Commitment with Cost
in the Golden Triangle
A visit to our work in the mountains of north Thailand
Steve Dennie
January 1996
With soldiers combing the hills of northern Thailand ferreting out a drug
lord, it didn't look like we would be able to visit our mission work
in Lo Mah Village.
We learned about this situation upon arriving in Hong Kong on January
5. We weren't planning to travel to Thailand for another ten days,
but at that point, things looked iffy.
Lo Mah Village is located in the famed Golden Triangle, which produces most
of the world's heroin from the opium plant. Drugs, we were told, are
sometimes hauled through the village right past the home of our pastor, Teacher
Lee.
People in that area are somewhat wary of foreigners, and it can get touchy
when they are guests of Teacher Lee. Now, with the army scouring the hills, he
was understandably hesitant about us coming. Especially when we would be carting
around a big TV camera.
As if turned out, the drug lord surrendered a couple days later, and it was
decided that we could go. But not all of us. Just five of us. Myself. Bishop Ray
Seilhamer. Lance Clark from Huntington College. Macau Mission director Luke Fetters.
And Peter Lee, the superintendent of the Hong Kong Conference, where the vision
for the Thailand mission originated.
We flew over Vietnam and Laos before
landing in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. Another plane took us to the
city
of Cheingrei, where Teacher Lee and Mr. Goh, a missionary from Singapore,
met us. We dumped our stuff into Mr. Goh's four-wheel-drive Toyota
pickup and headed north, with Lance, Luke, Teacher Lee, and myself riding
in back.
We drove British style, on the left side of the flat, four-lane road.
The landscape looked much like footage I'd seen from Vietnam, but
unmarred. A mountain on one side. A humped water buffalo in a field. Homes
on stilts. Roadside stands
with fruit and other items. Small pickup trucks loaded with people. Numerous
motorcycles and scooters, helmets optional.
It took an hour to reach Maesei, a town on the border of Burma (real name:
Myanmar). In the busy street market outside our hotel, people were starting to
take down their displays and cart away their wares. While the others went inside
to register, Lance and I walked among the vendors and started filming.
A kid came up to me. "Hi, do you want to buy cigarettes?"
"No."
"Champagne? Liquor?"
A young man and woman stood behind us for quite a while. The guy was blind.
He held a cup in one hand and with the other grasped one end of a stick about
the size of a broom handle, which the girl used to lead him around. She stood
with her hands pressed together in front of her face in quiet supplication, very
patient, muttering something prayer-like. They finally moved along. I watched
them stop next to several men eating at an outdoor table.
I saw a barefoot monk in a purple robe walking from business to business,
holding with both arms a big pot on which sat a number of coins. Collecting
for the temple,
perhaps? He never said anything--just walked up to people, and they knew
what he was there for.
While we were eating on the rooftop of a wonderful restaurant, a lizard fell
from the thatch roof and landed beside Bishop Seilhamer. He was unphased.
Luke told us that during an earlier visit, while staying overnight in Lo Mah
Village, he heard some chewing, and suddenly a rat fell through the roof, landed
on his hand, and scurried away.
It was cold when we started up the
mountain Tuesday morning. Lance, Luke and I, riding in the back of the
truck, shivered
far more than we expected in "hot and humid" Thailand. Lance was wearing
two T-shirts and a thin windbreaker--all he brought to Thailand. Luke and
I weren't doing much better.
We all started out sitting on the side of the truck, which seemed to be
more manly, even though it meant the cold air hit us full force. Lance
finally sat
down in the bed, letting the cab break the wind, but Luke and I remained
perched on the sides. "You know we think less of you now," I
told Lance.
Two pleasant Thai girls, Christian teens from Lo Mah Village, rode in
the back with us. They wore heavy jackets and stocking caps, one of which,
to our envy,
converted into a face mask. They didn't speak English, and we of course didn't
speak their language, Akha.
It took over three hours to get up the mountain. Initially, in the valley,
we drove on four-lane paved road. Then we turned off and headed toward the mountain
on a two-lane paved road. Eventually, we reached a thatched checkpost with several
soldiers, a couple machine guns hanging up. The leader sported a full green uniform...and
white sneakers.
They looked us over real well. Luke, who had come this way several other
times, said it was the closest scrutiny he'd seen yet. I removed my
NBC cap.
After the checkpoint, the road turned to dirt. It was graded smooth, being
prepared for paving; a shallow cement drainage canal ran along the side.
But in time, we turned off onto another road, and there it got real primitive.
Constant bumps tossed us into the air. There is just no way to describe
how much
abuse our tailbones took from that road. The best solution, which I didn't
learn until we were heading back down the mountain later that day, was to
stand
up and grasp the rollbar.
Thankfully, it warmed up. By the time we reached Lo Mah Village about 11:00 that
morning, the temperature was in the 80s.
All of the village roads were dirt, most
deeply rutted. A lot of animals walked free, like those little Thai pigs which
some people in the States keep for pets, but which, here, looked as ugly as could
be.
Mr. Goh stopped in front of Teacher Lee's thatched home, located on a
corner where one road T's into another. Mrs. Lee was out front carrying
a little girl. Shortly, Teacher Lee rounded the bend on his scooter.
"If we work in the mountains, it is long-term support," Peter Lee
told me. In the city, he said, a church should be able to support its pastor within
5-7 years. But we couldn't expect that in Lo Mah Village.
How'd we latch onto Teacher Lee? It's kind of tricky. Start with
a Hong Kong pastor who had been a missionary in Singapore. He knew Mr. Goh, a
Singapore citizen who had become a missionary in Thailand. And Mr. Goh was a friend
of Teacher Lee, who at that time worked for another missionary organization in
Thailand. That's how the connection was made.
The Akha tribe migrated from China some years ago. Teach-er Lee himself
is Chinese, but he married the Akha chief's daughter. In addition
to pastoring the church, Teacher Lee runs a little school in which he teaches
the children
to speak Mandarin Chinese.
Mountains towered around us. Someone pointed to the mountains in one direction
and said that was Burma. We were cautioned to absolutely not point our cameras
in that direction.
This was a Tuesday afternoon, and Teacher
Lee had called the Christians of the village together to dedicate the new church
building. When we arrived on the far edge of the village, where the church is
located, probably 80 people were there, many of them children. A few young boys
were wearing a shirt and nothing else; one youngster in particular kept putting
himself right where we wanted to film.
Akha women wear fabulous headdresses with golf-ball size beads, probably silver.
A flat piece at the back means the woman is married. Several women had babies
tied to their backs, the kids asleep. We were told that many Akha men have multiple
wives.
The building was finished in November at a cost of something like $12,000,
most of it provided by Hong Kong Conference. It's a nice cement building.
A wood superstructure holds up the tin roof. A cross projects from the
front peak.
There are four barred windows on each side. A six-strand barb wire fence
attached to crude boards and logs surrounds the building. Steps lead up
to a platform in
front.
The building is bare of furnishings. No pews, no chairs, no platform furniture,
no carpet. Just a bare building--but a nice building. Chairs, we learned,
were coming.
The dedication ceremony began in front of the church. Bishop Seilhamer unlocked
a padlock on the front door, and some words were spoken and translated. Then everyone
moved inside and sat on a large blue plastic tarp spread on the floor.
Before going in, they slipped off their footwear and left them around the entrance.
There were three pairs of sneakers and two pairs of cute boots. Everything else
was sandals and thongs.
I counted about 80 people sitting there, mostly cross-legged, listening to
the dedication ceremony. "Today," Bishop Seilhamer began, "we are dedicating this very beautiful
building, and are very thankful that you are present for this special day." He
then read Acts 2, repent and be baptized, and it was translated.
Later: "Teacher Lee, I give you these keys as a symbol of your oversight
of this building to the glory of Jesus Christ."
The church has several acres of property, far more than they need for their
small building. But their needs go beyond that. Sometimes, when a person becomes
a Christian, he may be expelled from his home or no longer feel welcome by his
neighbors. So Christians build homes on the church property. Already, several
thatched homes stood down the hill from the church. Eventually, we were told,
this would become a separate enclave, a community of Christians on the edge of
town.
It was a reminder that in many places in the world, the cost of discipleship
is a lot higher than we experience. The following Sunday, Mark Choi, the Hong
Kong director of missions, would come to Lo Mah Village to baptize nine men. I
wondered if any of them might be building a home on that special land.
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