Getting there and Day 1

Have you had a McDonald's Samurai Pork Burger yet?  Probably not, unless you've eaten at a McDonald's in Thailand.  Why is this significant?  Our travels to Roi Et started out pretty smoothly, from a logistics point of view.  We all met at SFO at 10 am on Friday, March 27.  We had a short layover in Seoul and ended up in Bangkok late Saturday night/Sunday morning (i.e., after midnight).  We got up early (no one got more than 4 hours sleep) and a couple of shuttle rides later ended up at the old DMK airport in Bangkok for what we thought would be an 11 am flight that would arrive in Roi Et at 12:15.  But our flight was delayed until 1:40!

Meanwhile we were waiting in an increasingly congested terminal with 7 gates that had at least 2 flights waiting at each gate.  The terminal had seating for only 3-4 flights, so 14+ flights made it ridiculously crowded.  And there was insufficient air conditioning to accommodate the huge crowd.  The airline apologized repeatedly and to show their contrition gave us all a free McDonald's lunch: a sandwich (Samurai Pork or McChicken) and a bottle of water with a McD's logo on it.

The Covenant churches in Roi Et were so excited that we were coming that they sent 20 people to the Roi Et airport to greet us.  But because of the flight delay they had to leave.  Bob Shim, Patrick & Tip Boonrang and Kristi Byford, a Covenant missionary in Roi Et, did return to greet us (below you can see Bob and the team greeting us).  They got us to our hotel in Roi Et and we had 30 minutes to settle down before our orientation began.

We walked from our hotel to a nearby building for orientation.  Our interpreters joined us and we heard stories of how God has been working in Roi Et through the Covenant since 1971 and how there is a renewed work of God going on right now.  We had dinner together (including leftovers from what was to have been our lunch!) and then assembled gift bags for the kids who would be coming to the health fairs (below is a picture of us assembling the gift bags).  Bob told us that there would be 60-80 kids the first three days and that there could be as many as 200 on the fourth and final day.  The reason for the increase?  The people of that church have a good reputation in their neighborhood.  Our prayer is that through these health fairs we will help all the churches to gain favor in the hearts of their neighbors.

After the assembly line we took some time to sing and hear Patrick's story of how he converted to following Christ from being the president of his university Buddhist society.  We closed with prayer together.  To be honest, by this time we were all pretty tired (after 4 or less hours of sleep the night before and over 20 hours on airplanes).  To be even more honest, some of started sleeping before Patrick had finished his story.  By now (11 pm) most of us are asleep.