Hoay Maw

On Apr 7th we went to Hoay Maw for a "Spring Special".

We were delighted when the staff and children from the local Ban San Faan children's home asked if they could join us.

We were also joined by our friends Simon and Jill Bird and their son Matthew.

Our oldest son, Tom, was away at a youth camp but our other two children, David and Jessica came as well. David had organised some games activities, mostly with a water theme as it is near the thai New Year Sonkran festival which can basically be described as a good natured, national water fight. Jessica and I, Jill and Malee from Ban San Faan had each prepared a craft activity.

Simon came to evaluate the water supply as there have been problems irrigating the vegetables.

Whilst the children were enjoying the craft activities, Jill, an English GP, took the children one-by-one and tested their eyes. She had made a special eye test chart using Thai letters. She found one child who had a congenital cataract and a couple of other children who were short sighted. Unfortunately, the boy with the cataract was not eligible for free medical care and so we will have to explore options for helping with that. It should be straight forward to get some glasses to help with the short sight. A surprise outcome was that our David took the test, (as he is learning to read Thai at school) and was found to be quite short-sighted in one eye - so a visit to the optician for us.

As usual, the children revelled in the opportunity to do some creative activities. Jill helped them make a mosaic cross design using pretty glass mosaic squares on a pale blue tile. We have encouraged them to keep the tiles and we will take up some tile cement and put the tiles up as a display. Malee helped the children make paper bag animal puppets. The children enjoyed colouring in the faces, tongue and paws of the animal. Jessica and I (Jenny) helped the children make zig-zag paper men. A craft that David had learnt at Powerpack.

After crafts, David organised the games and a lot of fun was had by all.

Simon and Adrian returned from their expedition to find water. They recommended pumping water up from a low-lying lake in order to service the vegetables and proposed fish pond. We hope that the Spring Harvest offering will be able to help with this.

Some good news is that the small mother pig has given birth to 15 cute piglets. Wan Pen is seen here putting anti-bacterial powder on them.

As it was quite hot outside, we showed a film in the cool church.

We all ate together with the Hoay Maw children.

We finished with a time of worship and prayer in the Church. The Ban San Faan children helped lead some songs in Thai and Matthew Bird helped by playing the electric guitar. One of the Hoay Maw girls led prayer for the children at Spring Harvest as we pointed out that the children at the first week of Spring Harvest would be watching the final video and taking the main offering that day. Then the Ban San Faan children and the rest of the visitors all prayed for the Hoay Maw children.

We travelled back quite late, sleeping most of the way and arriving back at about 11.30pm.