(Euiy) Nicole & (Ai) Kris: My new home

At the beginning of October I moved in with a new Lao family, as exchange students from Norway arrived for 6 months and needed to live in the home of my old family.

While I discovered the new students were coming only a few weeks before they arrived I had little time to figure out where I was going to go live, but no worries. (Living in Laos has made me relaxed about everything). I wasn’t worried, and knew that if I needed to I could stay in a guesthouse for a a while, but my friends heard I had to leave my old home and quickly began to search for who they knew that would let me live with them. Life in Laos is all about connections and who you know. Well,  a Christian family of the LEC agreed and although we had never met before (as they go to Annou Church & I go mostly to Nakham  (currently Nongtha Church) we were an excellent match.  On top of that as Laos is a community centered lifestyle I have grown to enjoy/ be more comfortable with groups of people, I did not really want to be alone in a guesthouse. I wanted to be with others in a setting where I could still speak and keep learning Lao and eat Lao food.  They are crazy, loud and fun family, very different from my old family (my old family is excellent too and I still see and talk with them).

My new Lao family consists of 5 people:

Mina: Age 39. Mina is a mother to 3 children. She is from Savannakhet in the south of Laos, and is cousins with my old family. She has family that live in the United States and has traveled to Korea.  She used to work at Sharon International School and so she now gets a good price break from the school, and is thus able to send her children there. Mina rents out her old house to people that work for the Thai Embassy, and in addition to rent gets paid to clean the house for them weekly.  Her new house, where I live with her family, she currently is renting. Mina (my new mother), takes care of everything.

We joke with her she is starting a guesthouse.

She makes breakfast and dinner every day for me if I am there, she cares for wounds (like when a stick went right through my foot a few weeks ago), she worries if home late, she puts up a mosquito net as she is now afraid that I will get Dengue Fever… You name it, she’ll take care of it!

Like lots of Lao people, she is also really funny, and always laughing at something.

Dang: Age 35

Dang is the father of our family. He used to work at World Vision and also lived in North Carolina for a few years working at restaurant. He now works with his cousin in different provinces doing English translation work. He often leaves randomly and I never sure when he will come and go. He has a very funny sense of humor. 🙂

Issac (Age 10), Yoshua (Age 7) and Irene (Age 3) are their children.

They have a lot of energy and won’t sit down for more that 5 minutes to do their homework.  Irene has a lot of crying episodes (as many 3 years) and if your not careful when you hold her or she is running around the house she will wet herself (as diapers are too expensive to use all the time. )

Kris: (Age 27) is a volunteer with MCC (Mennonite Central Committee) for 9 months. He moved here in September and has been assigned to do IT work for MCC. It is nice to live with an American and Kris is not one of those foreigners that exists outside of the world they have come to live within. Kris will try everything- food, activities, etc. He is also old enough to be mature about differences and cultures. His parents work for MCC and he has done quite a bit of traveling and living in other places which is excellent and are just the kind of people I can connect with the most now.

Issac, Yoshua, and Irene can be found shouting out Euiy Nicole or Ai Kris now. Those are are titles now, and how we belong/ mean to the children. Euiy meaning older sister and Ai meaning older brother.

At our house we have English school every evening from 5:00 (the students begin arriving) – 6:30 pm about. There are about 30 students that come to study in the evenings. Most of them are children but some young adults in their 20’s also come. There are 2 classes and two teachers from the Philippines who come to teach. There is one beginning class and one more advanced class and then the students that sit and do homework. The students pay 200,000 kip (25 dollars) a month for English classes, but since English school at our house is more of ministry than a business, many of the students don’t have that kind of money and are allow to come free of charge. It’s a wild crazy time and I help when there or when the regular teachers aren’t available. The English school at our house has been happening for about a year now.

As of last week Mina also started a small shop on the side of the road outside of our house.  She got a neighbor girl, Lar, from church to help her. She sells fried chicken, Lao sandwiches ( meat and vegetables with chili sauce in baguette bread), and sandwiches with milk.

Our home has new AC that we use regularly, don’t have a washing machine ( it’s broken) and we shower with a bucket – like most Lao people- and some days have no water/ very little, but what exists is very rich.

The home is very near Naxai Church and the church school , so I can also now walk there as well as closer to many other places I go.

Life with my new family is very busy, but very fulfilling and fun!

My new Lao siblings- I leave them for 2 seconds and this is what happens. They make chipmunk pictures with my computer! 🙂

News from Laos

(Official News Article)

LEC had a special funeral service for 2 of the passengers that were Christian and on the flight that crashed). 

_________________

BANGKOK | Wed Oct 16, 2013 1:22pm EDT

(Reuters) – A Lao Airlines plane flying in stormy weather crashed into the Mekong river in southern Laos on Wednesday, killing all 44 people on board, among them nationals of 10 countries.

The virtually new ATR-72 turboprop plane flying from the capital Vientiane crashed at about 4.10 p.m. (0910 GMT) just eight kilometers (five miles) short of its destination Pakse, which is near the borders of both Thailandand Cambodia.

The airline said in a statement it had yet to determine the cause of the crash, in which a senior aviation official said the tail end of Typhoon Nari may have been a factor.

Those killed were mostly Lao nationals. But seven French nationals were also killed, the country’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.

South Koreans, Australians, Canadians, Taiwanese, Chinese, Burmese and Vietnamese and five Thais were also among the dead, said Thailand’s foreign ministry spokesman, Sek Wannamethee.

Several officials confirmed none of the passengers or crew survived.

Lao Airlines is the national carrier of the communist state and has operated since 1976. Its aircraft carried 658,000 passengers last year and it has a fleet of just 14 planes, mostly propeller-driven.

Southern Laos was affected by Typhoon Nari, which hit the region on Tuesday killing 13 people in the Philippines and five in Vietnam.

Vestiges of the storm might have caused the plane to crash, Yakua Lopangka, Director General of the Department of Civil Aviation, told the Vientiane Times newspaper.

Thai television showed a photograph of the plane partly submerged in shallow water on a stretch of the Mekong, the tail severed, next to a handful of rescuers in small boats.

State-run news agency KPL quoted a witness saying strong gusts of wind blew the plane off course and rescue attempts were complicated by a lack of roads near the crash site.

Lao Airlines has six ATR-72 planes, a European turbo-prop aircraft co-manufactured by Airbus parent EADS and Italian aerospace firm Finmeccanica.

In a statement, ATR said the aircraft that crashed was its latest ATR 72-600 model, designed to seat between 68 and 74 people. It had left the production line in March this year.

ATR said Laos authorities would lead an investigation into the crash, whose cause had not been determined.

Lao Airlines operates on seven domestic routes and has international flights to China, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore.

(Reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Martin Petty; additional reporting by John Irish and Tim Hepher in Paris; editing by John Stonestreet and Tom Pfeiffer)