Tongue Thai-ed

Since our arrival in Thailand, we've understood and appreciated the value of knowing and speaking the local language.  If your going to live and serve cross-culturally, it's Step 1; no way around it.

Our realistic goal is to be 'comfortable' in speaking Thai (meaning we can carry a basic conversation with most anyone, buy what we need at the shops, and communicate and build relationship with our Thai co-workers and women we're working with) within our first 2 years.

Now, nearly 6 months after moving here, we've started our first official Thai classes with a local Thai tutor, Mrs. Wan.

Mrs. Wan is a precious lady who's taught Thai to many of Destiny Rescue's foreign staff members.  She's originally from Bangkok, but has lived in northern Thailand for most of her life (so she's familiar with the 'local dialect' and can correct it when necessary!).  She has a daughter our age who's married to a kiwi (New Zealander, for all my north american counterparts) and who runs her own language school in Chiang Mai.

Dan meets with Mrs Wan for a one-hour Thai lesson two times a week, Catrina does one for now, until we can afford more (but she's also a quicker student; by Mrs. Wan's own omission....)

The reason we haven't started Thai tutoring in earnest until now, is that in our first few months here, we wanted to know what the options available to us were; were we to do a 2-week intensive course, did we just want friends to teach us, did we need to take a college class?  Our role within Destiny Rescue was flexible to the learning we wanted to do, but did not provide a package or requirements as such to learn Thai.  So we started with a local friend coming over and teaching both of us; but it was haphazard at best, and it was upon us to develop the lesson plans as such and direct the course of the learning.  So finally, we knew, if we were going to learn Thai, we had to strike out and make it priority.

Now you can be a part of this process with us!  Along the side-bar of this BLOG, there's a section where you can donate (through paypal, or through a tax-deductible donation if you wish; just let us know via email) to our 'Learning Thai' fund.  $30 a month about covers it; and this was more than we originally budgeted exclusively for language learning.  But once we started, we knew this was a wise investment of our ministry time and resources for this season.

We'd be blessed to have your partnership with us in this (or other available) projects as things move forward!  Keep an eye on this space, as we'll update this regularly as opportunities come up.

Prah-jawh- you- khap kun

Thank you and God bless you!