Early preparations...

Equip Int'l MMI class photo

Okay, so I might not be much of a blogger, but here’s a general update of what’s been going on lately that led to the countdown that I posted earlier! In May, I drove to NC for Equip’s Missionary Medicine Intensive, which was…intense! (Praise God for helping me through the class…there were some tortuous days in there for me, trying to keep up with the schedule while having severe mouth pain and swelling due to a gum-impacted wisdom tooth and other problems!) I learned about a lot of tropical diseases and conditions through the 50 case studies, and had classes in other various topics including OB, malnutrition, suturing and basic dental extraction theory. I still need to practice more suturing now that a kind classmate sent me a small supply of free sutures (they are expensive otherwise)!

Gayle helping a villager in Thailand

In June, I realized that the summer was going to start to fly by quickly with all the things that I needed to plan and get done before I left for Thailand. I had been in touch with Gayle (the nurse who is based in BYT village [Beeyohtah] doing clinic mission work in various villages in the mountains of NW Thailand) and had told her I’d plan to come in October, due to my job and other plans. At the same time some other turmoil was going on, and some things were up in the air but I wasn’t able to get into it further, especially since I was wiped out working graveyard shifts at my LTC nursing job nearly every night for much of the rest of June. I had locked-in the Wilderness First Responder class schedule that I planned to do in August, and let my job know that I’d probably be resigning soon after that by October. I really didn’t want to get an airplane ticket yet, since I didn’t know when I’d actually be ready to go. (Needed to leave enough time to get my wisdom teeth/oral surgery done in September, quit my job at Riverview then, move from Spokane to store stuff at my parent’s garage, sell some stuff, and hopefully learn some Thai and have my biennial flight review done by then, etc, etc.)

But I started looking at tickets online, with Korean Airlines, in order to get a round trip ticket and freely extend the return date to come back within up to 12 months (as another missionary had suggested). After playing around with the dates, it appeared October 16 to Chiang Mai looked like the best option. Somewhere I saw that the flight had “7 tickets left at this price,” so I prayed about it for awhile ($1258 is a lot of money, when you haven’t done a single bit of fundraising), and later came back and saw that it had “1 ticket left at this price”, and I bought it! (I think God made me see that message to make me step out in faith and buy the ticket right away, because the prices haven’t changed since then!)

Meanwhile I wondered, don’t I need to be doing some fundraising? The money I’m starting to save from working lately will vanish quickly with various travel expenses and paying for the classes I’m taking, a biennial flight review, wisdom teeth (even done at a sliding-scale-fee clinic), and future ongoing expenses while contributing in Thailand. And it’s not like I own anything of much value to sell. (My car’s KBB value is probably <$800 at this point!) And how much money will I really need? Looking at the typical AFM missionary monthly budget goals, the numbers are higher than what I’ve ever dreamed of spending anywhere. A couple of people asked me if I was going with AFM and how much fundraising I’d done so far, and I had to answer, “Well, I haven’t really been able to do any so far--I’m keeping busy moving forward and praying that God will open doors as needed!”

One of my "long-lost" relatives!

So after I bought the ticket, the next day I went with my parents to our Lamberton family reunion. I hadn’t been to that reunion since I was much younger, but this summer it actually worked out in my schedule, and I was excited because a few of my Reeve cousins were going to be there this time. It was a blast seeing so many people I hadn’t seen in 8-15 years, and some family I had never even met (we have a huge family)! But two providential things happened that I totally wasn’t expecting. One was that my great-uncle Lyn nominated me to receive the Sabbath offering (the family votes on a new location for their offering every year)…which meant that I had to stand up impromptu and share a little brief overview about what my plans are--to a lot of people who didn't even know me! The other thing was that I got to meet and talk to one of my great-aunts who happens to be Thai (working on U.S. citizenship) and lives part of the time in Chiang Mai! I had mostly forgotten about my extended relatives from Thailand, since I hadn’t seen her or my (late) great-uncle Clark since I was 5 years old! (Clark Lamberton went to the SDA hospital at Bangkok as a missionary dentist in the 1950s, and later went to Chiang Mai and operated his own locally-famous dental practice for many years before he passed away.) So now I’ll probably get to see my great-aunt Pongsri sometime if she is there when I fly into Chiang Mai!

 

Please keep me in prayer as I continue to prepare for this overwhelming life change. I’ve never prepared for an international trip before, and this one is going to last up to a year (potentially, as an initial trip)! But it’s not time to pack yet…right now, in between working some night/evening/day shifts I’m also trying to do some hiking and bouldering/climbing in the park near my landlord’s house, etc,, since I need to get into shape for the extremely intense WFR class that I’m taking in CA next month! And, if anyone has some recommendations for some basic course material to learn some basic Thai, I’m open to suggestions! (I’ll probably have to start learning the Karen language later, once I arrive in the village.)