Jennifer Tibbetts

Dear Friends and Family,

Thank you SO much for praying for my time in Asia.  It was amazing!  A few highlights for those who don't want all the details.  Details below for those who want more :)

- I saw 17 different missionary couples or singles sent out from OMF US and had opportunity to spend time with them for encouragement and prayer

- In Singapore I saw 2 of our former dorm kids (Sue and Arunee) plus another dorm kid (Pen-Pen) and in Chiang Mai I saw 2 other of our dorm kids (Jared and Linnea) plus Linnea's husband, baby son and parents

- in Lopburi, Thailand I attended Prasiri Church which we helped to start and saw the church that Puk and A have started in downtown Lopburi (both of them came to Christ through Prasiri's ministry)

- In Chiang Mai, I saw C (came to Christ through Prasiri's ministry) who is now overseeing 5 churches, and C said that he has tried to model his family after our family

- I was able to share the gospel again with Buu who studied the Bible with me over 20 years ago and is in a difficult family situation

- I felt right at home in Asia - loved being warm!  My Thai language came back well.

OK, now for more detail.

So I arrived in Singapore on January 11 and Rita (former OMF Co-worker) was there to pick me up from the airport.  I stayed with her and her 2 boys, Josiah (21) and Bennett (17).  Great to catch up with them.  On Saturday evening, Rita hosted the dinner with Arunee, Sue and Pen-Pen. (Both sets of parents continue to serve in Thailand.)  Delightful to see these women in their 20s who are all walking with God.  Arunee is planning to attend Singapore Bible College this fall and wants to become an OMF missionary.  Pen-Pen is working with Cru.

On Sunday morning, I spoke on missions at a Singaporean church.  My message was translated into Mandarin - a first for me!  In the afternoon, I enjoyed a coffee outing with Josiah and Bennett to catch up a bit with these two young men, and then Rita and I took a walk to the beach - lovely.  Then I traveled to the OMF International Headquarters.

Monday through Friday I attended a Consultation with about 30 other OMF Child Safety Officers from UK, Australia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the Philippines.  We also had a guest speaker from SIL who has a lot of experience in investigating allegations of child abuse involving missionaries or missionary kids all over Asia.  She provided a lot of helpful info on the process of interviewing victims and perpetrators, as well as the follow up care needed.  We shared resources on child prevention, and I was given time to share about my "Training Kids in Child Safety".  It was exciting to meet a Singaporean woman who wants to work with me to make this training into an eModule so it will be available to all of our workers!

While I was in Singapore that week, I also met with 5 missionary couples, plus an American missionary kid who is close friends with our Joshua.  Four of the missionary couples are sent out by the US so this was an opportunity to provide some member care, and the 5th couple oversees Library and Archive work.  I am currently supervising a team of volunteers at our US Library and Archives so it was helpful to see the Singapore archives and dialogue a bit with this couple.  Whew - it was a busy week!  I also managed to get to the Singapore Botanic Gardens two evenings as it is located right across the street from our OMF compound - wow - so lovely!  The temperatures were in the 90s with high humidity - loved it!

On Saturday morning, I flew with Arend and Jolinda to Myanmar.  Arend and Jolinda were the team leaders of our church planting team when we started Prasiri Church in January 1998.  Their kids and our kids were very close friends.  Now Arend and Jolinda look after our OMF team in Myanmar.  On Saturday evening, they took me on a train ride around Yangon and then into downtown and up a high tower to eat at a restaurant so we could look over the city.  I was especially interested to see the Shwedagon Pagoda which was mentioned in a book I recently read on Ann and Adoniram Judson, the first American sent missionaries who worked in Myanmar in the early 1800s.  

On Sunday morning, I was picked up by another couple who took me their church.  What a joy it was to worship God with a group of Burmese people who were singing wholeheartedly (without words!) and to hear the Word of God preached (that morning it happened to be preached in English and translated into Burmese).  The pastor and wife of this church have 4 small children and also took in 17 orphans to care for.  They have helped to start 67 other churches!  In the afternoon, I enjoyed a lovely massage (after sitting too much during the Consultation and on the 17 hour flight from San Francisco to Singapore).  In the evening, Jolinda and I went out to explore more of Yangon.  You really take your life in your hands when you try to cross the road there!  

On Monday, I attended an English class taught by one of our workers and then spent the rest of the day with his family, playing with their 3 young boys and taking the wife out for coffee.  Went out for one last Burmese meal in the evening.  Tuesday morning, I got to visit David and Louise SP, friends we met in Thailand who are now working in Myanmar, and seeing tremendous fruit in remote areas, despite the resistance of monks and great difficulty in travel, inter-tribal wars, etc.  

Tuesday afternoon, I flew to Chiang Mai where I was met at the airport by Pastor C and two of the pastoral interns who work with him.  C came to Christ through our Prasiri church planting team 22 years ago, and is now overseeing 5 churches in N. Thailand - what a joy to reconnect with him!  I had dinner with C, his co-worker Florence (an OMF worker) and a short term missions team who had just arrived to do some medical work in the refugee camps where they work in N. Thailand.  

In Chiang Mai, I stayed with a family sent out by OMF US who have recently relocated to Chiang Mai after having to leave the place they were serving due to governmental issues.  Really enjoyed connecting with them, and hearing about their plans to continue reaching out to unreached people groups now that they're in Thailand.  On Weds morn, I visited the OMF Mekong Center and saw a number of our workers, including a Personnel Manager for some of our teams who I often correspond with about various issues.  It was great to meet him in person :)  I then enjoyed a delicious hamburger meal at a western restaurant (Duke's) on the Ping River and had some time to read and catch my breath.  As I sat there, another couple sent out by the US walked by so we had a wonderful time of re-connecting about their new ministry of providing digital Bibles for an unreached people group.  A bit later, I met Jared and Linnea and their family for coffee - so good to catch up!  They are doing well.  Linnea is now a nurse and a mother of a young baby.  Jared is working in research.  Their parents continue to serve in Cambodia and they "happened" to be visiting them just as I was in Chiang Mai - isn't God good?!

That evening, I met Barb Metzler for dinner.  This lovely lady has served in Thailand for years with another mission. We got to know each other through a homeschool co-op when we lived in Chiang Mai, and Nathan and Alysha became close friends with Barb's kids.  Barb's husband Tom passed away last year from cancer due to exposure to Agent Orange when he fought in the Vietnam War.  Amazingly, Barb carries on with ministry to medical personnel in Thailand, and is building a house near Chiang Mai University where she plans to invite a couple of university students to rent from her so she can build relationships with them to share Christ.  

On Thursday, I went over to our dorm where we worked from 2008-2011.  It was so fun to see it again and to spend time with our househelpers - Eid and Hua.  Eid had become a Christian during those years and both ladies are continuing on with the Lord.  They had studied the Bible with me, and I had given Eid a copy of "I Dared to Call Him Father" about a Pakistani woman who had dreams about Jesus which ultimately led her to the Lord.  After reading the book, Eid had dreams which led her to pray to Jesus.  I reminded Eid of these dreams as I'd just re-read our old prayer letters re-telling these dreams.  She had forgotten some :)   We prayed together for Eid's 20 something daughter Pat and husband to receive Christ, and Hua's 3 young adult kids to continue on with the Lord.  

Our dorm is no longer needed as there are no kids needing a boarding home who attend Chiang Mai International School so OMF is planning to turn it into Modular Study Groups - a homeschool week center for kids who are homeschooling in remote locations.  For more info, see https://msgkmg.com/ 

I then walked out of the neighborhood to try to find some lunch at a 7-11 (they're ubiquitous in Thailand), but went the wrong way (forgot my directions!)  A kind young man gave me a motorcycle ride to a 7-11 - another provision of God.  Then I traveled by Grab (Asian version of Uber) to the other dorm across town to meet with the current dorm assistant, Anna, a 20 something American.  Was very impressed with her.  She is praying about what she will do at the end of this school year, and considering a couple possibilities in Thailand.

After our talk, Anna needed to go pick up the dorm students from Grace International School (where our kids attended), so she dropped me off at a coffee shop where I waited to meet a Speech Therapist/Special Needs teacher from Grace who is also sent out by OMF US.  I had a good conversation with Michelle as she processes moving back to the US in a few months after serving 3 years in Thailand.

I then traveled to meet another missionary friend who is sent out by OMF Australia and we had a lovely time catching up and praying together.  Friday morning I met with an OMF Canadian friend for breakfast and then went to the airport to fly to Bangkok.  Arriving there with my 50 lb bag, I was a bit worried about how to get my bag up the 20 step stairs to cross the highway to get to the other side to catch public transportation to Sow Tong (near Lopburi) where we served 2002-2006.  I asked at Airport Information and God provided an intern who lives in Lopburi who guided me to an elevator/walkway combination - thank You, Jesus.  I then got on one van which took me to another van.  2.5 hours later I was in Lopburi and needed to find my way to get 20 minutes to Sow Tong.  As I wearily got out of the van, a man climbed out behind me and said, "I overheard you saying you are traveling to Sow Tong.  I'm traveling that way and my wife is here with my pickup truck to pick me up.  We'll take you to the place you need to go."  Wow!  Angels!  What a blessing to get a ride to the door of Dr. Bunny's house (our dentist friend in Sow Tong) where I was planning to spend the night.

So that evening I had dinner with Dr. Rabbit, husband Thone, Prem (17) and Prim (13).  The next morning, as I was reading my Bible, Prem sat next to me so I suggested he get his Thai Bible and read in Thai as I read in English.  I was reading Exodus 12.  Afterward, we had a great conversation as I explained how the symbolism of putting the blood over the doorways to spare the firstborn son of the Israelis and Egyptians who followed suit represented Jesus coming to die to spare us from having to die as punishment for our sins.

Then I walked across the street to our former neighborhood.  I went to the Bunny Family house, but no one was home so I left a picture of our family with my phone number with a neighbor.  Then I saw our old house and visited with our neighbors, Grandma Lamyay and Saa.  Saa is a nursing professor at local university.  We had a great time visiting.  I also stopped by to see Grandpa Dune who studied the Bible with Scott for several years.  Grandpa Dune told me that his wife passed away last year from cancer.  He said, "I'm glad I got to study the Bible with Scott even though I didn't become a Christian."  Then Saa took me out to lunch and to buy some pad thai packets to bring home for Alysha - boy, was she happy to get them!  Kindly, Saa took me to Puk and A's house where I was to spend that night in downtown Lopburi.

That evening, Puk and A with their two boys (10 and 8) and daughter (1) took me to Pastor Mong and Ong's new house where we had a lovely dinner with Teacher Awd, Golf, Gik, Sai, Baw.  It was so precious to catch up with these folks who came to Christ over the years we worked with Prasiri Church and who are persevering in their love for Jesus.  Golf and Gik (brother and sister in their 30s) shared with me their plans to move from Bangkok back to Lopburi with Sai and start a coffee shop that will be a center of ministry.  A year ago their mother got very ill with a heart condition.  After being resistant to the Lord for 10 years, Gik asked her mom if she was ready to receive Jesus.  She prayed then to become a Christian.  The next time she went to the doctor, her heart condition had completely healed!  She threw away her idols and is now walking with Jesus - praise God!  

Meanwhile, the Bunny Family called me and said they wanted to come see me so about the time we arrived back at Puk and A's house, they showed up to visit.  It was a delight to see Mee Wasana with daughters Ooey and Yuey and 3 grandchildren.  Mee Wasana, Yuey and her husband A had studied the Bible with us for over 1 year, but hadn't become Christians.  We consider them close family friends.

The next morning Golf, Gik and Sai picked me up for church and kindly drove to Sow Tong to pick up Dr. Rabbit's teenage sons Prem and Prim who were willing to go with me to Prasiri.  What a joy to be in their church building which is nearly completed after years of saving money and gradually completing it.  They asked me to give a testimony.  After church, I traveled by van to a Bangkok mall to meet Ann and A (who ministered with us part-time for 1 year when we worked in Sow Tong).  These two ladies (who also came to Christ through Prasiri) have been English teachers for a number of years at a Christian school in Chonburi where most of the students come from Buddhist families so they have tremendous opportunities to share Christ with them.  They also run a hostel for 18 kids who live with them during the school year and only go home every other weekend.  Ann and A have daily devotions with the kids.  So good to spend time with them.  

Ann and A then drove me to Bangkok Bible College to see Fiat (studied the Bible with me 20 years ago) who is married to Tam, the Dean of Men for the College.  Fiat marks papers for those who study the Bible by correspondence. They have an 8 year old daughter and live on campus so it was fun to see BBC.  They treated us out to dinner.  Then Ann and A drove me to David and Gladys Chang's home, fellow OMF US missionaries who serve in Bangkok.  Fun to catch up with the Changs too.  They had just been to dinner at our house in Colorado last summer when they were on Home Assignment.

Monday morning I took a Grab to meet Buu at a Bangkok mall.  She too studied the Bible with me 20 years ago with Fiat, but didn't become a Christian.  Buu has a lot of pain in her marriage.  She has two young daughters.  I shared a lot with her and Buu promised to do a Thai Bible correspondence course.  Please pray that she will!  Then Buu took me to the OMF Mission Home in BKK.  I got to visit with the Thailand Child Safety Officer (an OMF US missionary) and talk about some of her concerns as she seeks to promote Child Safety for our Thailand workers.  I also got to see Margaret Paylor, an 86 year old retired OMF UK worker, who was visiting and Eunice, another UK worker who used to live in our neighborhood in Lopburi in about 1999-2000.  Precious!  

Early Tuesday morning I went to the Bangkok airport to fly to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  There I was met by Jenny Kangas.  (Jenny and Tim went to Cambodia from OMF US at the same time we went to Thailand in summer 1997 and we've met up several times over the years.)  Jenny and I traveled by van four hours northeast to Snuol in rural Cambodia.  Wow, what a broken place rural Cambodia is after the Khmer Rouge devastated the country years ago and killed everyone with an education, over 90% of the Christians along with most of the Buddhist monks.  It was fascinating and sad to experience it firsthand.

That evening we played "baseball" with Nathan and Brianna Martin's boys who are 7 and 5.  This OMF US couple lives 2 doors away from the Kangases and has served in Cambodia for 8 years.  On Wednesday, Tim and Jenny took me a Cambodian high school where they were meeting with the administrators to discuss helping the 12th graders with their English.  This is the only high school in the area.  In rural Cambodia, kids are lucky to get a 6th grade education.  Most would find it very difficult to travel on dirt roads for 30 minutes to 1 hour to get to high school by motorbike.  Most of them have no electricity or running water.  

Later Jenny and I went to the fresh market where fish and eels were flopping in metal containers and the fruits and veggies were quite fresh, but potentially full of chemicals.  Jenny has learned to ask for the organic veggies.  I enjoyed seeing a John Deere sign down the road from the Kangas home as Nathan has recently begun working for this company.  I went in the shop and saw some big tractor tires - seemed like they did tractor repairs, but I couldn't communicate with the owners.  (It was fun to discover that I understood about 1 in 10 words so Thai and Khmer must be related.)

That afternoon I spent some time with Brianna.  She and Nathan will soon return to the US for Home Assignment.  They've had a tough 4 years in Cambodia.  2 of those 4 years, they were the only Westerners living in their rural town.  (Tim and Jenny just moved there in October from Phnom Penh.)  Between homeschooling their boys, cleaning a primitive house where running water and electricity are not always available, mosquito nets needed due to dengue and malaria, and outreach to relatively uneducated people where sexual abuse is common plus daily loudspeaker calls from the local mosque and Buddhist temples, there has been a lot of spiritual warfare and just plain hard and lonely living.

That evening Jenny provided a lovely dinner for the Martins, Kangases and me.  So good to spend time sharing and catching up.  I realized how much I have missed talking about our 15 years of missionary life with people who understand.  Much of our lives in Colorado are spent reaching out to others.  It was wonderful to share much with Jenny, so many memories of raising our kids in Thailand came back, as well as the joys and challenges of being empty nesters now.  It was a precious gift!

On Thursday morning, Nathan and Brianna with their boys, Jenny and me rode on motorcycles (their common form of transportation) on dirt roads to visit a family that Brianna has spent much time reaching out to.  Brianna shared how she did Bible study with 1 Christian sister for about a year upstairs in a small thatch roof house while the woman's drunken sister lounged in a hammock below and shouted obscenities at them.  Wow!  Eventually that sister has also come to Christ, but the family has been through a lot of trauma and abuse as three of the sisters are widows along with their mother so they have little protection from men in the community.  This family has cashew trees around their property and they harvest the cashews for a living.  They send the raw cashews to be processed in Vietnam.  This is common in Cambodia as they don't have the infrastructure to process their raw products.  Vietnam then sends the roasted packaged cashews back to Cambodia to sell and the people who grow these cashews cannot afford to buy their own processed cashews!

We had a good visit with the family, and then drove back to the Kangas home.  I had some more time with Brianna that afternoon, and then in the evening helped Jenny get ready to host a dinner for 3 visitors from the US who were on a short term mission trip.  The older couple attends a Cambodian church in California and wanted to see Cambodia for themselves.  The other visitor was Megan from our US office who is in Cambodia for 2-3 months to write firsthand stories in order to record them for OMF US blogs and newsletters.  We had a sweet evening together.

The next morning Nathan drove the 3 visitors and me to visit a school 30 minutes from their home.  Through OMF, the Martins sponsor the salaries for a number of teachers of elementary schools in rural Cambodia.  Without this help, there would be no teachers at these schools.  The government is recently beginning to contribute more as well.  OMF is also helping to fund library books for the first libraries for these schools.  Before this, the kids had no books other than their school textbooks to read.  Nathan related how fun it is to begin to see kids at recess reading library books.  Though these are not Christian schools, it is so important for these kids to get an education, to be able to understand more of the world around them.  Hopefully, some will eventually become Christians and be able to read their Bibles.

This school was quite primitive.  Some non-profit organization built them a bathroom, but they only have water in the rainy season (6 months of the year).  The rest of the time, the kids go to the surrounding forest to relieve themselves.  There is no electricity.  The kids in the preschool were dirty and the floors were bare concrete.  The school (like all Cambodian schools) only meets for the mornings.  In the afternoons, the school just started a 7th grade program for students who want to further their education.  But if they want more than that, they'll have to travel 30 minutes on dirt roads (that become muddy and slippery in the rainy season) and have money for the school fees to attend the regional high school.

That afternoon, Jenny and I traveled by van back to Phnom Penh.  For over one hour, the van was so full that the driver put a passenger in his seat alongside him and somehow managed to still drive the van while constantly honking and passing other vehicles - I was glad that the high seat in front of me kept me from seeing lots of "near misses" as we flew down the road!

I got to tour the OMF Cambodia mission home and office and spend about 1 hour with the Field Director sharing some of my thoughts about how we could encourage more workers to live in rural Cambodia.  Most workers cluster around Phnom Penh as the infrastructure is much better there and there are international schools for their kids.  In order to see workers in rural Cambodia, we need homeschool helpers or opportunities for families to join homeschool weeks or programs with other missionary families to combat the loneliness and provide more tools for homeschool families.  

Jenny took me out on motorcycle to see where she and Tim had lived, as well as the school their boys attended and the area where they did ministry.  There were a number of scary moments in crazy Phnom Penh traffic where as Jenny said, "They're starting to understand how traffic signals work"!  She then took me to dinner at a lovely place - a nice treat.  Then Tim and Jenny took me to the airport and I flew overnight to Tokyo.

I had discovered that my itinerary had a 12 hour layover in Tokyo (actually Narita airport) before my flight to Denver, and Narita airport has an amazing tour program for layover folks.  So for $2 I checked my suitcase, and for $30 I got a 6 hour tour which included volunteer tour guides, a bus that took us to a historic town where they did Japanese crafts and showed historic way of living, lunch where I got to make rice balls covered in seaweed and enjoyed tempura veggies and chicken, and then traveled to a temple compound from 787 AD and then back to the airport.  It was a bit chilly (they had their annual snowfall the night before and it was in the 40s or 50s) after being in 80s-90s in Singapore, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia so I purchased a sweatshirt and socks in the airport before the tour.  Japan is so organized and easy to navigate!  I also met a Muslim couple on the tour from Malaysia and enjoyed talking to my Shinto/Buddhist tour guide.  

Then a 10.5 hour flight back to Denver where my sweet husband greeted me.  And 2 weeks of jetlag later, I feel fairly normal again.  I've been VERY busy at work catching up on a backlog plus getting ready for tomorrow when 9 of our US missionaries (plus 2 kids) are here for 1 week of debriefing, training, reconnecting with our home staff.  These weeks (2x per year in Feb and July) are always special times for our US team as we get to spend time with the missionaries we are serving, and who have amazing stories of their work in Asia.

Well, this is very LONG!  If you've made it this far, thanks for "listening".  I loved being in Asia and found it hard to come back to the US.  I truly feel that I belong in Asia and am well suited to the heat, humidity and work.  I am still fluent in Thai (yay!), but discovered that I would also be glad to work in Myanmar or Cambodia.  And yet it seems that God has me here for now and must have a purpose for me.  My husband was glad to send me to Asia (and says he is very glad to have me home!), but also says he has no desire to be in Asia.  He loves pastoring our church and preaching God's Word each week to our sweet congregation.  So for now I will go on serving the Lord at OMF US office 3 days per week and in our neighborhood on other days.  Was good to get back to my 2 neighborhood Bible studies this past week (and had a new neighbor visit!)  By the way, I've been sending out (somewhat) regular updates about my neighborhood ministry (with a bit about our family and OMF).  If you'd like to receive those updates, please let me know as I have a separate mailing list for those updates.  (If you've already been receiving those updates, I included you on this email and will try to get out an update on my neighborhood ministry soon.)

Blessings to you all.  Would love to hear from any of you.  I'll pray if you send requests!

Love,
Jennifer for the Tibbetts crew