Ever failed culturally? We have!!!

(This blog was hand written on our first day of ministry here in Thailand!)


We started a camp at Ban Pong, there were about 30 kids!  To put them into groups we passed out pictures of animals, pigs, frogs, owls, tigers, and ducks, & they were to make the sound of their animal to find their group! "Oink! Ribbit! Who, Who! Roar! Quack!" Easy enough, right?!  Except that evidently animals are NOT bi-lingual! The owl and the tiger are a bit! But the Thai duck says, "Kop! Kop!"  The Thai frog says, "Up! Up!"  and the Pig says, "Oot! Oot!"  We laughed, they laughed, crisis averted!

We made name tags, where they were gracious enough to use American characters as the Thai characters look like this!
 Thai children are neat and orderly, respectful, and very quiet!  Weirdest culture ever! ha!

Showing emotion is a sign of weakness, to show too much excitement, or anger, or sadness will cause the Thai not to trust you.  To say my name is as a female is: Chan followed by your name But a male is to say: Pom Chuu followed by his name.  Unfortunately for Adam, he missed that memo! And introduced himself on the first day as Chan Adam! (Girly Adam!)  There were quite a few giggles on that one! No need to plan ice breakers with this crew!!!

They love basketball so we thought we'd play a game of "Knock Out!" or "Shoot Out" as Sara calls it! We're such an individualistic culture while they're collectivist to the core! The sweet Thai children would wait until the child in front of them made their basket before even attempting to shoot! Needless to say we failed culturally more than once on our first day, but they were forgiving!
We switched games and evidently "Steal the Bacon!" brings out the non-polite in ANY culture!

While we await our Pad-Thai to be ready for lunch, our iphones are in the hands of polite children playing Angry Birds, there's a group playing Ninja, Taylor is showing the boys pics of his girlfriend and teaching them to say, "Pretty!" And Colton is making somewhat of a failed attempt to teach the children dodge ball, it's not entirely a failure though because they don't mind to throw the ball at Colton just not at each other!  Ha!

To end the day, we announced, "Tommorrow Tye Dye!"  Opps! That could have been heard as Tomorrow Thai Die! Maybe I should do a blog series on how to fail culturally in any land, I've got lots and lots of material!!! We don't just pray grace over our meals, but over our days in Thailand!