Relationship Building

The 4 of us at lunch

One of the greatest privileges of life, and often one of the most difficult, is to be able to establish relationships and friendships.  Relationships do not get established overnight, you have to build them, usually slowly.  Often you have to be very intentional.  That is easy to do when you do not have a lot of friends (like someone moving to a new country).  We have been making several new friends.  We wanted to share an experience with one of our newest friendships.

J and Dew

Several weeks ago,  I happened upon a cyclists in the mountains.  I caught up to him and asked his name (to practice my newly acquired language skills).  He said his name was Dew, but then he quickly begin to ask me questions in his native language.  My language skills were not that good, so I just put the dumb foreigner face look on to say, “I have no idea what you just said.”  (FYI: We usually either use that face or the face that makes us look like we understand every word they say.  Usually in language class we use the latter.)

That casual encounter has begun to build into a great relationship.  I ride with him every morning and each time I try to use the opportunity to share a little about our purpose and the Truth.  Last week we finally had a holiday and our schedules allowed us to get together with him and his girlfriend.  We told them to take us to their favorite restaurant.  You can do that here, because their favorite restaurant will not be a $100 steak dinner; usually, it will cost around $2 – 3 to eat a nice local meal. 

The restaurant with the ostrich in the cage in the back

J and L

Aim and Dew

They took us to this nice restaurant overlooking a small lake (aka a pond).  The pond was stocked with giant fish and there was an ostrich in a lake-side cage(which I guess they use for its eggs).  After allowing our “tour guides” to order for us we were able to feed these giant aquatic beasts living in the lake.  It is a brilliant plan to charge the tourists to feed the stocked fish.

The boys are feeding the fish

The girls feeding the fish and posing using the peace sign, which is used by the locals in all their photos.  It cracks us up!

The fish pond…aka J’s lunch

After our meal came, we quickly remember that their idea of a normal meal is different from ours.  One dish was hot soup with a seafood symphony.  It had clams, squid, fish, and shrimp.  Another dish was a minced pork salad (which sounded benign enough).  The salad was spicy pork.  All of the pork.  The loin, intestines, liver, kidney, etc.  So, I offered some of my meal to our friends.  They happily picked all of the inners from my plate.  I casually picked from their plate (one of giant fish we had just feed).

J and Dew

J’s lunch-bones and all

Truthfully, the food was fine, but the best part was hanging out with new friends.  After we were done I asked, “so, do you want to anything else?”  Dew thought and said, “oh we can go to a nearby waterfall.”  It was a 105 degrees outside, so we welcomed the idea of visiting a waterfall.

Trekking the waterfall

Because it was a national holiday, the waterfall entrance fee was free.  It was a single fall broken into 13 steps.  Each step had a pool with seemingly hundreds of people bathing in each pool.  With the warm temperature, it was very hard not to jump in (cell phone and all).  I waded around a bit, but decided not to immerse myself in the refreshing stream.

The guys decided to get wet.  The girls didn’t. 

Dew and Aim taught us the “heart pose.”  Can’t you tell we are making a heart. :)  We learned this is another tradition they pose with in their photos.  Guess we are going to have to learn how to perfect it!  They told us to work on our form.

We are truly privileged to visit such exotic places as these and to be able to share our message with people who desire to hear it.

Mae Sa Waterfall