Category Archives: Memories

September 2, 2012 · 6:24 pm

Another Sunday Edition

 

When I actually write a post on Sunday, I tend to like to write about a more spiritual side of things.  I do know and respect that most who read this blog don’t read it for my spiritual insights and I am sensitive to that fact.  At the same time, as Shakespeare said, “To thine own self be true.”  Today I was watching a YouTube video put out by my church.  Before I explain why I thought about posting it, let me show it to you:

I like this video, because I do believe that there is a bit of our Heavenly Father in everything around us.  This also gave me chance to reflect on my two years I spent in Thailand.  I make no secret that I learned Thai as part of my desire to share the Gospel with others in Thailand.  To do that, I had to understand and respect the religion of the people, primarily Buddhism.

One may think it’s a contradiction that I can be out trying to convert people to my religion and still respect them for following theirs.  To me it’s not.  Thai’s have a saying in regard to religion.  ”All religions teach us to be good.”  I agree with this whole heartily.  If they are not teaching you to be good, then it’s not a religion.  If I had never learned Thai, I would never have learned about Buddhism and I would never understood the general message of what Buddhism teaches.

So on this short Sunday edition of Want2SpeakThai.com, I would encourage all to share your beliefs and be willing to have others share theirs with you.  When you have language exchanges, ask to learn about their church/beliefs.  You will not just learn more about the language and culture of those who speak your language.  You will understand your own more as well.  That is what happened to me in Thailand and that is what will happen to you.

 

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July 15, 2012 · 2:44 pm

A few quick thoughts on Sunday

Prayers

Prayers in different languages can help us be more spiritual

One thing that I was told a while ago is that the quickest way to make enemies is to talk about religion and politics.  I don’t actually believe that, but I do typically avoid those subjects on this blog.  Being that today was Sunday, I thought I would give a few interesting memories and contrasts I have found while studying religious themes in the languages that I am pursuing.

Praying in Thai

One of the first lessons I was given about Thai, when I became a missionary, was how to pray. Continue reading →

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May 28, 2012 · 12:49 pm

Thai Monday – Remembering My Father

Today is Thai Monday so the post will be entirely in Thai.  The English translation will be down below in Italics.  Enjoy:

วันนี้เป็นวันพิเศษที่สหรฐ เป็นวันอนุสรณ์ เป็นวันที่เราคิดถึถึงคนที่เสียชีวิดแล้ว คนหนึ่งที่ผมมักจะคิดถึงคือพ่อผม พ่อผมเป็นคนที่โดนหลายสิ่งหลายอย่าง ขาทั้งสองข้างถูกตัดออกและเขามีโรคเบาหวาน แม้เขาจะมีปัญหาเหล่านี้ เขาเป็นครูสอนและเป็นพ่ออันยิ่งใหญ่ ผมคิดถึงพ่อผมจริงๆ

Today is a special day that the U.S.  Today is Memorial Day, which is the day we think about those that have passed away. One person that I usually think about today is my father. My father had many things happen to him. Both of his legs were amputated and he had diabetes. Even though he had these problems, he was a teacher and a great father. I really miss my father.

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April 19, 2012 · 9:24 am

Memorizing Scripts: A useful tool to learn any language

Official U.S. Navy Imagery

There I was sitting in the Missionary Training Center learning Thai.  It hadn’t been easy, but I was beginning to feel like this task of learning Thai might actually be possible.  I should have knocked on wood or something, because a bomb was about to be dropped on me.  One of my class mates inquired about what we will be doing to study Thai once we get to Thailand.   I was expecting something like learn to read the Thai script or maybe go on English fasts where we don’t speak any English no matter what.

However, our teacher surprised us all.   He casually explained,”The first thing all of you will be expected to do is memorize the discussions.”  The discussions were what we called the lessons that the missionaries used to teach to those who were interested about our church.  They were standard lesson points that all centered around a few related gospel principles that were designed to be taught in a discussion format(hence the name).  Of course I reckoned that I was going to have to memorize them sooner or later, but why the first thing?  I can barely put a complete Thai sentence together, shouldn’t I be doing other things to improve my Thai before I really try to teach the discussions?

The benefits of memorizing

I soon quickly found the benefits of memorizing the discussions.  Continue reading →

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March 7, 2012 · 1:58 pm

The things I will miss about New Zealand

Today is the day!  I get on the plane at 10:45 pm and arrive in Salt Lake City, Utah at 7:45 PM the same day.  I love going back across the International dateline.  It’s kinda like having a time turner from Book 3 of the Harry Potter series.

Before I return home and embrace my life in America, I thought I would take a moment to talk about my time here in New Zealand.  New Zealand has been my home for the past year.  Even though this experiment and adventure didn’t turn out the way my wife and I thought it would, I will continue to have warm fuzzy memories of the time I spent here.  So I thought I would dedicate this post to New Zealand and the things I will miss now that I am leaving the place of my wife’s childhood and my home for the last year.

The Location

New Zealand is a primarily two islands just south-east of Australia.  The location allows it to have mountains, beaches, large cities, and acres of farmland all really close to each other.  There is no wonder that so many movies are made here.  It has so many of those wonderful locations that movies look for but all in that same country.  Everyone is near a beach here in NZ.  Several times, my father-in-law took my family out on his boat and we would anchor at a new beach every day and swim.  The trout fishing I did in the states has nothing on fishing for snapper out in the ocean.   My wife said that this is where God hid the Garden of Eden and I believe her.

The Food

They have food here in New Zealand that you do not get in America.  First of all there are the Bakeries full of Delicious meat pies and sausage rolls.  Then you have the plethora of Takeaway Chinese and fish ‘n’ chip shops every where you go.  Finally, the cookies and candies that you can only find in New Zealand are to die for.  Tim tams, Toffie pops, squigles, Perky nanas, Pineapple lumps, mallow puffs.  The list could go on for a whole post!  It’s going to be amazingly difficult to get these products in America.

The People

We have made some wonderful friends here and I will miss them all, but even more than that I will miss my in-laws.  I really do have wonderful parents-in-law who would help us all the time.  Many of my wife’s siblings are just starting to have children and one just got engaged over christmas.  All these new events will happen with out us.  We are going to miss so much.  One of my wife’s older sisters was another mother to my children.  My kids will miss her, especially my youngest.  He wont know what to do with himself if he can’t go up and bang on her door to let her know he wants to hang out.   One of my wife’s other sisters and her husband have promised to come over once a year.  I really do hope that they will.  We are going to miss everyone here so much

The Future

Now that my journey here in New Zealand is coming to a close (for now at least).  All I can do is look to the future.  For the purpose of this blog, it means I am going to be in a position to use my spanish much more.  Radio, television, and people themselves will be speaking in Spanish much more than before.  I can no longer hide behind my location.  I need to go out and speak and perfect this spanish!  Si se puede!

Thankyou, all who read my blog.  Some of the fun of  being an american, living in New Zealand, and learning spanish no longer will apply.  Even so, I hope that you will all continue to help me as I start this new leg of my journey in America.  Thanks again!  Nos Vemos!

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February 16, 2012 · 8:25 am

You’re Fat!!!

When ever you go to a new country, there is undoubtably going to be a culture shock.  Thai culture is no exception to that rule.  I loved learning and living in Thai culture when I was there.    The one thing about Thai culture, that  I always found interesting was how Thais could be so polite and respectful one moment( This is called เกรงใจ  kreng jai in Thai) and then they will turn around and tell you that you are fat the next moment.  In fact I was called fat, or some variation of fat, by almost everyone I was introduced to in Thailand.

I soon realized that physical characteristics are fair game in Thailand.  I also quickly learned that words like fat don’t always have the negative implication that automatically goes with the same word in English.  To a Thai, saying “you are looking kinda round today” is no more offensive than saying “you are looking very lovely today.”  Both are just observations.  In fact, bothare usually said with a sense of endearment.  Me being called fat all the time, helped me get one of my favorite nicknames that I ever received, while in Thailand.

Nicknames in Thailand

Let me step back for a moment and talk about another bit of  Thai culture. Continue reading →

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February 3, 2012 · 11:07 am

I am from ญี่ปุ่น(Yii pun)…..

When I was in Thailand,  I was there as  missionary for my church.  Most of the other missionaries I was with were other Europeans, mostly Americans.  There were several Thai missionaries as well.  We would hang around with each other so much that it began to change our accents.  My family started to notice that my accent was kinda off from a typical american accent.  My English grammar was still the same and my pronunciations wasn’t bad, it’s just that I sounded ‘different‘ than what I used to sound like.

This wasn’t the only interesting thing that happened.  The Thai missionaries began to have their accents change as well.  In fact they would change so much that other Thais would say things to them like, “Where are you from?  You aren’t Thai, you don’t speak very clearly,” and “This Farang you are with speaks Thai more clearly than you, so you can’t be Thai.”  If I had a baht every time I heard a Thai mate of mine get torn apart for not speaking Thai very well, I think I would be a millionaire.

Funny thing happened on the way to the wad

This interesting situation ended up creating one of the funniest things to ever happen to one of my Thai friends.  We will call him Jo to protect his identity.

Let me give you a bit of back ground on what we did as missionaries.  We go and meet people and invite them to hear a message about our church.  If they accept then we invite them to hear more and so on.  You can guess the most of the people we talk to say no and most of the people who do say yes, say no for further visits.

My friend Jo, who is a Thai, started talking to a man in his neighborhood.  During the conversation his accent came up.  Jo was not in the mood to be told he couldn’t speak Thai very well and decided to say he was from Japan(ญี่ปุ่น -Yii pun).  It made for an interesting conversation and so much so that the man eventually asked to learn about the church.  Since the chances of him wanting to learn anything more than that were very slim, Jo didn’t worry much about his little ‘fib’ about being Japanese.

Little did he know….

This man not only wanted to continue learning, but he became very interested.  Not just interested in the church, but in his now Japanese friend whose stories became more and more elaborate as he went on. Including naming the place he was from and what it was like in Japan compared to Thailand.

I never did find out what happened, because I ended up being moved to a new area.  This is one of those examples of why you shouldn’t lie, because it always ends up biting you in the ญี่ปุ่น -Yii pun

 

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