Being English I'm not used to earthquakes so the fact that Chiang Mai was hit by a big earthquake last week is really quite exciting. Newspapers claim that it was 6.3 on the Rickter scale and its epicenter was just 260km from here. The funny thing, I didn't even feel it. As I sat in The Centre on Wednesday last week, cutting out stars to decorate for the Friday Night Party - we were having a space theme - it came as quite a surprise when students started greeting me with the exciting news that they just felt an earthquake. Apparently it lasted a good 45 seconds but fortunately didn't cause any damage to buildings. I'm actually very disapointed I missed it, I'm not sure how it is possible to miss an earthquake but some how I managed.

Dear Friends,

The Centre was an extremely excited place to be yesterday as we heard news that one of our students Jeep became a Christian. Jeep was only at The Centre for a couple months arriving around the same time as us and then leaving a few months ago. He is now living and working in a city called Phitsanulok about 350km south of here but we have continued to keep in touch with him and pray for him. Jeep always seemed very interested in Christianity when he was at The Centre and he always enjoyed talking to people about Jesus. When he left we wondered if that would be the last we would see of him and if this would be the end of his interest but instead this was only the start. It wasn’t long before Jeep started phoning me and Nathan and the other staff at The Centre and telling us how God had been answering his prayers and asking us lots of questions. It was always difficult for us to talk to him as his English isn’t the best and so we were never sure how much he understood and most of the time we weren’t sure we understood him.

Yesterday he rang Nathan and had a short chat to him before talking to P’Opal who explained a few things to him and asked if he wanted to become a Christian. Over the last few months God has been working so powerfully in Jeeps life as he has had to make decisions about his career and ended up setting up his own business. It is so exciting that now he has recognized God’s grace in his life and made a commitment to follow Jesus.

Thank God for Jeep and that he has come to know Jesus. Thank God for bringing him to us at The Centre and for the encouragement he is to us. Please pray for Jeep as he starts the journey of the Christian life, pray that he would quickly be able to find a church and that there would be Christians around him who can encourage him and teach him. Pray for the staff at The Centre that we would know how to keep in touch and help him in whatever ways we can. Thank you for your prayers they are so clearly making a huge impact on our lives and the lives of the students.

God Bless

Paul Zealey

Moogatar has to be one of my favorite places to eat in Chiang Mai and my advice to any tourist would be to give it a go, it is certainly an experience. We ate there on Saturday night with a couple of students and some of the YWAM team we have been working with along with around 600 other people. Moogatar is basically a huge eat till your sick buffet where you pay 150 baht (about £2 or $4) and you can eat as much as you like. It is in what might be described a huge open cow shed just off a main road with a stage at one end and a very long table through the middle of it. On the table at one end is all kinds of raw meat, seafood and vegetables, in the middle is some cooked food, lots of deep fried meat, flies and chicken feet and at the other end is the largest assortment of fruit and ice cream you have ever seen. Each table has its own mini coal barbeque so you can cook for yourself and a large supply of coke which you need to drink a lot of as hygiene isn’t quite up to UK standards.

We had a great evening chatting together and eating some very nice if not weird food. Dai, one of the students persuaded Nathan to eat a rather suspect piece of meat and then told him afterwards it was a chicken foot.

In other news, The Centre is now a very quiet place as the team have now left and moved onto their next place in Chiang Rai before heading back to Australia in a few weeks time. We have another much smaller team arriving next week, just 4 Bible College students from America so it will be good to have a few more teachers and students around. We now have our visas and tickets for India; we leave in 3 weeks time so we’re really looking forward to that. Finally I have to mention the rain, it has been pouring down every day for the last week so the rainy season has certainly arrived and will be here till we leave which is annoying but can be fun!

People tell me that Gap years often change you as you experience new things and meet new people. While I know this to be true I didn't quite expect to change in this way. I have never been a great fan of any kind of animal but the worst were by far Dogs. Dogs have a habit of coming near me, wanting to play with me and frankly I never wanted anything to do with them and certainly didn't want to touch them.

However, one of our friends has a dog and as we see her a fair bit I was forced to become a little more accepting of these nasty animals. Now, I actually quite like Gracie and we have some what of a good relationship. I still don't like dogs much but this one is rather cute don't you think?

This is a story that I helped P'Opal write last week and thought I might share it with you. P'Opal is the boss at The Centre and became a Christian about 3 years ago; ever since she has prayed earnestly for her family and here is the story. P'Opal writes:

In October 2005 my mom moved to join me in Chiang Mai. She first planed to stay in Chiang Mai with me for just a year but she has just kept extending the time and is still here now. Since the beginning, we have had some hard times and good times. God has really used these hard times to restore my relationship with mom as we had such a broken relationship. Those times weren’t that easy as I expected when I first asked her to stay with me. Sometimes I cried a lot because we didn’t understand each other and we didn’t act in a loving way, I mean that we didn’t act in the way that mom and daughter should act to one another. Another reason that broke my heart is that it was really hard for mom to accept me as a Christian, so sometimes she doesn’t understand me. We had a lot of conflicts at the beginning and I couldn’t even bring up the word “God” up because it would turn into a big fight.

I write this story with tears because when I look back I can see how God has worked amazingly in her life. From not accepting at all to the point that she prays, talks in a Christian way, thinks like a Christian and sometimes she even lives her life like she has the personal relationship with God. Right now my mom can go to the church and she enjoys it, actually she has been there many times already. She sometimes prays for me. More than anything God has totally restored my relationship with mom. She understands when I have to work for the church and for The Centre. Sometimes she even supports me when I have to go to camps. She also encourages me to pray and tell the Gospel to people when she sees anyone who has a problem. She says “Why don’t you ask her to go to the church so she can know God?!” We can talk about many things together. One great thing is that whenever I have some problems in my job at The Centre she would always tell me to pray to God. She said one time that I should “pray to God and he will give to you what you need”.

She is also the one who has convinced my brother to go to church. My brother has been going to church regularly since my mom encouraged him to go, and now he has become a Christian. Praise the Lord for every thing he has done in my family. God is faithful and he’s answering our prayers.

Please pray that my mom would make a decision since now she totally believes in God but she just doesn’t want to step out from her old life. She has been a Buddhist for her whole life so it’s hard for her to accept a new thing. Even though she knows that God blesses her and she has some personal experience of God, it is just too hard for her to let go of an old thing.