Danish Visitors

Early on in our time in Pattaya we had a visit from a Danish TV crew, who had done a TV programme on why Danish men were coming to Pattaya.

We were asked to take them around to visit the people in the slums, many of whom had become Christians while in Pattaya.

The church had long worked in the slums, bringing food packages and offering assistance and this is where the Baan Reum Jai Thai church first came out of.

Thai pastors Arisa and Yodnang set up a church in the centre of one of the slums, which also served as a place of refuge for wives with husbands who were alcoholics and battered them, as drinking whisky and beer is very prevalent among Thai people.

We showed the two female reporters around this slum to meet some of the people who lived there.

We were shown how to make sticky rice (or Khao Niaow in Thai) by a lady getting ready to go out and sell it as a street vendor.

We met an old lady in her 80’s, living in a wood-built house and dancing on her verandah, poor, but full of joy.

We talked to a Christian couple and when the reporters asked what they did for work, the man told us that his wife used to work as a sex worker.

“How do you feel about that as her husband, your wife doing that type of work?”

“We are Christians,” he said, “she did what she had to do in those days, but now we are different, we don’t do that anymore, we believe in forgiveness.”

The visit to the slums impacted the two Danish reporters deeply, “We never expected it to be like this,” they said, as they wiped a tear from their eyes.

“We came here and thought we would judge everything, but their attitudes have changed our outlook.”

“In Denmark hardly anyone believes in God, they think it’s weird, but here it’s different.”

I have read with interest lately of a revival starting among the young people of Denmark, so let us not assume that it’s ever too late for God to move in a country, from the slums of Pattaya, to secular Denmark, God finds a way to turn people back to Him, where there is a spiritual vacuum, God is waiting to fill it.

Isaiah 55.6; “Seek the Lord while He may be found; call on Him while He is near.”