Up the Kwai River: Part One

Riding on the "Death Railway" of World War II
infamy nearing the town of Kanchanaburi - 1983

One item on our first-year agenda was to visit and get oriented to the other Baptist mission work in Thailand. With that in mind, in May of 1983 we took our first trip to the upper reaches of the Kwai River to visit the Kwai River Christian Mission. The mission station was home to the Kwai River Christian Hospital as well as a school and student hostels and a church. When first established in 1960, it was quite remote with limited road access so often, people traveled there by long-tail boat.

Our trip had roads the whole way, but the pavement ended a good while before we arrived. We took buses and by the last leg of the trip we were on a bus kicking up clouds of dust and loaded with a wide assortment of people, cargo, chickens and a pig. It was a scene from a movie stereotyping developing country transportation.

The Kwai River Christian Mission was in a state of transition. The Khao Laem dam was being built that would flood everything in the mission area. Of course, the lake has now been full for many years and we were told that since the original church was on high ground, remnants of the foundation can still be seen when the lake level is low. What we saw in 1983 however, was a nice, hill top church building and all the other buildings of the mission station were still intact.

Bridge Over the River Kwai in
Kanchanaburi - 1983

The route to the Kwai River Christian Mission leaves Bangkok and heads northwest to the town of Kanchanaburi. We took a passenger train on this portion of the trip which follows some of what was called the “Death Railway” built by the Japanese with POW labor during World War II. On this trip, we stopped in Kanchanaburi to visit a military cemetery where many of the Allied soldiers that died building the Death Railway are buried. We also visited “the bridge over the river Kwai”. This particular bridge is “a” bridge over the river, originally built by prisoners and local people coerced by the Japanese. This bridge was also bombed during World War II. However, the particular story and characters depicted in the 1957 movie called “The Bridge Over the River Kwai” are fictional and the movie was actually filmed in Sri Lanka.

Nearest bus terminal and "car wash"
on the road to the Kwai River
Christian Mission - 1983

From Kanchanaburi, we continued northwest into an increasingly rural countryside with increasingly
rough roads fording the occasional stream. At last, the bus stopped and didn’t appear to be going any further so we got off. As for missionaries there at the time, Ben and Doris Dickerson and Emily Ballard were stationed there for the American Baptists. Jan Vertigan didn’t yet know she was soon to be named Jan Yawan, but she was there for the Australian Baptists. Dr. Lois Visher was also there serving as doctor. Peggy Smith, another American Baptist colleague was also there but I don’t remember if she was stationed there or visiting along with us. Fellow language student Harvey Jones was there as well from the Australian Baptists. There might have been another mission person or two around as well.

Kwai River Christian Hospital at the original
site - 1983

We toured the mission work, got to exercise our newly acquired Thai language vocabulary, met lots of the local people associated with the mission work, looked over the new town that was being created, and saw where the new mission station was going to be located. It was amazing to think that virtually everything we were looking at was going to be underwater once the dam was completed. Every house, shed, hostel, hospital, church, school, etc. was going to be torn down, lumber and hardware salvaged as much as possible, moved to the new location and rebuilt. Ben and Doris Dickerson had been stationed there to oversee the whole operation, though at this visit, the moving process hadn’t yet started.

L to R Ben Dickerson,
Emilie Ballard and
Dr. Lois Visher - 1983

Marcia’s family hosted visiting missionaries at times during her childhood, so she might have gotten to experience missionaries as “real” people more than me. But as for me, before arriving in Thailand, I’d only met missionaries in church settings. In Thailand though, we were beginning to see that our mission colleagues were just a great group of people to be around. They liked to have fun, were great story tellers, didn’t take themselves too seriously, and were creative and innovative. At the same time, they were very dedicated, people of real faith, and tireless workers that loved what they were doing and loved the people they were doing it with. This visit and the “get to know each other” party we had one night on this trip helped crystalize the spirit of our mission colleagues and the spirit of the mission work.

I don’t recall the overall availability of electrical power at the Kwai River station, but it was somewhere between minimal and none. Certainly, there was no electric power the night we had dinner and our gathering. I also don’t know where the idea came from, but the challenge was to divide into small groups of three, pick out one of the three, then make clothes for that person out of newspapers. In the photo, are some of the results. In mission literature, I suspect it is difficult to find photos of Emilie Ballard and Ben Dickerson dressed in newspapers and I doubt it is something they would have used when speaking to churches in the US. But I post these photos here as a symbol of the “real,” good natured people we were privileged to work alongside.