Thai Opera

The Christian hospital next to my school does a Christmas outreach each year for the community. Usually it is in front of the hospital so the nearby community can come and watch. However, this year they hired a Thai Opera from Payap University in Chiang Mai to come and it would be all in Thai. So, they decided to have them perform in the town of Sangklaburi about half an hour away. The teachers I normally would have gone with didn’t have a truck available, so I got a ride with people from the hospital each night to go there and back. Because they were coming from so far they performed two nights, Saturday and Sunday. They did performances that were modern stories, but had a Christian message to them. At times I got confused as to what was going on in the story, but by the end had figured it out for the most part. The costumes were beautiful and the different colors were to help know who went with whom in the story. There were also jesters that came out to break up serious scenes who weren’t in the fancy dresses. I had seen one similar performance in Ayutthaya at my grandmother’s funeral last year, but this was far better as I understood it better and it had a Christian message to it.

As far as the outreach part, there were over 1,000 people there the first night, and probably over 800 the second night. We can only hope and pray that the message was heard and lives were changed.