picture postcards

...the island.

Hey, thank you so much for praying everybody! We had a good week on the island and it was so good to know people are thinking of us and praying... We got all sorts of suggestions where we should come to as well :-). I appreciate that...
And really, I was so happy about our little hide-away thing - compared to India Thailand's beaches are very "developed", so I was kind of doubting we would find a little quiet spot for us - in my heart I was wishing for something like Gokarna again, simple huts, not too many people and a nice sort of people too, more the backpacker style type of people... And here we go, Ko Phayam - a three hour ferry ride from Ranong on the Andaman coast of Thailand is pretty close to that. The description on a poster said "like Ko Samui in the eighties" so we didn't know what to expect - strange haircuts and purple bikinis? But it turned out really nicely. Here we are, this was our hut...

We shared it with some unbidden guests, apart from the regulars - mosquitos, geckos, ants - we had frogs jumping in our bathroom; they especially seemed to enjoy sitting on the taps, to make sure to maximize the surprise effect... One even decided to stay for the day.
One day we had a snake hiding behind the refuse bin - and that quite scared me I admit. It was a little one, thin but still long. After that we had two days when we wouldn't enter the hut without beating hysterically sticks on the floor... We got back to normal on day three though. After the snake I didn't mind the frogs anymore... And I was happy sleeping under a net!

Nice place, selling chai yen, the thai iced black tea with lots of sugary condensed milk...

What we came for... We spent our days reflecting what we felt we had learned during the last years and during the time travelling, we remembered what we thought God had put into our hearts, our dreams, ideas and his words. And we kind of tried to find our own words for all that in the process.
But we didn't put it together yet, we felt we would need the time to make up our minds separately and only in a second step put both our stuff together... So it's not done yet, but it feels already good -I realized once again that God is guiding us and why should he stop doing that now?? So the story is to be continued, maybe on another island :-).

Think future on Ko Phayam

On our own again (du kannst nachlesen bei Kim was noch war) we arrived on the island of Ko Phayam. We are taking some days off to think about our future. We hope for God to speak and to put the puzzling pieces together so that we can get a clearer picture of what we will do after our trip. Please dont ask us yet, it will take some time to ponder and also to search advice from some individuals with whom we want to share our thoughts. But we really would appreciate your prayers during this week, because our decisions will lay the foundations for the next couple of years. Thank you very much!

The struggle for Land

Two very dear friends of ours have the same problem at the moment. They need help to be able to buy land. One piece of land is in Portugal, where Barbara already started to establish a community that is meant to be a kind of retreat for people, combined with agricultural and social work. Now she started a campaign where you can buy single sqauremetres for 7 Euro each. I feel that this is a good opportunity and the place might become a place of huge blessing. Check her blog for what is happening.

The other piece of land that needs to be bought is in India, where Ton Baba is forced to move his christ-centred community of the poor to another place. It is pretty serious and about 100 former homeless and partially very sick people are concerned, as well as the co-workers: "Sewa Ashram is currently under threat of demolition by the Delhi Development Authority, which is acquiring our land for city development. We urgently need your help and support so that we can move our community to a new, secure piece of land." They already had the bulldozers aroud the corner. Jake and Jessica, who are volunteering for the ashram at the moment, blogged about the situation here.

We are back from our 5 days in Laos. It is much too short to get an impression of the country, I guess it will be mixed up with our Thailand-impressions. But it was a good starting point for mainland southeast asia. Laos doesn't have big cities, the capital is just above half a million inhabitants, so it feels a bit like a village. It is mostly dominated by communism and buddhism. Glitzy temples, monks in orange and communist flags became a familiar sight for us. And more tourists than we expected. Kristian picked us up from the bus station and later we met the other guys form the German group. It was so good being welcomed and able to talk in German, sharing experieces and just be together! Especially as I started to think that I have travelled enough during the days before.

Kristian visited Laos last year and met a bunch of people who are believers and ex-addicts, andthey live together in one place where they rehabilitate other people who stopped taking drugs. They are doing a cool job, their place has a really nice atmosphere and it was great to see how everyone takes care for the others. We had good times encouraging and inspiring each other. We especially enjoyed our worship and prayer times. On our last day we went to swim in a big lake with many small islands. It was a pity that we couldn't talk to much to the individuals because of the language barrier. But still many of them asked us to come back next year.
Now we are in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and try to plan our vacation with Kim and Kristian, maybe we will just end up on one of the islands in the South.