Itsara

I’m glad everyone could make it. This has nothing to do with Christmas – neither the December nor the September variety. That just happens to be what day it is. I wouldn’t want that to go unnoticed.

We’ve been back for about 3 weeks now, and have had both Matthew and Sandra for nearly that. Much of our time, especially the first couple of weeks, has been spent getting our house settled. We moved just before we left for the States, but we couldn’t move in properly yet. The Bauer’s were still living there, and the Abbotts hadn’t yet figured out their living situation. When we returned, the house was empty. It was just us four(.75). We had to get furniture, water, food, a cold box to put the food in so that we didn’t have to get food everyday, etc. Finally, we have all that. The last major purchase left for us, at least for now, is a number of chairs to go around the dinner table Emmet built for us (yay, Emmet!).

I’ll take some pictures of the place once we have chairs and there isn’t a large hole in the ceiling where a spot of mold used to be.

Cindy has been working on homeschooling the two kids. Sandra and Matthew, though they are siblings, are like night and day. So far, the only thing I can see that they share in common is their mom and a last name. I guess they’re both Thai too – that’s something. Planning homeschool has been somewhat stressful for Cindy. She feels a lot of pressure on her to teach a certain way, at a certain pace, to a certain level. It has taken us both some time to let go of all of that and just to teach as best we can. There’s a lot we’ve learned in that area. Maybe we’ll talk about it some time.

Contrary to what you might think, I have not been at Im Jai everyday. I have been home most of the time, actually, trying to be a dad/guardian/male influence as well as a husband and general repairman. I only went into Im Jai because they tracked me down (harder than it sounds – I lost my cell phone) and asked me to help with some things. I’ve been thinking and praying everyday about Im Jai, because I really don’t want to be there most of the time. I want to be home with my kids and my wife, loving them, teaching them, playing with them, creating (though not always with them). I don’t really want to be fixing computers.

On the other hand, Im Jai doesn’t have anybody who can do what I do. True, they don’t need to be asking me to make PowerPoints or buy printer ink. Anyone can do that. But when a computer dies for no reason, I’m the only one who knows what to do. Or at least it’s cheaper for them to ask me.

But my heart lies at home. So I’m sort of waiting for God to say, “Okay, it’s time to leave now and be a father for good.” But I don’t know if he will, necessarily.

That’s where things lie now. I’ll let you know how Christmas goes. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I just know that good food will be eaten, some sort of media will be consumed, and possibly some game will be played. As long as 2 out of those 3 happen, I think it’ll be a good day.

If you currently support us by sending money to Coast Vineyard, you need to read this. The rest of you are excused.

We said before that you could send checks to Coast with our names or “Thailand” in the memo. That’s no longer strictly true. From now on, make sure that one or more of our names are in the memo line of the check.

The reason for this is that Coast has been doing more and more work in Thailand, so a check that says simply “Thailand” in the memo is ambiguous. Is it meant for us? For the upcoming short term trip? For the missionary in Bangkok? Or is it just for a Thailand general fund?

So, if you want to make sure your money gets sent to us, make sure that one of our names is in the memo. Thank you.

I didn’t notice this when he wrote it (being in the States and all), but Sean updated his site with a post on his wedding, for those of you who would like another look at it. He has some new pictures as well.

As some of you have no doubt heard, there was a military coup in Thailand last night.

That sounds scarier than it is. Nobody got hurt (so far as I know), no shots were fired. Guns were just held that said, “We’re in charge now.”

That also sounds worse than it is. They didn’t take control because they’re mean and power hungry (though the fear is that they will become that). They took control because they, and many other people, really didn’t like the current Prime Minister (Thaksin) and had no other way to get him out.

But you don’t need me to be your news source. There are other, more qualified channels for that. Here are some articles I found informative: Thailand’s king gives blessing to coup and Q&A: Thailand’s coup impact.

But don’t worry about us. We’re fine. We’re all fine here, now. Thank you. How are you?

On Monday, the five of us (Cindy, Matthew, Sandra, Emmet, and myself) went to the hospital for Cindy’s latest doctor appointment. The reason we all went, other than that we’re family, is that it was the day of Cindy’s last and latest ultrasound. Last time all we saw was an amorphous blob (albeit a dancing one). This time, we got to see our baby’s face for the first time.

So this is the face of the newest Heine at T-minus 3 months. We told them we didn’t want to know the gender, and they respected that. There was nothing in the images they showed us to reveal anything, so you all may continue with your guessing. The due date is more or less confirmed now (as much as any due date can be) as December 11th. So mark your calendars, synchronize your watches, and get ready. A new half-Thai Heine is about to be unleashed on the world.

In talking to people, I realized that we had made a fairly significant decision that we neglected to update you on. In truth, it’s not really a change in vision. A better word might be reclarification.

As most of you know, we came out here with the intention of starting our own orphanage. Knowing very little about how to do that, we chose to start working with Im Jai House in order to learn, with the idea that we would eventually leave in order to do what we came here to do. For a time, we had thought we would be house parents at Im Jai instead, but that didn’t happen. With Sandra, we pulled out almost entirely from the kids of Im Jai House. But we have learned a lot during our time at Im Jai – especially with the contrast of parenting Sandra versus what we were doing with the kids at Im Jai.

We have seen the institution style of raising children, and we are experiencing what it means to parent a child. Our hearts are very much with the latter. What we want to do is to take care of the children God gives us as we would our own, including adoption whenever possible.

Obviously there is a limit as to how many children we can take care of in this manner. We couldn’t provide love and parenting to 50 children at once! So the other part of our vision is to teach others with similar hearts to do what we do. We’ll see how much that changes in the future and what God does with it. He’ll have to bring us people to teach, I imagine.

I want to add that I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the institutional method. It just has different strengths. An institution is capable of giving food, education, and (ultimately) opportunity to a large amount of children who wouldn’t otherwise get it. But personally, I don’t think that institutions are the best way to teach children to love God and love others. Conversely, the parenting method that we want to implement is limited in how many kids it can reach, but those children receive a higher quality of life – not in terms of food or material goods, but in terms of love.

Like I said, this isn’t really a major change, but when we were home a lot of people would ask us when we were going to start our orphanage. So our answer is that we’ve already started it, but it’s not really an orphanage. It’s a family.

We’re back now from our trip home. For me it was really encouraging. The loving support we get from you guys is more than we ever expected. You’re not just a bunch of fellow churchgoers who give us money cuz it’s the Christian thing to do. You’re our brothers and sisters and mothers who love us and pray for us and want to know how we’re doing and want to come out and visit us. You’re our family. I’ve always felt that way at Coast – that’s why I love that church and am always so sad to have left it. But we didn’t really leave it. Everywhere we go we take you guys with us, and I love that about you guys.

We tried to do less scheduling on this trip than our last one. Instead of making appointments at every possible time slot, we took most days as they came, one at a time. In some ways it worked. We got to hang out with some people that we might not have hung out with otherwise, and we saw some people more often than we would have had we made appointments. If we missed you though… well, that’s why I said it worked in some ways.

Reverse culture shock wasn’t that bad. It happened some at first. For example, we forgot that in the States it’s normal for folks to pay $10 for a plate of food that could feed 3 hungry people (and then throw away the part they don’t eat!). And I was surprised when we bought OJ with pulp to see that they had to artificially add the pulp. On the other hand it was nice to have drinkable tap water (with optional hot water), trash cans every 10 feet, and grocery stores open at midnight.

I did suffer from a surprising bout of culture shock (the non-reverse kind) with Cindy’s family. I guess the cultural difference has been there off and on, but this is the first time I identified it as a cultural issue. (That’s a good thing. Knowing the reason for the differences makes it easier to handle.) There are a number of facets to the issue, and I don’t really want to go into details here because I like Cindy’s family and I would hate for you to get a bad impression of them. In general, it’s just that sometimes I like to be asked before certain forms of help are offered.

We already really miss all of you and are grateful for the time we got to spend with each of you. We’re not sure when we’ll be able to travel back next (what with having 3 kids starting in December), but I believe that Sean and Prang plan to come out sometime in the next couple of months. I know a bunch of you want to come out and visit us too. If you’re not sure how to make that happen, let us know. We can help you work out details, and we’d love to see you out here!

I sincerely apologize for the recent dearth of posts. I don’t like doing that, even with the warning. We just haven’t had internet at most of the places we’ve been (or we haven’t had the time to write even a quick post).

Anyway, we’re back now – at least mostly. We don’t have internet at home yet, but that should change this coming week (then again, it is Thailand). I’ve got three posts that I’ll schedule to show up this week and next. Hopefully by the time they’re all up we’ll have internet at home and posting will be easier again. (NOTE: For people who get an e-mail everytime Itsara is updated – sometimes when I schedule a post to be published in the future it doesn’t send out an e-mail, just so you know).

Now that we’re home, we’ve been scrambling trying to get settled. We came home to a furniture-less house knowing that two days later we would have 2 children living with us. We have most of our furniture now, with more coming. We have both Sandra and Matthew now, and they’re both doing very well. Emmet’s also here helping us out, so that makes things easier too. Cindy is trying to figure out how to handle school, and I’m trying to figure out what my role is (other than father, of course) for these next few months. Specifically, how much time do I spend working at Im Jai (if any) and how much am I needed at home?

Also, shortly before we got on the plane to return home we heard some really great news. For those of you that haven’t heard yet: Prang is also pregnant! I believe she’s due sometime around April. You can pray for them and their baby and pray that this brings our two families even closer together (especially now that Sean and Prang have moved into their own house).