The Olivers In Thailand

Our family had the privilege of being invited to share in the Christmas celebrations at Baan Saan Fan on Christmas Eve.

Beautiful girls dressed up for the party!

Let's remember whose Birthday we are celebrating!

Two retired couples from America are serving for a year with the home and the school. This year they organised a turkey and ham fest for the party.

Yum!

The children blessed us by presenting the dance dramas that they had prepared. This year Jenny taught the younger children a dance which included sign language to the song "Saviour of the World". Esther taught the older ones a stick dance to a Thai version of "Holy Night".

Boys!

Up, up and away!

A great start to our family Christmas celebrations!

We were honoured to have our friends from Baan Saan Fan over to share a meal. Thirty children were joined by fifteen adults including two retired couples from America who are serving at the Baan Saan Fan home and school for a year.

We had chilli con carne and Adrian had bought a 1kg bag of chilli powder. Despite using a substantial amount it still wasn't hot enough for the older girls!

The children all loved the soy bean vegetables which was amusing as we are used to children not usually getting excited about the veg.

Desert was ice-cream. Then we made pop-corn to take down to the Christmas event at our children's school (GIS).

A good time was had by all!

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During the summer we enjoyed a 5 week visit to England.

It was a wonderful time to connect with family, friends and church.

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We were blessed with accommodation, transport and meals.
Big thank yous to:

• Pip & Maggie Lear for lending us their lovely home whilst they were away.
• The West family for squeezing us in for a fun packed week at the "Pudding Palace".
• Kingdom Faith for lending us a tent for a week!
• Adrian's parents for having us to stay for the final week.
• Jurrie and Ann for so kindly blessing us with the use of their car for our whole visit.
• Heather and Powerpack for giving us a money gift towards our trip.
• For all the wonderful meals and hospitality. I sure we have put on lbs!.

We had the opportunity to visit Cambridge, Southampton and Surrey Universities.

Cambridge

Fitzwilliam College

Adrian was working full-time at Eurotherm and the indication was that there would be more work for hime during the year ahead. Tom had the opportunity of 3 days work experience at Eurotherm

Jenny's Aunt Nadine and cousin Mariana and Mariana's family were also in the UK and so we enjoyed a family reunion and BBQ together.

It was also a joy to celebrate Adrian's parents Golden Wedding anniversary together with family and friends.

The couple, the cake...

And the cousins!

We loved to see how our home church, Arun Community Church, is blossoming and developing. We had opportunities to share about what we get up to in Thailand and received a lot of encouragement.

We had an excellent week with Powerpack at Kingdom Faith in Peterborough.
We were able to share about the work of Powerpack Thailand with the children.
We also had the opportunity to share over the Kingdom Faith camp radio.
We ran a Powerpack Thailand shop and also had an offering by the children to help with our project to translate Powerpack resources into S.E. Asian language. Over £800 was raised and we have already been able to send money to buy a printer which will help our translator.

We arrived back in mid-August just in time to rush the children into school and it has been pretty hectic since then. Hence I am only just getting around to writing this blog!

Another video, created as part of their British Literature school class.