The Road is Long...

Winding road opposite the village of Glae Mue Shae La.
It is burned off in preparation for planting hill rice.

 “The road is long, with many a winding turn” sang the Hollies in 1969.  That was our song in Thailand as well. Several posts in this blog have already made mention that travel was a big part of our mission work. We lived in Chiang Mai and later in Mae Sariang but our work was out in numerous small villages. Most of these villages were hard to reach. Some could only be reached by walking, some by boat, some by rough, muddy or sometimes impassable dirt roads and some by a combination of various kinds of transport, even including elephants!

There is a 200+ year history of Baptist missionary work from the US and for many missionaries, that history involved traveling out to where ever the people were living. Certainly, some missionaries were stationed at a school, a particular church, a medical facility, etc. and they were fairly stationary. But for the Karen related mission work in Thailand, it was all about the missionary traveling out to the villages. We caught on to that idea quickly and decided we would never refuse to go somewhere. If the people could live there, then we should be willing to go there.

Related to that was that if we said we would go to a village on a particular day, we were going to go or die trying. Early in our time visiting villages we heard that often government or other projects would promise some action, then never be seen again. We were representing Jesus, Christians, the Karen Baptist Church and the Christian faith so we were determined to be seen by the people as honest and reliable. Hopefully we lived up to it.

No highway department to call. If you want to
finish the trip, you chop the tree yourself.

So travel was a challenge and like many challenges, it became kind of a sport. And like many sports, who ever could travel the fastest to a particular village was sort of the “winner”, at least until the next guy went a little faster. It may not seem very missionary like, but at snack time after the weekly prayer meetings, the men would usually gather and compare notes about where they had been most recently, what they had done, what still needed to be done and of course, how long it took to get there and back.  Needless to say, the most disputed part of the discussion revolved around the travel time. No driver would admit that someone else actually got to a particular place or got back faster and even after endless discussions and tall tales of mountain driving derring-do, no champion driver was ever crowned.

Dick Mann and Johann Facchini were often the most vocal about their mountain driving credentials and Johann was fond of declaring “I’m the best driver in the mission!” The wives and other women usually just rolled their eyes when these travel speed discussions got going, ignored the men or went to another room if the discussion got too loud.

Crossing an irrigation ditch on the way to a village.

Each year, the TBMF (our Baptist Mission Group which at that time included Swedes, Australians as well as American Baptists) held a conference down on the Gulf of Thailand coast. Like many conferences, the grand finale was a “talent” night where anyone could and would do almost anything, especially if little or no talent was displayed. One year, several of the wives put on a skit where they imitated their husbands bragging about what good drivers they were and how fast they could go from place to place. It was hilarious from the beginning, but when Helena Facchini, imitating her husband, shouted out “I’m the best driver in the mission” the audience lost control.

Where was I in all this? I have to admit, I feel like I got pretty good at driving the mountains and got a good feel for the limits of my trusty Toyota. In all our years in Thailand, I never wrecked a truck or had one (that I was driving) slide down a mountainside. However, we had some dicey adventures I’m sure we’ll cover later in this blog. All in all, I traveled “many a winding road” and I suspect I was as good a driver as anyone but, I still don’t want to see Marcia imitate me at a conference.