Thank You Dunhams!!!

In Chiang Mai, we got to meet up with an amazing family, the Dunhams, that took the time to show us around the town and introduced us to their ministry, The Family Connection Foundation (! It was so cool to meet people living here who are just trying to shed some light into this country. Their ministry does so much for the people of Thailand, especially Chiang Mai. They run children homes and preschools (in the picture above) and are developing a lot of community programs to go out and build relationships in this city. They are very brave people sharing their faith in this country. Only 0.5% of the country knows Jesus, so they are looking at a very daunting task. The thing that hit me the most was what they told us about orphans in Thailand. Basically, Buddhist teaching is huge on Karma and Buddhists believe that orphans are orphans because of the bad Karma they made in their past lives. This being said, no one is very excited to help them or to love them. One of the many programs of their ministry is to help orphans, give them love and attention and teach them that they are loved! This is Tim and his daughter who is adopting the cutest little girl, Emma (below). They were so amazing to us! Thanks for everything!Emma had Eric and I wrapped around her finger in about 30 seconds! She was so cute and actually taught us a lot about Chiang Mai and Thailand! She was super fun to hang out with! ...Katie

Monkey Temple

So, this is a little out of order (we did this the day before going on the elephant trip), but we got some funny pictures, so I thought it deserved posting. We went to Lopburie, a town renowned for it's temples swarming with monkeys. We definitely underestimated the amount of monkeys we were going to see. About 5 minutes after arriving, the streets were filled with monkeys! They were hanging on the power lines, climbing on the buildings, sitting on people's cars and scooters...they were everywhere! They weren't exactly the cute monkeys we were expecting either...they seemed more like pigeons. When we got to the temple itself, it almost looked like the walls were moving, there were so many monkeys. Shiny stuff and bags really appealed to the monkeys, one jumped on Eric and was so cute until he tried stealing our bag! ...Katie

SONG SOON!

Katie and I just spent 3 days in a beautiful small village near Chiang Mai. It was an elephant conservation center. This place doubled as a self sustaining village where the Mahouts (the people who took care of the elephants) lived and worked and farmed and everything. These guys were pretty much married to their elephant. One of them even left his house in Lampang to live there. Pum, the guy who took care of Katie's elephant would go twice during the night and feed his elephant. It was very amazing how the elephant seemingly able to communicate back with the Mahout somehow. My Mahout has been with Pankut for 12 years now. I guess 12 years together every day and you learn how to speak to each other.

elephant bath. This water was not exactly the cleanest water ever. It seemed like the elephants would always wait until they got into the water to poop. Notice the softball or larger sized clumps of elephant poo that are floating around in the water we are spraying at each other. Pretty gross but oh well. It was way fun.

We got to trek out into the forest and clean off and feed our elephants each morning at 6:30 am. It was super cold then by the way. After that we would trek back into the camp where it was time for the bath. This early morning bath didn't usually have the same playfulness that the other 2 baths for the day got. Since it was so cold it was usually just an in and out hope you dont get to wet kind of a deal.

Me leading the pack

This is where we stayed. Our room was connected to the home of one of the Mahouts

Long shot of the village


This is a little 8 month old baby elephant named Kaelynn, who was very interested in my camera. .....Eric

Mahout Course = Elephant Professionals

We are officially "mahout" certified!! Eric and I just finished our 3-day elephant training course. We arrived at 6am on Monday morning to a beautiful elephant sanctuary in the jungle in northern Thailand. When we got there, we were each assigned elephants. My elephant was Gale, he is 10 years old and his mahout is Phum who has been with him since he was born. Gale acts like a teenage boy, he is rebellious, eats anything and everything and is always doing his own thing! It was crazy how we got to know all the elephants personalities in just 3 days! After we got to know our elephants, we learned different commands and how to act with our elephants. We learned different ways to get on and off, how to get them to pick stuff up and hand it to us...all sorts of things! This is me and Gale...
We got to take the elephants to a lake to bathe twice a day...the mahouts made it look easy, but my elephant didn't just stand there to let you wash him...he liked to go ALL the way under, head and all. He would just splash around with his trunk up like a submarine, and me getting soaked. My mahout taught me "bon-boon", which tells the elephant to suck up water into their trunk and then give you their trunk to point, and then they spray!!! I got Eric so good, his elephant wasn't nearly as cool as mine...he got drenched!!!
Every morning, we got to hike into the forest with our mahouts to find our elephants. This was my favorite part of the whole program. We got to spend a lot of time with them, clean them, feed them breakfast and then walk with them on a nice trek out of the forest. They were so helpful and pulled up their own chains and everything! It amazed me how intelligent these animals are!
This is one of the most beautiful sunsets from our camp. Our room looked out over a beautiful lake and we were able to see the elephants walking around all over the place. We actually stayed with the mahouts and really got to see their ways of life. It felt like we were living on a farm...only with gigantic elephants stomping around all over the place!...Katie

BATS BATS BATS

Our Guide for this tour we went on that Katie wrote about earlier took us to this little cave where monks go to worship. In this cave we were able to get super up close and personal with about 5,000 bats. Much closer than I would normally prefer, considering one actually hit me in the back at one point. We also we able to get pretty close to some strange bugs


Then our guide showed us this place where every night over 2 million bats fly out of one whole in the side of a mountain about 15 ft in diameter in one hour. This was truly amazing. I have never and will most likely never see anything like this again in my entire life. Coupled with our fun group and the amazing sunsets these bats are something I truly will never, ever forget



The hole they came out of
The escape route


The beautiful sunset