Catching up.

How quickly time goes when you’re busy. I have 2 days of activities to write about.

On Wednesday, the 23rd, Kevin, Sherry and I traveled with Pastor Peacefully to Burma to purchase a chainsaw for the Karen people. When Peacefully visited the states he liked Kevin’s lumber cutter attachment for the chainsaw so much because they can not only clear trees, but they can produce lumber for building from the trees with this. Anyway, Kevin and Sherry wanted to help them get this so we rode along to Burma to pick out the chainsaw to go with the lumber attachment. They don’t sell larger chainsaws in Thailand because there has been too much tree harvesting without good forest management. This saw will be used in Karen State which is in Burma. We had no idea on brand of saw available or what it would be like.

We drove to Mae Sott where they have the normal border crossing at the bridge into Burma. We had to pay 500 baht to get a one day visa at the border. This is just under $17 US. When we got to the bridge we weren’t sure (we didn’t ask exactly what we were doing as we were just tagging along) how things would work. After walking and going to the border control we were allowed to walk across the bridge to Burma. Jenny had decided not to go since we had done a lot of walking on previous days. She was happy she didn’t go when she heard how much we had to walk again. We had to leave our passport with border control in Burma on arrival. Once we paid our fee, gave them our passport and met back with Peacefully he says to me, ‘We have a little problem.’ Turns our he forgot to have the Thai border control stamp his passport so he could enter (different process for him since he’s a Burmese and Thai citizen). He informs us that he has to walk back across the bridge, leaving Kevin, Sherry and me in Burma by ourselves and with our passports in the hands of the border control. It sounds worse than it is since we now see how things work, but we initially teased Peacefully that he was planning on dumping us off in Burma and leaving us there.

We wandered down the street past all the money changers and Kevin even converted some Thai money into Burmese money. I think it was 60 baht ($2 US) and he got just over 2800 Burmese dollars in return. I don’t know what they call it. We didn’t have to wait long and Peacefully came back from across the bridge and we went to meet a guy about the chainsaw. Here is the streets of Burma at the border.

When we got to the ‘hardware’ store we found out the chainsaw for sale is a Stihl and one of the biggest they make. We were surprised and happy because we are so familiar with that brand.

They started the saw up and Peacefully made the deal and his friend on the Burma side would take the chainsaw with him.

We then retrieved our passports, walked back across the bridge and headed back to Thoo Mwee Khee school.

Since it was Wednesday we headed to church at the school where the students handle the Wednesday service and they do it in English. It was really neat to see that. A young man preached in English and they had a Karen interpreter repeat in Karen. Next week we will all be responsible for this service. I’m looking forward to that also.

As always here, every day tired us out and we sleep well.

I’ll catch up on yesterday’s adventure later.