My favorite salad growing up: ambrosia with coconut flakes. After playing in the sun all day, I go for my cocoa butter, lotion of choice. I recently needed some hair oil product, and bought the coconut kind. One Halloween, I dressed in Hawaiian garb, complete with a coconut bra (actually my mother dressed me, but she understood my affinity for these tropical treats even as a toddler.)

So it only seems logical that when choosing where to go in my life post- (formal) education, I would go to Thailand, the land where coconuts abound, with curries made from coconut milk, coconut trees growing wild (as opposed to our landscaped ones here in SoCal) and fresh coconuts cracked open with a straw at open air markets and sidewalk vendors.

Mmmm...coconuts.

If you like, or even love, something enough, you will first find that thing and then follow it back to wherever it grows most pure and wild—or at least that is what you do if you want to remain passionate and alive throughout your life.

So that is what I did, and for the next seven months, I will follow what I love to this country of palms bursting with the fruit of my heart.

Oh, that, and God walked me here.

OK, so coconuts really have been just an ironic twist in the grand symphony of my life thus far. In fact, they have nothing to do with it. Actually, God had everything to do with it.

I didn’t even think I wanted to go to Thailand. I wanted to travel in Australia. And then Africa. And then Europe, where I would meet someone and continue on with him through life. Maybe we would re-visit Asia after cinching lucrative careers with loads of vacation time and I could write some novel while hobnobbing with the natives.

Upon evaluation, God replied, ’Sweetheart, those are nice ideas, but your heart is meant for another path, little Christian’ (loosely paraphrased). And this is how He made my way…

My friend Lauren wanted to start an online magazine (this one, actually,) and she compiled a seminal team of two for her first journalism trip to Thailand, scheduled for just the same time I was to be in Australia. Having previously resolved to ‘write more’ in my graduated life, this trip aligned too well with my pursuits to go unnoticed. He stirred an uneasiness within me, and when finances made it too difficult to make for a meaningful time down under, I quickly switched plans and proceeded to Thailand for a month in February.

Kay Fox, Betsi Clark and their friend Claire

In May, my travel mate Sarah and I fulfilled our promise to pay our friends a sleepover visit. On the drive over to Visalia, I thought, God, if Kay invites me to go back with her and Don (her husband) to Thailand, I don’t think I could say no.

Why, you ask? Because this woman exuded love, and living alongside her for any amount of time surely has to contain transformational properties. We did not even get to dinner before our conversation turned to Sarah’s and my directionless lives in search of ourselves — and our displaced passion to love others in need. So Kay inquired of my talents, and amidst my feelings of uselessness she found that I can sew a bit and am willing to teach/speak English. Therefore she extended a volunteer position at Handclasp, the center where she and Don work (I say ‘therefore’ only because in God’s logic it makes absolute sense — why wouldn’t she ask me to come just at the peak of my existential funk — but to me it came as a quite pleasant surprise).

Karen children in northern Thailand

On our way home, I stopped by my coffee shop job and gave my two weeks notice. A week later, I emailed Kay to say ‘Yes, I will go.’ Ever since, a peace passing all understanding has kept me committed to this quest, and I still cannot wait to go.

I am really nervous. I do not like running errands by myself, let alone living in a village somewhere north of Chiang Mai with a barely familiar couple in their sixties, teaching a language I still struggle grasping most days. But somehow this makes it just ridiculous enough to be perfect, wild and pure.

Did I mention that the Karen people group compose the majority of those living in Museekee (the village)? Insignificant to the untrained eye, but this group relocated years ago from their native Burma due to ongoing persecution, and has quite a story to tell. I first read about them in Don Richardson’s book, Eternity In Their Hearts, and frankly it remains the only excerpt (amidst tons of miraculous accounts of redemption) that stuck with me after setting the paperback down. Something about the Karen really captivated my heart and cultivated a distant affection for them.

When I read this book a year ago, I resolved to learn more about the Karen. I didn’t, so they loitered in my memory bank, and somewhere in the left ventricle of my heart.

God brought them back to the surface upon our visit to their refugee camp — the very spot I first met Kay.

I do believe in irony, but not the naturalistic, unfeeling sort. No, I am into the kind that serves as a tool for Jesus to construct a life story glorifying the Godhead and the kind that made Sara laugh out a baby well into her nineties. The type that moves a girl to Thailand by way of foxes, restlessness, refugee camps and theology/missions authors, sprouting a growing speck of faith that continues to discover His love step-by-step.

I will spare you the rest of the pages detailing the majorly minor details of this year’s falling ever-the-more in love with my God, but do know that this is just the head of a very dark and tasty pitcher of beer poured straight from the tap Himself: the Holy Spirit.

It gives me a good buzz to think of just how fast He makes my heart pump.

Coconuts have many uses.

Plus coconuts, when clomped together, sound like hoof beats…

Betsi Clark is serving as a missionary in northern Thailand for the next six months. You can keep with her adventures on her blog Going Somewhere.

I wrote this in my journal one morning during my trip to Thailand:

Today I fell in love with this place. There is a smog over this city, but if you can catch a glimpse underneath it, a pristine paradise will overwhelm your eyes. And it hits you in a spiritual way—and a smile begins to push into your cheeks as you see what an honor it is to be in it, surrounded by such beauty. There is holiness hiding here, and it is worth hanging around the dirt to hear its inevitable whisper, to feel the touch of fire that heats the underbelly of a city slowly being set ablaze. Eve and Nella at the Tamar Center hold a set of matches, and they dream big. The woman in the slums who cooks for her family feels it, even when her neighbor contracts leprosy. Jessica (Mock) tastes it, too, speeding through traffic on her rented motorbike, she prolongs her commitment to live here for another year.

Welcome to Pattaya.

Walking Street, where most of Pattaya's 10,000 prostitutes work. Photos courtesy of Jessica Mock.

Cliché, to say the least. Pattaya, Thailand is smoggy. She carries water bottles and empty pastry wrappers amidst her waves, she presents a bar or 7-Eleven every 100 feet or so. If you were to take a morning jog through her clogged pores, she will clog yours, and leave you smelling – no, reeking – of all the scents lying in her thick and humid atmosphere. The streets are foreigner-ridden. Fat men in g-strings receive massages on the sand, girls wearing next to nothing flaunt themselves toward men twice their age and a tenth their beauty. A veil on this place? I admit, I thought so at first. But no, there is just smog, and plenty of it. This place is dirty, in almost every sense of the word. So imagine my skepticism when my friend Jessica (a relocated American now living here in Pattaya) tells us as we inch through the streets on our sweaty car ride into town, that she “loves this stupid city.”

Seven days later, I did, too.

It happened while on my run along the sidewalk bordering Jomtien Beach. I saw this city in all its potential. For the next 12 hours, my eyes stopped burning and my nostrils ceased to smell the fragrant bouts of polluted air rushing my way. I stopped speaking of the filth and unholiness this city finds its roots in, or possibly I just stopped noticing these sensual perceptions. Regardless of what it was, God showed me what He sees: the potential, the being-made-perfect, of Pattaya, Thailand. Below the smog a different wind blows – the underlying current of pure and undefiled love. I firmly believe that God loves all people, no matter how unaware they are of His affection, but it was at this moment I understood why He loved them. The hope that this place is not yet what it should be, not all that it could be, welled within my spirit, and evoked my desire for change, to push and pull this city out of its current state of smoggy stagnancy and into a beautiful paradise.

Traditional Thai dancers join in praying for Pattaya.

The city itself boasts of humble beginnings: a small fishing town catering to traveling military men by setting up one street with only bars and girls for hire. Pattaya has developed into a destination sought after by those who love to party and be entertained by beautiful women. It tends to attract mostly very lonely males in search of companionship, and young military bucks looking for a good time. Girls from all over Thailand flock here in hopes of supporting their families by working the bars and, even more hopefully, finding a rich foreign man to love and provide for them. Most will accept Pattaya for the inexpensive tourism, and ask nothing more from her streets and businesses and people. But there are some who dwell in the city and remain there with a determination for others to see Pattaya the way they do: clean and restored.

One such woman traveled to Thailand from Denmark and caught wind of Pattaya’s plight and its need for change. Four years later, Nella Davidse ventured back and began her first year in prayer for a united ministry and building relationships. The next year she met two girls in need of work, housing, and education, and began to disciple them. Along with her friend Eve, Nella began the Tamar Center, a ministry that reaches out to women working as prostitutes in the bars of Pattaya. The center now provides an established place for girls to step out of the bars immediately and into free English classes, a card making vocation and a community of compassion. Women can further their training in the Center’s bakery, cafe, hair salon and, prayerfully soon, a restaurant where they develop marketable skills to add to their resume.

Not only that, but Eve and Nella instill their own love and hope within these girls through a discipleship training school, where each woman has the chance to step out of the humid, dirty air and breath new life. The women are now bringing the chance to see more clearly to the rest of the country: Tamar Center is now taking the girls back to their home villages to share their stories with family and neighbors. They describe just how polluted Pattaya is, and tell the story of their redemption. The sweet breeze, which started with Tamar Center, is not only blowing through the city, as Nella prayed, but has started to flow into some of the poorest, most remote places in Thailand.

A Thai woman lifts her hands in worship at Pattaya Praise, a November event organized by Christians living in Pattaya. Recently, a transvestite bar allowed a worship set to be played in their establishment.

Thai girls from these regions flock to the city behind pressure from their parents and the desperate need for money. So while Eve and Nella work to get those girls already in the industry out, Leanne works in the slums of Pattaya to help prevent the children from entering at all. She came to Thailand 14 years ago, working in refugee camps and the slums of Bangkok until God brought her to Pattaya. She established programs for children, with the intent of moving the slums away from dependence on food handouts and evangelism and into a more independent situation. Her humble desire is to set the children’s sights high, and invite them to see more than their family’s situation currently dictates. She does it all for the love of these people.

“I feel very comfortable with poor people…I guess it’s just been indoctrinated on my heart,” Leanne’ said. Her laid-back demeanor is not able to hide her intense compassion for the work she does -these people are her life.

God is transforming this place with a handful of committed people loving Pattaya, of whom Nella, Eve and Leanne constitute only a few. Already, the bars close earlier, a diversity of businesses are moving into locations where bars used to be, ministries are growing more robust, transvestite bars host worship events, women start vocations of their own, and every day, the population is able to breathe a little easier as the wind of the Holy Spirit sweeps through Pattaya.