Thai Special Assembly Day

Welcome to our Safeguard Your Conscience assembly!

I asked Cut for a very literal translation of 'Safeguard Your Conscience' and it's something like 'keep protecting conscious feeling good bad of you'. We had 1,110 at our assembly and 7 were baptized. There was also a deaf translation of the program happening on the left side of the auditorium. 

We sat next to Mai, the Bible student from an earlier post who used to be a monk, and her family. They took the entire weekend off to come to assembly. That's a big deal because they operate a small drink shop in a night market, and the weekend is their busiest time. It was quite a sacrifice for a family of Bible students to make! 

We were very touched by the faith and trust they're showing in Jehovah already.

There are no assembly halls in Thailand. We rent out school auditoriums. So I snooped around the middle school a bit to see what those look like here...

There were 5 stories of hallways like this.

Some paintings they had laying outside the art room.

I couldn't understand the program so I used the opportunity to practice reading. I read the songs ahead of time and wrote them out phonetically so that when it came time to sing them, I could perhaps do it intelligibly. It takes me about an hour to read one song at this point. 

People bring lots of extra food to assembly and like to share so I made cookies to share with everyone. It's good being the cookie girl. People like you. People look at you with wide eyes and ask, "ARE THOSE HOMEMADE?!?!" Then the cookies get devoured. And let me tell you, most of the world does not know how good a chocolate chip cookie can be. The ones I made weren't exactly up to my standards but still, they went over well. In the new system, chocolate chip cookies are one of the first things we should share with each other. 

That's another global education work i'll be interested in taking part of.

This picture was taken AFTER assembly. Can you tell? Can you tell that it was the hottest indoor assembly i've ever been to? That even though we were inside with air conditioning, it still felt like we were in a wet sauna with all our clothes on? I think you can tell. Look at my face. But it was still great! Next time i'll tell you how the road trip went...

Sawadee ka!