God Created the Universe to Train the Faithful by Bill Gossett
Billy Ray Blog Part 1 of 2
2BC-Thailand/UHDP Mission trip 2-25-20
This is my second trip to UHDP in Thailand. This year, on my first day, I met Rick Burnett, the founder of UHDP at 7 a.m., and we took a walk in the mountainous tropical jungle surrounding UHDP. A really long, long, long, long walk. It wasn’t long because it was boring. It was long because he would stop every few yards, and his eyes would get really big, his voice would get really excited, and he would say things like “Do you realize this is an Arengo Westerhoutil. I planted this 17 years ago and can’t believe it is soooooo big.”
I would answer “That’s really cool, what would I call it”? He grinned and said it was an extremely rare Black Sugar Palm. It used to be plentiful in the area but was disappearing. It has a special fruit that is boiled. The fruit tastes and looks like a jelly bean but has high nutritional substance. This walk went on for about two hours, with numerous stops and a brain overload of information for me!
We approached the end of this particular walk, and he stopped, looked at me very seriously, and said, “We can’t walk back in that part,” pointing to a very dense part of the jungle, “That is where Tigers live.”
He looked at me and smiled deeply as we moved toward our base camp. This would be the first of a half dozen walks. Little did I know that his wife calls his walks, death marches. (See part 2 blog for details on this statement.) The walks were being used by Rick to verify the impact of the Agro-Forestry techniques UHDP had been implementing. The techniques must be productive, practical, and successful.
We traveled to approximately ten different hill tribe villages over the next few days. I would not have taken my old land rover on these roads. I must have banged my head against the side of the window a zillion times as the truck shook, negotiating deep ruts and crazy high dirt mounds and giant palm tree leaves and bamboo scraping the truck sides and windows. When we did arrive at a hill tribe village. I would see the excitement in Rick’s eyes as he pointed out the UHDP Agro techniques that were being implemented by that particular hill tribe. The excitement would grow as the tribe’s head man would come up and greet Rick.
Our mission team spent the night in a Palaung hill tribe village. We slept in bamboo huts with livestock, such as pigs and chickens, located on the other side of our bamboo hut walls. It really was a humbling experience, and you could feel God’s presence all around us and around the tribal people.
God really has created a universe that trains the faithful.
Watch for Billy Ray Blog part 2 coming soon
Photographs
