Chiang Mai, Thailand: November, 2001: Daniel had gained a lot of education and experience during the brief years in America. After graduation he continued working for the radio missionary, who sent Daniel out to speak in churches in the eastern and central United States. Daniel was to raise money for the radio missions work by telling of his escape from Burma and his wonderful, new opportunity in America, thanks to the radio ministry’s kindness. Daniel was effective, and the missionary encouraged him to continue his show-and-tell presentation in Cincinnati.
But the Kalnins’ hearts were really in Thailand, and they wanted to get started with their own venture in Chiang Mai. In 1979, with the financial help of Beverley’s home church in Toronto, they organized Outreach Thailand. A year later, the organization’s name was changed to Frontier Labourers for Christ to include work in more than just Thailand.
By 1980 Daniel and Beverley were in Chiang Mai. What a difference ten years had made in Daniel’s life. But the change in status in no way meant that the struggles were over.
“Those early days back in Thailand were really tough,” Daniel told me. “We opened up our house and had twelve young people staying with us. We were trying to help them the way I would have liked to have been helped.
“During those years Beverley and I had nothing. We were receiving less than three hundred fifty dollars per month in support from America. We tried to run our entire missionary efforts on that amount. We had only one set of clothes each, and Beverley and I would go down and pick water lilies to cook and eat.”
Daniel’s missionary plan was pretty creative and unique. He developed a concept he called “model Christian villages.” He got the government to give him some land in the Golden Triangle, world famous for poppy farming and heroin production. It was up in the hill-tribe regions not far from the borders of Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos. Daniel’s goal was to try to present to the people an alternative lifestyle and occupation in lieu of the drug culture and poppy growing they were locked into.
His plan included laying out a village in which each building plot would include enough land to raise a crop. He then asked volunteers from America and other countries to come to his village and install a water system with clean water piped down the roads and to every building plot. Once the village was laid out, he began taking applications for new residents to join him there. The restrictions were simple but stern. The villagers had to stop growing heroin and start growing coffee. They had to become Christians and attend church regularly in the village. Once they agreed, they could build their houses, hook on to the clean water system, and start growing coffee.
The plan was slow in developing at the beginning, but by the time the coffee was harvested and the crop was sold, the villagers discovered that they had made more money than they had made growing heroin. Suddenly Daniel’s idea became popular. Eventually many villages were built, and even the king of Thailand came to the hill-tribe area to observe the model Christian villages firsthand and commend Daniel on his work.
Daniel and Beverley and their little family were still struggling financially, however. Just the trips back and forth from Chiang Mai to the hill-tribe village were more than they could afford. One day while Daniel was in a border town, he was praying that God would see his need and help him. That day he met a man from Evergreen, Colorado, who was out in the jungle buying gemstones from small mines. He told Daniel that he wanted to visit his house in Chiang Mai sometime and get acquainted with him. Daniel said okay but never thought he would ever see the man again.
To Daniel’s great surprise, the man showed up on his porch in Chiang Mai three days later and insisted that Daniel take him to see his model Christian village. Daniel spent a whole week with Gary Abbott at the village, showing him the water system, the building plots, the church, the school system, and the coffee plants. Gary in turn went back to America, and three months later returned with another gem dealer from Colorado named John Andrick.
But that time when Gary and John showed up on Daniel’s porch in Chiang Mai, Daniel didn’t have even the sixty-five dollars it cost to make the trip to the hill-tribe villages. So Daniel told them he wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be able to take them to the border. He actually went in and stretched out on his bed, hoping that the two men would just go away. However, to Daniel’s frustration, they just sat down outside and waited for Daniel to feel better.
“At that point,” Daniel said, “God brought a Scripture to mind from Colossians 3:17: ‘In everything give thanks in Jesus’s name.’ He then told me to get up and take the men to the villages.”
It was well after dark when they arrived, and only the lights from cooking fires penetrated the jungle darkness.
The next morning Daniel began showing Gary and John the three villages. “You know, Daniel, I don’t talk or think like you do,” confessed John, who wasn’t a professing Christian, “but I know someone back in Denver who does, and he needs to meet you. I’ll introduce you to Carl Rehnert. If you are ever in America, call me, and I’ll send you a ticket to fly to Denver.”
Months passed, and Daniel hadn’t heard anything more from the two men. Financially things were getting tighter for the Kalnins in Chiang Mai. Then a letter arrived from a missions group in the northwest United States inviting Daniel to travel to America to speak around the country at different churches. The group had included a ticket for Daniel’s travel, so he packed and headed for the United States.
What Daniel hadn’t understood when he accepted the invitation was that the group would pay for his travel to the different churches, but he was to raise money for the group’s missions work. Before he spoke at the first church, he had to promise he wouldn’t raise any money for himself or his own work in Thailand. He felt that even though he hadn’t understood the invitation that way, he needed to follow through on their request. His itinerary was nearly full for more than ninety days. His travel was paid for, but all the offerings were sent directly to the missions group.
It was December, and Daniel was preaching in Montana. He was down to less than one hundred dollars of his own money. He was discouraged and sent a telegram back to Beverley in Chiang Mai.
“I know you will be disappointed,” he wrote, “and I am very sad, but I don’t have enough money to buy a ticket to fly home. So you and the kids will just have to celebrate Christmas this year without me. I’ll get home as soon as I can.”
Then Daniel remembered the offer from John in Denver. He called him and told him he was in Montana. John was pleased and told Daniel to get to Missoula, Montana, and there would be an airline ticket waiting for him to Denver. After the speaking engagement that night, Daniel got permission to borrow a car to drive on to Missoula. He could leave the car at the airport. That cold December night, Daniel drove through snow and fog from 9:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m. to arrive at the airport in Missoula. Daniel hadn’t slept at all that night. Sure enough, a ticket was waiting for him at the counter.
In Denver John picked up Daniel, put him in his car, and headed east on Interstate 70 to Kansas or Nebraska or someplace where John was going to meet up with about seven other guys to hunt ducks. They bought Daniel a hunting license, put a shotgun in his hands, and told him he was a duck hunter. Daniel loved it.
That night Daniel was so exhausted from driving the whole previous night that he fell into a deep sleep and began snoring. The other hunters woke up, but they couldn’t wake Daniel to make him stop snoring. The men never did stop teasing him about his terrible snoring episode.
Back in Denver, John and Daniel got together with Carl Rehnert at Carl’s office in downtown Denver.
“You need to help this man,” John told Carl.
“What is your statement of faith, and what do you need?” inquired Carl.
“I need at least twelve hundred dollars just to continue now,” replied Daniel after sharing his testimony.
Carl got on the telephone, and in a short time, he found twelve men who came up with one hundred dollars each. Daniel arrived back in Chiang Mai, Thailand, to a wonderfully surprised family on Christmas Eve l982.
Carl was instrumental in acquainting Daniel with influential people in some of the main churches in Denver. A number of those people visited Daniel’s missions work in Chiang Mai and the hill-tribe villages in the years that followed. It was that Denver connection that brought Daniel and Project C.U.R.E. together. And in my opinion, the relationship between Project C.U.R.E. and Daniel has been very successful.
As I observed, however, there was an interesting dynamic going on within Daniel. In our meetings he would report to me about all the new happenings in Chiang Mai and the training of the barefoot doctors. Project C.U.R.E. even agreed to completely furnish the proposed training center with medical goods on the newly acquired land in Chiang Mai, Thailand. But somehow our conversations always went beyond Thailand and ended up in talks and dreams and plans about Myanmar, Daniel’s old home of Burma.
It had been more than thirty years since Daniel had walked over that bridge in Maessi and just kept walking. He always dreamed of going back but knew he never could. He had received word that his mother had died because of a botched appendectomy at a village hospital in the far northern state of Kachin. As much as he would have liked to return, he knew he would be considered a fugitive and thrown into prison.
By that time many of Daniel’s relatives had become successful to a degree in state politics. Daniel’s older brother was, for a while, the governor of the area around Putao, a township in the far north of Myanmar. With these weak political contacts, Daniel decided to see if he could reenter Myanmar safely, traveling on a Thai passport. In 1995 he was flatly rejected. But the new generation of officials didn’t seem to connect the fact that Mr. Kalnin with the Thai passport was the same man who had escaped the country illegally thirty years earlier. So he tried again in 1996. That time he was granted permission to return to his home state of Kachin and the town of Putao. It was an absolute miracle that he was ever allowed to leave the capital city of Rangoon. Beverley was allowed to accompany him on his return.
It was an extremely emotional time for Daniel. Many there presumed him to be dead. Tears flowed freely as he revisited family, friends, and places with memories overgrown by many years of absence. But the reality that met Daniel in Myanmar, which immediately reconnected the emotional past with the dynamic present, was the unpredictable phenomenon of the Barefoot Doctors program.
Next Week: A gutsy plan to enter restricted Burma