Details, details, details

You'll be happy to know that we are now in possession of two round-trip tickets to Thailand.

Our official departure date is July 2, 2011.

And some specifics about our year:

Justin is being sponsored by CitySquare, where he currently works, for a Legal Fellowship with International Justice Mission. You can learn more about CitySquare and the amazing work they do by visiting their website.

International Justice Mission (IJM) is a faith-based non-profit headquartered in Washington D.C. Here's the "About Us" section on their website:

International Justice Mission is a human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression. IJM lawyers, investigators and aftercare professionals work with local officials to ensure immediate victim rescue and aftercare, to prosecute perpetrators and to promote functioning public justice systems.

Justin has been interested in IJM and their work since he was a mere events coordinator at Pepperdine. You might even say it was one of the reasons he joined the ranks of those who practice law. And the idea of IJM has been a part of our relationship since the beginning. Picture our first date at Thai Orchid on Belt Line Road in Addison. A Thai restaurant, I know, who could have foreseen the irony. A suave and clean-shaven, and as always overly confident, Justin mentions IJM and his hope to someday spend time working overseas in one of their field offices. A previously under-impressed Angela, who has always wanted to live and serve overseas, has her interest piqued. And the rest is history.

In Thailand, IJM's work has traditionally focused on citizenship issues with the hill tribe peoples living in the border areas near Laos and Burma. These semi-nomadic people groups are not ethnically Thai, but they settled in Thailand generations ago. So they are technically Thai for citizenship purposes, except they don't have the documentation to show it. They live old school, like backwoods Appalachian folk. If your babies are born at home and you never make it to the big city, or even to the next big town, you never get documented. If you're not documented, you're more likely to be taken advantage of. And the cycle of injustice and oppression continues to be fed. In order to prove Thai citizenship, IJM officials conduct extensive interviews in and around the villages. In the course of these interviews, they've discovered that sexual abuse in children is a rampant problem, but the people don't know how to fight it. So they are starting a new initiative to train and support local officials to fight against these kinds of abuses. Justin's work will be focused the development of the new initiative.

Going to Thailand is fantastic, but being in Chiang Mai is doubly special for us. Our friends, David and Michelle Allen, work as missionaries there and we had the good fortune to get to visit them in Chiang Mai last summer. As a point of reference for you, Chiang Mai is the second largest city in Thailand, second to Bangkok and is becoming increasingly modern. If you had visions of us living in a bamboo hut in the jungle, sorry to disappoint. We'll have cultural differences to contend with for sure, but our big city life there will probably be more like our life in Dallas than it is different.

Check out the map below to get a sense of where we will be:


When we got the official word that Justin had been accepted by the Chiang Mai office, we contacted our friends David and Michelle to start making contacts about my employment for the year. Not that I couldn't get used to sitting around eating mangoes and sticky rice or drinking Thai iced tea all day. Just thought I would earn my keep. They connected me with Grace International School, where their daughters attend, and they just happened to have a need for a Speech Therapist for the 2011-2012 school year. Here is a copy of Grace's mission statement as listed on their website:

Grace International School exists primarily to enable international Christian workers to remain in their field of service by providing for the needs of their children through an integrated education from a Christian worldview.

As I thought about spending the year in Thailand, my heart was pulled toward immersing myself in the Thai culture. I wanted to find a small neighborhood preschool or community center where I could really dig in and help the least of these. Several things stood in the way of that, foremost of which is the fact that I don't speak Thai. When this opportunity at Grace presented itself, I had mixed feelings about taking it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the blessing of being connected with a strong Christian, English-speaking community. In a year that will contain so many differences and challenges, it's a comfort to look forward to a job I know how to do with people who's cultural oddities I understand, at least most of the time.