My first salvation in Thailand
16 January 2010, 09:00Ching Ting runs her family’s tea house with two of her sisters in Mae Salong. I frequented this shop, along with a couple others in town. It doesn’t take long to figure out which ones make tea the way you like it. I never could communicate at this one, though, because nobody here speaks English. But, I kept coming back anyway.
Later in my stay here, Patti emailed me something she and Ning used to use when they were in Chiang Mai: a quick Gospel message translated in both English and Thai. I printed it out, and took it to the tea shop. A few days later, she told me using the few words of Thai that I understood and some hand motions that she had read the tract, and prayed the prayer at the end! And all I did was drink a bunch of tea and hand her a piece of paper.
On the way back to my hotel room, I found this sign. Ordinarily I probably wouldn’t think a lot of it. Sure, I would photograph it, simply because this is a Buddhist country. But in light of what I had just heard from Ching Ting, this sign was sobering. Ning and I would later set a goal to translate the tract into Chinese and Akha, the two main languages in Mae Salong.
~Jonathan