One of the girls on my team (Jenni) sent this email to me about our time in Burma:

I had 2 opportunities to speak in Thailand, so I decided to use one of the occasions to share about Myanmar.  I’d shared with some of you about meeting a Burmese priest who was forced to reveal the names of Nargis survivors that he placed in temporary shelters.  The people whose names he gave to the military were then sent to labor camp.  When I shared about this, 3 people (Karen/Kayin tribe) in the audience began to cry because they themselves were victims of the labor camps.  It really broke my heart listening to their stories afterwards.

 

 

 Many of you were interested in the type of therapy that I got to do.  As far as the art therapy goes, I had the kids draw a heart and gave them 6 crayons.  Each color represented a different emaotion (red was love, green was scared, yellow was happy, brown was angry, etc).  Then I asked them to fill in their heart with each of the colors, as big or small as they feel.  One of the boys (8 yrs old) had a huge part as scared and very little of everything else.  When I started talking to him, we started with the happy and I asked him to talk about what makes him happy, etc.  When we got to ’scared’, he didn’t want to talk about it.  Finally he opened up and it was like the flood gates burst.  He talked about the bad men who came and put the children in burlap sacks and carried them over their shoulders.  If anyone stopped them and asked, they would say that it was just pigs.  If the kids made noise, then the bad men would hurt them.  When I asked if the bad men hurt him, he started crying and said yes.  The orphanage workers told me that they had no idea that any of that had happened to him.  It just opened up this kid. 
Another girl we asked to draw her house and all she drew was a roof and a lone figure sitting on it with water underneath. When we asked her where her parents were, she said that the
big wave took them away.  Again the workers had no idea what she had been through. 
I spent a little time trying to teach the workers how they could continue this type of thing with the kids.  It was having an impact on them as well, so I think that they will keep it up. 

I am now in Australia on my way to Nepal.  i had to go through Manila to get here and had a 28 hour layover – crazy!  the Lord was very gracious to me and I met a woman who was traveling with her daughter.  We spent most of the day together and they let me hang out at their hotel with them.  We decided to go to the mall and the band Lifehouse was there performing – that was cool.  I’ll try to write more later.  Blessings, Ann