There’s a song I love, by United Pursuit, called Simple Gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ that I believe in is really quite simple (if you could describe love as simple, which is a whole other question) because it is that Jesus loves us incredibly and wonderfully that He would die so we could be with Him in heaven for eternity, and now He wants us to love Him back in our thoughts, words and deeds.
I went for my first mission trip in September, to Pua (Thailand) to teach English to children in Kathy’s Home. Kathy’s home is where children from the villages surrounding Pua can stay in order to attend the schools in Pua. Their villages being between 45 minutes to 2.5 hours drive away from Pua, staying free-of-charge in Pua ensures that they can receive a consistent education. Mak and Narola are the missionaries who run the home, together with two temporary missionaries from their hometown in Nagaland (India) and their daughter, Phoebe. I was so inspired by the trust Mak and Narola had for God - despite the need for house parents for the children, they've been continuing to trust and pray that God will provide. And the temporary missionaries and Phoebe being there are answers to prayer for the moment, but we'll keep praying.
It look a while to get there – a flight to Bangkok and then a change of flight to Nan, and then a long taxi ride to Pua, and then a ride in the back of Mak’s Song Tao to Kathy’s home. When we got there, it was already night, but it was time for our first lesson. Auntie Yah Wu and I were teaching the group of children who had just come from the villages to Kathy’s Home, and who struggled most with their English. They ranged from the youngest in the Home, aeroplane-loving Krittanai (also called Mochi), to fourteen year old Jeerasin. They called me Pi Miriam, which meant teacher Miriam, and we revised phonics with them, which they’d learnt previously with Auntie Yah Wu.
I was so tired from travelling and teaching, that I slept easily, waking up at 6am to go for a walk around the nearby lake with Auntie Yah Wu, who told me the story of how she met Uncle William, and advised me not to be in a rush to get married – ‘courtship days are the best days of your life, you don’t want to get married too soon’.
Our first lesson of the day involved teaching numbers and how to tell the time to the children, which we practiced with a game of ‘What’s the Time Mr Wolf?’ The children took big steps at first, excited by the game, but when they realized that the point of the game was running away from the ‘wolf’ they were taking steps towards, their steps turned into shuffles and little tiptoes, and they giggled and were easily scared into running backwards, before sheepishly stepping back forward to their places.
After that lesson, I fell asleep in a room in Mak and Nerola’s office and living space, under the slow rotation of the fan and a blanket of heat. Our next lesson saw us splitting the class into girls and boys – I taught the girls:
Malee, the cleverest in the class, competitive and keen to learn
Jumpee, one of the slower girls, who often drifted away in dreams
Saifon, who always clasped her mouth after giving an answer, afraid it was wrong, although she was usually right
Siriwan, shy and timid, and afraid to ask about what she didn’t understand, which was most of what was taught
Namtip, clever and inquisitive, who beamed at me during class and said ‘Pi Miriam so cute!’
Auntie Yahwu and I visited the market after that class, where she showed me the incredibly spicy chillis the people of Pua like to use in their cooking, and tiny green eggplant,
During worship on Sunday, the children started off singing in their Hmong dialect, in tunes that I wasn’t familiar with. But it was incredibly uplifting to hear their earnest nature in singing praises to the Lord. The English songs we had later had simple but meaningful words like ‘open the eyes of my heart Lord, I want to see you’.
And maybe it was then that I realised that even though we can't speak their language and they can't yet speak ours fluently yet, the gospel can be shared (us to them, them to us) in other, simple, ways. In the discipline through which Auntie Yah Wu handles a class, in the time Uncle Kim Song uses to prepare each lesson, in the photographs Uncle Siew Kim takes of each student - in the many ways they show practical love to the students, the love that Jesus commands for us to show to our brothers and sisters,
