What is our job?
What kind of work will we do for NMS?
We get asked this a lot, and there is no simple answer, but I have tried to explain it in this post.
The jobs we applied to were pretty general, and to our mind it seemed like NMS were looking for a couple willing to live in Thailand 4-8+ years with an education in theology or some sort of social or agricultural work. We applied with our shared dream of living abroad and our desire to use our skills and life to contribute to missions and social work.
My education is in media and communication, and I am soon done with a bachelors degree in Theology and missions. Ole Martin has his education and working experience from IT development. My working experience has been in project management.
NMS has a lot of projects in Thailand through ELCT, our partner church, that we will find our place with after our first year of language school. What exactly we will be doing is up to us, NMS and ELCT to find out. Some of the possible projects ELCT has through NMS support, are:
Sustainable Agriculture in Nan
In the beautiful mountain region of Nan, tourism has increased, and the demand for various goods is high. This has led to increased living costs for those who live there, and also opportunities.
Teaching at the Lutheran Seminary
LST offers both basic theological training where no prior knowledge is required, not even formal schooling.
Sustainable Church Growth
Support for ELCT goes towards making the church more self-financed. The goal of this new approach is to counteract dependency and to create sustainable growth with local ownership. "Use Your Talents" is a big part of this.
Home of Praise in Bangkok
At Home of praise, the children of Klong Toei, receive much needed care and love. They play in a learning-friendly environment, eat healthy food, and get time for rest.
Strong and Safe Families
The project focus on children’s rights, prevention of human trafficking, and how to build strong and safe families. Through training and seminars, the project aims to strengthen families.
Out of all of the projects, I think the "Strong and Safe" families project speaks to my heart in particular, as it is the main project preventing young girls and women to enter or being sold into human trafficking and/or prostitution which is a big business in Bangkok. It is a lot easier to prevent this from happening, by educating families and helping with studies, than to get people out of it, although ELCT /NMS also works with A21 who are more active in recovery.
Right now we imagine I will be using my project management skills in following up some of these projects, and Ole Martin can use his IT and computer skills to make projects more efficient, teach his skills to staff or develop websites and solutions for better information flow. We are not quite sure yet what this means in detail for our workdays, and it might change based on what needs to be done.
One of our main goals in our first few years and in our work here generally is to learn Thai, get to know Thai people and be able to share our faith and learn from them as well. When you start over somewhere new, thats no easy task and it takes a lot of time to grow into a culture and network of people and really become friends.
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