Bookends 2020

What a year it has been. Sometimes my Bookends posts don't vary much from year to year. This year though, is quite another story. This year began and ended in different continents, but that was not how I was thinking it would be. So I think it is appropriate to put first a photo my wife took while doing laundry before we headed out on a New Year's Day outing.

Common Tree Frog Showing Us His Washing Machine

A tree frog—but not on a tree, rather in our washing machine. A tree frog out of place. Perhaps this was a harbinger of what the year would be like with us being "out of place" most of the year.

Tree frogs have a significant role in our lives. My first story comes from Haut Saint Marc, Haiti back in 1981. Ingrid and I were not in a relationship at the time, but we were on the same team. The six of us—a married couple, two single ladies (nurses), and two single guys—were living in tents. We had a communal structure for cooking and dining made of woven coconut leaves wrapped around living posts with a tin roof over the top. We took turns cooking and cleaning. I would get up early in the morning, while it was still dark, so I could head out to the little piece of farmland we had. I made coffee each morning by putting some of our Cafe Rebo roast in the cloth filter and pouring hot water through it. This was long before pour over coffee was a specialty thing in coffee shops. Later that morning, while I was out in the fields, Ingrid was cleaning up after breakfast. When she poured the spent grounds out of the filter, there was a poached frog amongst the grounds. That's why the coffee was especially good that morning. Forget about civet coffee when you can have tree frog coffee. I was admonished by my teammates to check the coffee filter for frogs before preparing the coffee in the morning.

Our Frog Coffee Dining Area

Fast forward a few years. Ingrid and I are married now and we are living in a different part of Haiti. This time we are in a nice house. The lower floor is made of concrete and is well screened to keep the mosquitoes out. But tree frogs have a way of getting in our bathroom. They like our toilet flush tank. Whenever we flush there would be a chorus of frog voices echoing in the tank. We would then remove the cover, grab the frogs and throw them outside. But they would find a way back in. Sometimes they would play voyeur and perch on the shower-head to watch the humans as they bathed. We hunted high and low, but it took a long time for us to figure out how they kept getting back in. When we finally found their secret entrance, we plugged the hole and from then on we no longer had the orchestra play to accompany our toilet flushes.

Back to New Year's Day 2020. Later on in the day, after the laundry was done with the frog surviving the ordeal, we made a drive to a coffee shop we like in Rattanawapi, the next county to the north. As we are prone to do, we find new roads to drive. This time we found ourselves in an area near the Mekong River where it was rice planting season for those with access to dry-season irrigation water. They have a new method they have of planting rice, which is less labor intensive. They raise the rice seedlings in plugs in plastic trays which are placed either on tarps or in ponds. Later the plugs are tossed into flooded paddies. Then the water is let down and the seedlings get established in the mud. The road we drove down had several ponds being used for rice seedling nurseries.

It is a fitting way to start the year. Raising plant seedlings is a very hopeful enterprise. One does not go through the effort without hope for an abundant harvest. And so we are hopeful, too. Hopeful for what a new year will bring. Hopeful for what a new season in our lives will bring as we anticipate leaving Thailand for a couple months and then coming back to perhaps start something new.

Rice Seedlings in Rattanawapi County

So, how did those hopes work out? Not as we planned, for sure. It's December 31st and there are no tree frogs around because we aren't in Thailand as we had hoped to be. Even if there were tree frogs around, they would be hibernating by now. We felt like hibernating last night. The heater went out in the house we are staying in, so the previous night was a bit chilly, but not too bad. I got up early so I could do a grocery run to Winco before the crowds show up.

Maybe we could jump to December 31st and just skip everything in between.

New Year's Eve Day finds me sitting in our Fresno office, even though it's technically closed, in case some UPS or Fedex deliveries come that we are expecting. I spend the morning working on getting things ready for our return to Thailand—making copies, printing out forms, etc. In the afternoon, I decide to scan some old black and white negatives that I have. Most of the photos I took from Haiti were color prints or slides, but I did shoot a few rolls of black and white on my old Canon AE-1 camera. There were a few photos I couldn't quite figure out what they were just by looking at the negative without a magnifier, so I scanned them anyway, to see what they were. And I'm glad I did. It was a series of a couple of girls sitting on a concrete and stone irrigation canal doing laundry.

Laundry Day

They actually were nice to photograph because they would sometimes look at the camera and sometimes just do their thing—chatting and laughing while they rubbed the dirt out of the clothing. The lives of these children are not easy and I don't think that doing a load of laundry is high on their list of things they want to do to pass time. But it helps to bring a friend. With a friend, even the less enjoyable things in life can be a lot easier to get through.

This past year has been full of challenges. Being displaced for nine months. Leaving our house to the whims of rats and lizards. Missing out on major events in the life of our church in Thailand. Extra hoops to jump through and expenses to shell out to try to get back to Thailand. But through it all I've had a friend. Two friends, actually.

My wife has been my faithful companion by my side through it all. When one of us is feeling down, the other can help lift us up. And God has not abandoned us either. God has been there to encourage us and help us through the hard times.

Scripture reminds us: Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble. Likewise, two people lying close together can keep each other warm. But how can one be warm alone? A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken. Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 (NLT)

Even if our year wasn't as we planned. Even if there were a few hiccups along the way. We made it through, with God's help.

And with no frogs in our coffee.

Bookends 2018

How do we look at life? Are we pessimists or optimists? Are we stuck in the past or are we hopeful about the future?

For the past several years I've done a blog with photos from the beginning and ending of the year.  As I was looking through photos, trying to decide what to pick, I realized that my choices show how I look at my life.  Someone else might have chosen different pictures.  (A saying I have is: There are two kinds of journalists.  Those who are biased and recognize what their bias is--and tell others.  And then there are those who are biased and don't think they are.)

I could have done nearly-identical pictures.  On January first, we had several of the youth over from church to make fritters or, as some call them, New Years cookies.  On December 31st we were making a batch for a New Years eve service at church.  These would be people oriented photos.

But I decided to use some different photos. I'm not a great people photographer.

While we tend to choose our sandwiches based on what is in the middle, we also want to choose our bread.  So while these photos don't represent the meat of what happened this year, they are like the slices of bread I choose to put the meat between.

January 1st falls close to my birthday. I told my wife that I don't really want to acquire things for my birthday. I'd rather just go to a park somewhere.  So we decided to go to Phu Phrabat Historical Park. It turned out to be the first of three trips to the park that year.

Phu Phrabat Park is focused around some interesting rock formations that were used as housing and places of worship many, many years ago.  There are even red-colored petroglyphs which have a character similar to those I would see in the American west.  If you want to see that side of things, as well as photos of the fancy restrooms, check out my flickr album from the park.

What I like about the park are the nice walking trails with varied scenery.  It just happened to be the season that some of the dipterocarp trees were blooming.  I picked up a blossom and stuck it in a mossy log, because I like the color contrast.

Dipterocarp flower on mossy log

Dipterocarp trees were once very common in northern and northeast Thailand.  They grow in humid climates with long dry seasons.  They don't seem to be bothered by the fact that it doesn't hardly rain for six months.  They just drop their leaves to cope with the dry season much as trees where I grew up would drop their leaves to cope with the cold.  There are many species in the plant family Dipterocarpaceae.  Most have winged seeds; the seed pictured below is the same species as the bloom above.  We big kids sometimes enjoy throwing them in the air and watching them helicopter down.

Dipterocarp winged fruit

Most species of the Dipterocarp genus get quite tall and the branches tend to be clustered at the top. This can make recognizing species difficult because it is often hard to see the leaves on the tree-you have to look at leaves and flowers that have fallen to the ground.

One thing that is nice about the Isaan region (as opposed to central or northern Thailand) is that the farmers often leave native trees in their rice paddies.  So one sees perhaps more of the big giants that used to cover the region before they were all cut down to put in farms.  Sometimes I'll even see masses of the pink flowers that have fallen off a tree onto the road.

Which brings be to the photo for the end of the year.

While many of our Canadian friends and relatives might be whining about the cold at this time of year (I would be if I was there), here in Thailand we are enjoying the cold winters.  It's nice when the temps drop into the 60s (15-20 C) at night.

While I tend to ride my bicycle all year round here, it is perhaps most enjoyable in the winter.  And so I found myself doing a leisurely bike ride on New Years Eve day.  This day I was staying on the dirt roads as much as possible because of the very busy highways during the New Years Holiday season.

My trip this day brought me past an old oxbow of the Huai Luang river that they put a dam in to form Huai Kan Lueang Reservoir.  The reservoir is on both sides of a minor highway and right now they are excavating dirt on one side to make it deeper and using the dirt to fill in the other side.

A consequence of this dirt fill operation is that I can now get up close to water lilies that used to be in the middle of the swamp.  On this morning, it had started out cloudy, but the clouds were moving off to the west so the flowers were in the sun.

Pink water lilies

The water levels in Huai Kan Lueang have dropped considerably since wet season.  As the water levels drop, some of the area is used to grow rice, as pictured below.

Ironic that this area was under water a few months ago. Now the farmer is using his tiller motor to drive a pump to irrigate his rice paddy.  Along one of the berms there are palm trees.  These are oil palms.  The fruits are are crushed to extract the oil. There is a significant acreage planted to oil palms in this part of Thailand.

Rice paddies and oil palms

Oil Palm Fruits

And so my year has brought me from the forest to the field and lots of places in between.  But when I woke up on January 1st of this year, I was happy that some things did not change.  I woke up next to the same wife.  The sun rose again like it has everyday.  And God's great love for us was still there.

God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.  1 John 5:9, 10

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Hebrews 13:8