and social involvement are to be done alongside each other. Rather, in integral mission our proclamation has social consequences as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life. And our social involvement has evangelistic consequences as we bear witness to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ.--

We concluded the conference by going to a great Lebanese restaurant (try some nan and hummus - it's amazing!) with most of the people who attended the conference. It was a great time of developing friendships with new people.

We will be in ChiangMai province for the next week, visiting several projects that are partnerships between LEAD and the Foundation for Applied Linguistics. These projects primarily focus on multilingual education in Hmong primary schools. Multilingual education programs allow young students to learn first in their native language while gaining skills in the dominant language of the country (Thai, in this case.) We'll talk a little more about these projects once we have more specific information.

..Isaac and Kirstie..