Many of you have written us asking about our safety in light of the violent Bangkok protests… we wanted to let you know that we are well, that we are staying out of harms way, and that the violence is very localized. As long as we stay away from the areas in central Bangkok where the protesters are encamped we have nothing to be concerned about. For the vast majority of people (maybe 11.99 million out of Bangkok’s 12 million residents) life continues much as it would normally – albeit with a more attention turned towards the news, more time turned towards praying, and more anxiety all around.

Before Izayla was born we wrote several blog posts about how close the protests were to our house – since that time the protests have moved to another part of the city, returning our neighborhood to normalcy.

Below is an excerpt from the YWAM Thailand homepage (www.ywamthai.org):

YWAM Thailand has received many inquires about the current political situation in Thailand. We would encourage you, and those you know, to pray for a calm and sensible solution to the current political crisis. We would recommend that you read the online versions of the Bangkok Postand Nation Multimedia for all the latest updates.

We are praying that the situation resolve itself within a reasonable amount of time. Please know that we are advising all staff, volunteers and incoming outreach teams to stay away from the areas occupied by the protestors for safety reasons.

From Izayla Talae – 1 Month – 2 Months

So usually we try to put a bunch of new blog posts up before we send out a new newsletter…

But alas, we haven’t gotten it together to do that this time around… blame it on our new daughter (she is rather distracting!)… blame it on our mothers (we are right in the middle of being blessed by 40 days of grandmothers!)… blame it on the political unrest in Bangkok (Iven has spent a LOT more time reading the news this past month!)… but whatever you want to blame it on, we’re sorry we’ve done such a lousy job communicating with you.

What’s new? Some lovely Izayla pictures and our 12th Newsletter. That’s it!

It is with great joy that we have welcomed our daughter Izayla Talae Hauptman into this world!

Kashmira gave birth to Izayla on Tuesday afternoon, March 16 at 4:49pm naturally after about 17 hours of active labor. Izayla was 7.5 pounds at birth, and 19 inches long.

Izayla (pronounced “eye-zae-la” or “ไอเซย์ลา”– a bit like the name “Isaiah”) is a name that came to Kashmira in the middle of the night during a bout of pregnancy insomnia. She woke up, wrote it down on a scrap of paper, fell back asleep and promptly forgot about it until Iven asked what an “Izayla” was the next morning… Kashmira’s 3am inspiration is loosely connected to the book of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, especially the 61st chapter, and some of the Hebrew words used in that chapter to describe God’s vision of fullness for His people.

Izayla’s middle name, Talae (pronounced “tuh-lay” or “ทะเล”), is a lovely Thai word for “ocean” or “sea”.  Iven thought of this name several months ago as a creative way to pass on a little bit of Kashmira’s marine heritage, while also honoring that our little one was “made in Thailand!”

We already love her dearly and know that you will as well!

More pics can be found via the pictures page or by looking at the (long!) slideshow below:

So Kashmira is now very close to giving birth (we hope!) at several days overdue, and one of the questions that our neighbors have been asking us from the beginning of this pregnancy is, “Where are you going to have the baby?” In response of our reply, “Bangkok, of course!” there is always a delighted smile, closely followed up by, “Where in Bangkok?”

When we tell people which hospital we’ve selected invariably they say, “Oh, that is so far away, aren’t you worried about the traffic?” To which I usually respond, “Yes, it can take some time to get there – but it is a very good hospital.” Which always gets another smile.

The reality is, even though our hospital is only 7 miles away, it does involve going right through some of Bangkok’s most infamous intersections to get there, and on a bad day can take a little more than an hour door-to-door. And this did concern me for a while. In the beginning I had visions of being stuck in traffic for three hours, finally helping Kashmira deliver in the back seat of a taxi… but since then I’ve learned a lot more about labor, and experience has shown us that traffic really isn’t that bad. My worries about getting to the hospital subsided.

…Until…

Just these last few weeks Thailand’s political situation has gotten stirred up again and the leaders of the current protest group have called for 1 million protesters to descend upon Bangkok this weekend for the rally to end all rallies… AND guess where the epicenter of their protest is?

We're on the Left Side, in the Middle, Rajadamnoen

Yup. Our neighborhood. Rajdamnoen Avenune, two blocks from our home. Ha! What’s more, is that between the protesters and the government’s actions to keep things somewhat under control we have learned that EVERY road into and out of our neighborhood is expected to be closed to motor vehicles by Saturday night. Talk about a traffic nightmare!

I love the irony of it – Bangkok traffic, I can deal with, but police blockades and 1 million (or even 100,000) protesters filling the streets? I guess our neighbors were right, our hospital is SO far away .

Don’t worry, later today we’re planning on going to stay with some friends who live just a few minutes away from the hospital until the baby comes, which could be any time now.

Thanks for your prayers and concerns – we’re doing ok, and we’ll let you know when this little person finally decides to join us on the outside!

Here’s another picture… I’m getting closer!

Iven was out this evening and I was getting hungry.  I left our little room in search of food, and went back and forth over whether I should walk one block and get some garlic chicken on rice for 30 baht (a dollar) or walk 4 blocks and treat myself to Burger King (4 dollars).  Five minutes later I was sitting on a neon pink plastic stool in front of a nearby street food cart, happily consuming my garlic chicken and rice, decision made.  Being that the baby is now quite big and so my stomach is quite squished, I couldn’t finish my dinner and asked them to put it in a styrofoam box for me to take home and finish later.

After a walk around the block I stopped outside our house and squatted down to chat with an older lady who “works” outside our alley.  She was chattering on to me in Thai about her ailments and her dinner when an older Thai man I didn’t recognize came to peer over her shoulder and investigate our conversation.

“What are you doing talking with this girl?” he asked my friend (in Thai), clearly expressing that he should she must be crazy to think I would understand her words.

She spun around to look at him and pointed to me with my street-food-to-go box, squatting there on the sidewalk, “Eh?  She speaks Thai.  She is one of us.  She lives here in this building and she eats the same food we do. Shes the same as us.”  What a compliment!  I was glad I decided to have rice over Burger King. Ha.

I have mentioned before that there are women working the streets of our neighborhood 24 hours a day, which is true, but sometimes hard to believe, even living here.  Late-stage pregnancy has brought roving insomnia on me, nothing serious but enough to find me laying in bed at 4:30 am this morning, wondering why in the world my body decided to be awake SO MUCH EARLIER than normal. So, a little before 6 I got up, put on clothes and went for a walk.  The sun wasn’t up yet but the urban-dwelling birds were aware that morning was coming, and chirping their little hearts out.  Walking the one block north, past the largest local “short time motel” there were about a half dozen young women sitting out on plastic chairs, ostensibly hoping to pick up a taxi-driver finishing a shift or someone on their way to start their work day.  The pain and hard things of our neighborhood somehow seem so much heavier at six in the morning, when the sun hasn’t even come out yet – it seems like “sex for money” just shouldn’t happen in the stillness of early morning time.  The women look tired and so sad.

A few mornings ago Iven and I were up just after the sun rose, on Sunday morning.  That is the time of day when the saffron-robed Buddhist monks are just leaving the temples to make their rounds giving blessings and receiving donations for the first hour or so of daylight.  A grown woman in a short skirt got off of her plastic chair and kneeled down to pay homage and ask a blessing from a pair of passing monks, who responded to her the same as they would for any other resident or worker in the neighborhood.  It was such a striking image.  Our life is filled with striking images – most of which we don’t feel comfortable trying to capture on film.

One of the adventures of having a child is naming a child. This is an awesome priveledge and gigantic responsibility. We are excited about this very important task, which will soon befall us, but we are also a little stressed about it too.  It really comes down to the fact that we both have pretty unique names and we like them – yes, they were difficult in pre-school and early childhood when no one can pronounce them and yes, Iven gets called “seven” a fair bit here in Thailand but nonetheless we want to give our child a name that is a gift to them, much as we both feel like our names have been a gift to us.

Naming Thai babies is a lot easier, I think, then how we foreigners go about naming our babies.  Most all Thai babies are given both a formal name and a nickname, usually completely unrelated to one another.  The formal name is used for formal occasions and documents but for all practical purposes and everyday life the child (and later, adult) is known and called by their nickname.

Those nicknames are for the most part either a noun or an adjective.  Common girl names are “Gai” (chicken), “Muu (pork, our landlord’s name), “Benz” (as in Mercedes), or “Ying” (literally meaning: girl). Common boy names are “Golf” (yes, as in the sport), “Bond” (made popular after a James Bond movie filmed here in Thailand several decades ago), “Honda” (like the car company, or more notably in this context, the motorcycle) or “Boy” (pretty straightforward).

Either gender can be nicknamed “Uan” (fat), “Noi” (little), “Bia” (beer), or “Dam” (black/dark, as in dark-skinned).  We have one friend whose given nickname is “Bowling” (because dad liked to bowl).  One of the cuter and most disturbing nicknames given to children, at least from an English speaker’s perspective is “Me Pooh”, which is the literal translation of “Pooh Bear” (as in Winnie the Pooh) but is just plain horrible if the poor kid ever makes any foreign friends.

Another funny thing about naming Thai babies is a bit too close to home for us in our current season of life (getting ready to meet our baby and not sure yet what he/she will be called) – we recently heard from a Thai friend that each hospital has a particular “default” name for both boys and girls that they assign to babies whose parent’s can’t decide on a name by the time they leave the hospital.  I expect these can be changed later but the path of least resistance is to keep the assigned name.  For example, Chula Hospital assigns the name “Bua” to any unnamed girl and “Kwan” to any unnamed boy.  What this means in practice is that the nearby and largest slum community, Klong Toey, has a ridiculously higher than average number of children with those two names.    This would never go down in America…  Can you imagine?  ”I’m afraid you have taken too long to settle on your child’s name, so the birth certificate will be filed as ‘John Smith’…thats the fifth John Smith born at this hospital this week!”

Don’t worry, we’ll find a name…

32 weeks pregnant now.  Its crazy how quickly this pregnancy season is passing!  I feel this little baby wiggling and kicking inside of me (In Thai the literal word is “dancing”), and I wonder who this little person will become.

As my belly grows and grows we are getting increasingly more smiles, questions and excitement from the people we see every day in our neighborhood, and especially the guys on outreach.  A funny thing we didn’t predict is that just about every single guy we have seen on outreach declaratively states, “Its a boy.  I’m sure its a boy.”  I finally asked one of the guys, “Well, if the baby turns out to be a girl, would you still be happy for us?”  Without skipping a beat he answered, “Yes, and then I would do her makeup.”  That stage is still quite a while off, for which I think Iven and I are both very grateful.  I’m so glad they come out as babies, rather than teenagers!!!

Hi Friends! Wanna hear about our trip to America, the 2nd annual Christmas Cookie Caroling Extravaganza,  and our first shot at throwing a Christmas party for the guys? Then read our newest official newsletter by clicking here on: Rak Teh #11 or on the link at the right of the page.

Feel free to check out our still very new logo (a big thanks to Adrian Young – communications guru extraordinaire at YWAM Thailand) and some photos that we are using to help share about rak teh by clicking at the top of this post.

And if you want to skip the newsletter and go straight to the pictures of the Christmas Cookie Caroling Extravaganza 2009, well, are you sure you want to do that? Really? If so, then just click on the image below, and it will take you to the album on Picasa, but we really do think it’s worth reading the newsletter… and now you know you’re gonna wonder…