I was ordering at a coffee shop and a farang (Foreigner living in Thailand) lady, with a big scowl on her face was handing over half a sandwich asking for it to be replaced. The staff couldn’t understand what she was saying so I translated. Her son had eaten the first half of the sandwich and when he started the second half they found a few long black hairs sitting nicely on top of the ham. It was truly grosse. The staff opened the sandwich to look at the hair and starred blankly at it. Yes they agreed to make another one but no ”I’m sorry” or “How awful”, or anything else to indicate that they actually cared.

The woman of course continued to feel disgusted and expressed that to all of us standing around her. The sandwich was remade and everyone went on about their usual business.

 I realize that as a farang, the lady just wanted someone to empathize with her and say, “sorry that shouldn’t have happened. Here let us make you another one”. If that had been said she would have lost her scowl and said “No problem” and gone away feeling heard and comforted and it would have ended there.

Instead she will probably never go to that shop again and she thinks that the staff couldn’t have cared less about her, and the grosse sandwich. She will then tell others about how Thai people are careless disgusting and slack.

The flip side is that after she left the two guys who were making the sandwiches were called into the manager’s office and the incident was treated very seriously. Probably the manager and the staff were highly embarrassed and grossed out themselves. Someone may have even been fired. To show any of that to the customer would have seemed wrong and inappropriate for Thais- but for us it is exactly what we need to hear.

I felt God saying that apparent silence and lack of interest does not necessarily mean that. The world view of Thais and farangs is just so different that we may just never, ever be able to bridge that. The daily misunderstandings and stresses are not necessarily ours as individuals but a collective cross cultural divide that thwarts our steps. 

During the recent airport closure stressed out passengers that were stuck unable to leave Thailand found that they were unable to get through to Thai Airways. In the end Australians that had tickets with Thai were rescued by the Australian embassy and put on Qantas flights out of Phuket. The Australian and other embassies put on extra staff even on the weekends to field calls and comfort their citizens. Even after 4 days, people who rang Thai airways were unable to get through.  Passengers took this as the airline being totally disorganized cold hearted and various other non-flattering things. In actual fact because the Thai staff could not actually do anything to help the passengers leave Thailand it was deemed better not answer the phone at all rather than insult people by not being able to tell them what they want to hear.

Again as a westerner I would say this is crazy- yet who am I, as a visitor staying in someone else’s country , to say that my way of organising and communicating is better than theirs. I bet my Thai boss could write many pages about how strange I am to work with.

I really sense God saying, that what we think we understand we don’t – We have to fight with all our strength not to impose our western world view on the situations we face here each day. The stress is an internal one, as even after 7 years we are still right at the beginning of trying to understand a complex and very different culture. We know that any good that happens is almost in spite of us and that God’s powerful all knowing Spirit is at work drawing people to him.