Dear Friends,

Today our team enjoyed some well-deserved rest and relaxation, spending much of the day touring Inle Lake, here in Shan State. Inle Lake covers about 45 square miles, but has an average depth of only about seven feet. From it, thousands of people who reside in villages along its shores earn a living. Most of them live in houses built on stills in the water. When villagers want to travel from their homes, they use boats or canoes.

The people of Inle amazingly grow tomatoes, as well as other fruits and vegetables, on soil that they float on the lake’s surface, supporting it by dried plants underneath. You can actually walk on the soil of those farms and sense that you are walking on land that is floating on water. A few of our team members did.

This is a Buddhist region that has been very resistant to the gospel, but HF is supporting one very strategic national missionary here through our National Missionary Program. We’ve also been distributing rice to very poor Christians all around this lake through gifts to our Food Fund. Some of those Christians are national missionaries. Today we listened to some very encouraging testimonies regarding the fruit of that ministry.

We stopped to have lunch at lake restaurant on stilts, and met there with a national missionary from India who is planting house churches, and who inadvertently started an orphanage in the process. British team member Philip Barker, who leads Orphan’s Tear U.K., spent some time with that missionary to take preliminary steps that may lead to regular sponsorship of his children, and we left him with some immediate assistance in the form of several hundred dollars.

Below are some photos from today with a little explanation in the captions. — David

Team members Jeff Trotter and Philip and Sandie Barker, with the bow of their tour boat aimed at one of the nicer homes on Inle Lake.

An amazing balancing act: A traditional fisherman on Inle Lake who rows with a leg paddle, leaving his hands free to work his net.

Inle Lake villagers walking a ridge along the shoreline

A young boy baiting his fishing line

An 85-year-old woman whom we met who does not need reading glasses

A visit to a paper umbrella manufacturer, where even the paper itself is manufactured. The handmade and fully-working umbrellas in this photo cost $5 each.

Team members Jeff Trotter and Philip Barker successfully stand on a floating farm.

A typical Inle Lake village scene

Two-hatted tourist and Inle Lake enthusiast, team member David Growden