From ajk96@u.washington.edu Sun Aug 11 07:47:47 2002 Received: from mailscan5.cac.washington.edu (mailscan5.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.14]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with SMTP id g7BEljeY030184 for ; Sun, 11 Aug 2002 07:47:46 -0700 Received: FROM mxu3.u.washington.edu BY mailscan5.cac.washington.edu ; Sun Aug 11 07:47:45 2002 -0700 Received: from mxout4.cac.washington.edu (mxout4.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.19]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.06) with ESMTP id g7BEljbr021231 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for ; Sun, 11 Aug 2002 07:47:45 -0700 Received: from mailscan-out1.cac.washington.edu (mailscan-out1.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.17]) by mxout4.cac.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.06) with SMTP id g7BEliS4010444 for ; Sun, 11 Aug 2002 07:47:44 -0700 Received: FROM hymn02.u.washington.edu BY mailscan-out1.cac.washington.edu ; Sun Aug 11 07:47:44 2002 -0700 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hymn02.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with ESMTP id g7BEli3t000922 for ; Sun, 11 Aug 2002 07:47:44 -0700 Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 07:47:44 -0700 (PDT) From: "Andrew J. Kim" To: bproject@u.washington.edu Subject: Last Day! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Hi All: The day has come, today is my last night in Bangkok, Thailand. Where to start... Well I got back from Chiang Mai this morning at 6:00am... It was 14 hours there and 14 hours back. When we got to the base camp which took 4 hours on van, we met up with a Korean Mission Team that had ablout 50 junior high students... I actually came with a College/High School Team from Korea which had 10 people, plus my room mate Min Ha and the Tae Kwon Do Teacher's 4 ness's who we had to take care of... When we got there, our team had no clue what we were going to do... But the Head Missionary at that base camp said we were going hiking... SO basically our team wasn't even prepared, we all had either tennis shoes or sandles, not much water proof clothing, food, etc... So we all unpacked unecessary things and just packed one extra pack of clothes, and some toilitries and a 1L bottle of water (which had to last us the entire 5 days we had to hike... So we go there on Wednesday afternoon, got an hour lunch break and headed off into the rough wilderness of Chiang Mai... I!t took about a 4 hour hike to the first village, luckly it didn't rain... I conserved about half of my water, we got there and the teams did there little presentations of body worship, etc to the nbatoives (who don't speak thai, they speak a different language which I call the Mountain language cause they live in the mountians...) We walked through rice patties, and some pretty rough trails... Saw them chop up our pig which we ate for dinner, didn't get to do much ministry because theyt village already had been evangelized... We packed 70+ people at the school in the Village and slept and woke up at 5am to get read and leave... We left around 6am and the next village we had to go to was by far the hardest one... 5 hour hike vertical!!! It was very rough and steep and what made it worse was it was pouring rain and when it rains in Thailand, it's monsoon rain... Luckly I packed my Old Navy Anorack Jacket and Nike Warm Ups which I quickly wore... What sucked more was when i!t rains, the leeches come out... I got sucked by I think 4 l! eeches, makes it a little harder to walk when they get on you... We first go to a school where we did the same kind of presentations but added doing messages for the natives that came, medical attention stuff and other things for the kiddies... This village near the school was different because all of them weren't evangelized so we tried some minsitry but all the kids ran away... :( Then after that we had to hike for about 2 hours to the last village where we slept a (still pouring rain)... But at least we got to go down the mountain... But going down a mountain with no trail + slippery mud = falling down in the mud with leeches waiting... Got bit my more parasites, I think I've been bitten by every single parasite known to man... Hope I don't get sick... Anyways, last village we did the same stuff and the village had already been evanglized, it had it's own church where all the sisters slept at. The guys on the other hand got to sleep in the natives homes. I got lu!cky and got to sleep in one of the richer people's houses, they had a motorcycle and a fire place!!! But no chimney so the smoke spread everywhere... And how the houses are built, the animals they raise liver under the house where they slep, poop and eat so it stunk like crazy... Luckly the smoke made the smell die down... We finally got to get some more sleep but we were woken up at 3am because one of the junior high kids got appendicitus (spelling?) so we all had to leave early (I have no clue on that person's status...) With an hour of sleep and an 8 hour trek up and down the mountains in Chiang Mai was quite a challenge.... I learned more about the power of prayer and trusting more in God. All of the people were impressed that I kept moving on and not taking much breaks (by this time I had no water and I was getting a little more fatigued and stuff...) But inside I was hurting a lot, I was thirsty, hungry, sweaty, sticky, stinky, itchy, aching, etc... But I lift!ed it all to God and by the last hour, a truck came and picke! d our group up which we were about 2 hours ahead of all the lazy people and took us back to the base camp where we took a "Thai" shower (hose,no soap :( ) And got an hour of sleep and had service and stuff... It was a great expreience by far, I think God saved this experience just for me :) From this experience, I gained a lot not only physically much spiritually from just hiking because there was nothing else to do but hike so I got to meditate a lot about my life, etc... And I promised the missionary there that I would bring a team from our church there so I'm expetcing some of you guys to join me in this experience next year!!! 18 hour hike in the rough Jungles and Mountains of Thailand, what more could you want? I think that's by far the longest e-mail I've sent you guys, hope you can envision my rough but supre fun experience!!! See you guys in another month after some serious R&R in Korea, till then peace out! Sincerly, Andrew P.S. Leeches suck ^-^ P.P.S Being dehydrates sucks too! P.P.P.S But God still loves me! .