Learning Thai

In Thailand, reaching the age of one month is an important milestone. Traditionally Thai people hold a folk Buddhist ceremony to celebrate the child safely making it through the dangerous early weeks. The ceremony involves a blessing by monks, a symbolic haircut, and friends and family offering words of blessing to the child. From what we understand, it is partly to celebrate, partly to bless the child, and partly to ensure ongoing protection from evil spirits.

We decided to adapt this ceremony and do a Christian blessing ceremony for Silas. We invited our team, our church, and our neighbors and some friends to come join us in dedicating Silas to God (tawai but= "offer a child"). Another cool element, was the number of countries represented among the 25 guests....Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, America, Ecuador, and Nicaragua!
Because a Thai celebration always has to include food, we started with a feast....

Nixson digs in to the buffet including grilled pork, sticky rice, papaya salad, chicken, and fruit and cookies.

....and these adorable cakes contributed by our friend Yupim (some with Silas's name)....

The man of the hour and his proud family

Utai dedicates Silas to God. Our friends agreed to help us teach and train Silas and we promised to raise him for God's glory.

At the end, we did the the traditional ceremony of string tying. Utai explained that the string is ordinary with no special powers of protection. It was used as a way of demonstrating God's love in welcoming and blessing Silas. Most of our friends tied one on and Silas didn't seem to mind......

Chaweewan, my friend

Khun Yai, our neighbor

Dan

Pon, our friend and recently baptized member of our simple church. He sang a song at the end of the ceremony. Efrain and Nixson also sang..."Pablo y Silas estaba en la carcel" (about Paul and Silas singing in prison). :)

Here he is with his whole string collection.

We were so blessed by this time....it feels really good to know that Silas has such a group of friends to help love and teach him and we feel really encouraged by the support for our family.
-Candice

Posted by Tom & Candice Mast at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sorry for the long delay in posting a new entry here! We have been without a computer since last Sunday. Ours continues to be out of commission and is currently in a repair shop. We're supposed to find out soon whether this one is fixable or if we will need to buy a new computer. In the meantime we're feeling a little cut off from the "outside world." Keep e-mailing though! We're running down to a neighborhood coffee shop/internet cafe to check in when we can.

A few prayer requests for you....

1) We are planning a baby dedication for Silas at our house on Friday night. We'll have a big meal for our Thai friends and neighbors and team and then we'll do a dedication service in Thai. We're praying that this can be a witness to our friends. Please pray with us.

2) Tom's Grandma Schrock passed away Sunday night. Please pray for Tom's Grandpa and the rest of his family as she will be very much missed. Praise God for her faithful life!

3) Praise God that Tom was able to get a job teaching English in a factory..which is something that we've been praying and hoping for. He teaches an evening class at a Denso car parts factory which is going well so far (2 nights a week). Thank God for the opportunity to form new relationships through this class and pray that it would lead to other factory teaching jobs.

Thanks for your prayers and we'll try to get back to blogging and posting pictures soon!
Candice

Posted by Tom & Candice Mast at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As I mentioned before, we were really blessed to have my mom here over the time of Silas's birth. She was with us in Mechanicsburg for Claire and Eliza's births, but we never expected that we'd be lucky enough to have her come all the way to Thailand for this one! It was pretty amazing how God worked out all the details including time off work. It was a wonderful time for the girls to get to know Grandmom again and for her to enjoy the new baby.

One of Claire and Eliza's favorite things was helping Grandmom cook and bake- they made lots of pudding and jello, french bread, cinnamon rolls, peanut butter cookies....all kinds of yummy things that we all enjoyed (and are excited to have stocked in our freezer!!).

Other favorite things were lots of reading time and craft time (here they are doing a puzzle) as well as plenty of showing off for Grandmom's video camera! They loved all the candy, tiny notebooks, little Bibles, books, etc that Grandaddy and Grandmom gave them!

Meeting Silas in the hospital.

First diaper change from Grandmom. Mom helped out with many baths, diaper changes, etc as well as helping out a lot with household stuff like dishes and laundry. THANK YOU!!!

Back home. Here we're having a one year old birthday party for our rabbit Lewis. He was allowed to join the party AFTER we had a meal in his honor. Claire and Daddy designed a "birthday cake" for him, consisting of greens with carrots in the shape of bunny ears.

This is my favorite picture of the two- look how he's holding on and looking right at her! Awww.

The girls miss you, mom!! I asked Claire if she was sad to say good-bye at the airport. She said, "A few tears trickled down my cheeks." I think that means yes. Since you left, Eliza has been trying out eating with her left hand in your memory! Thanks for everything!

-Candice

Posted by Tom & Candice Mast at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday our team came over for a prayer time at our house...and we were lucky enough to have Aida cook us some ceviche (a lime/onion/cilantro cold shrimp soup) which was one of our favorite foods in Ecuador. Yum!

And a few family pictures....

Adjusting to being a family of five!

2 weeks old.

And finally, we had another good-bye last week. Sharon headed back to America after a 2 year internship here. She arrived just a few weeks after us, so we're sad to see one of the "originals" leave us! Sharon, you blessed us and the team so much. We miss you!

-Candice

Posted by Tom & Candice Mast at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is a purely technical post about commenting. Those of you who are already registered TypeKey members can disregard this. But we've had several people mention that they read this blog but have been unable to comment. Because of the amount of spam we had been receiving, the company that hosts our site required us to implement a registration process. Here's how it works...

At the bottom of each entry, under any already-posted comments, you can click on this "Sign in" link.

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Thanks for bearing with this cumbersome process - we really appreciate you making the effort to leave comments that let us know you're interested in our work and lives here.

-Tom

Posted by Tom & Candice Mast at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We received Silas' Thai birth certificate, along with a certified English translation, in the mail today. Now that we have the official record of his birth we can report it to the U.S. embassy and begin the process of getting him a passport and social security number. It was interesting to note the differences between Thai and American birth certificates.

Here's the Thai version.

And here's the English translation. It records the moon phase, lunar month, and Chinese Zodiac year. We also got a kick out of the title that they use for him - "Master."

At the hospital this was how his crib was labeled. It makes him sound pretty important!

And finally, here's a more recent picture of him. He's continuing to do very well - eating healthily and starting to sleep for slightly longer stretches at a time.

-Tom

Posted by Tom & Candice Mast at 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)