Myanmar Mission Trip 2007 Scrapbook Pages

I thought it would be fun this coming week to show some scrapbook pages I've been working on.

This project is a mission trip scrapbook I'm making for a friend of mine.

I'll talk about how I made the pages and I asked him to tell about his trip.

My guest blogger is Louie Marsh from the The Marshian Chronicles who is also the Pastor of our church, Christ's Church on the River here in Parker.

Louie ~
The collage above is a combination of two pictures I took at the Shew Dagon Pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar (most still call it, Rangoon, Burma). I was there on my 4th short term mission trip in February/March of 2007.
The Shew Dagon is the largest and richest Pagoda in Myanmar, a land that is literally dotted with Pagodas. The grounds are huge, and contain many different buildings, altars, etc.
The pictures above show some ancient Buddhist inscriptions and their translation into English that are found there. You can also see the main building, covered in layers of gold, and easily worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
When viewed from a historical or cultural perspecitve all this is very interesting. And that's usually the perspective most Westerners view it from. All the effort and skill that went into the construction of these buildings are impressive indeed.
But as a Christian Pastor I had another point of view - and that one spiritual. To watch very poor people sacrifice time, money and goods to worship statues and stones was very sad. I've been in Myanmar enough to know how desperately poor all but the ruling class is. To watch them pray to dead stones was a moving experience, one that motivated me and those with me to pray even harder for the people of Myanmar.
Jan~
This is another 8 x 8 scrapbook. I like this size because I can run my card stock through my computer printer. The background for this layout is 2 pictures Louie took that I printed as full sheets and cut them to the 8 x 8 size thus making my own scrapbook paper. I then used 2 additonal photos and matted them and attached them to the page on the right.
Supply List: Paper - Royal Fiber Balsa, Basic Black. Computer printer and pictures.