Graduation Video

I made a video for the kids graduation service as a surprise. I wanted to celebrate their lives as they have come such a long way to this day. Here's to you, Seora, Maggie, Ben, And Nathaniel.

July 4th Fundraiser

I've attached the flyer for the July 4th dessert fundraiser for Maggie and Seora's mission trip to Thailand.
Give me a call or email if you would like to order. Please feel free to pass it on to others. Thanks so much. If you don't live locally, I apologize for tempting you. :) Melissa Carter

We are graduating 4 kids!!!

Hi friends and family!
Life is definitely busy around here. Besides breaking my foot, taking 4 teenagers to test for their learner's license, 2 washers and a fridge going out and preparations for the kids' graduation and working on the girls stuff to get ready for Thailand, life remains normal! LOL
While tying up all my loose ends on paperwork for school and getting the kids' transcripts together, I discovered that Nathaniel and Ben had more than enough credits to graduate as well! So we are graduating 4 kids! If you live nearby, We would love for you to come. I am so proud of the kids. After having a rough start in life they have really worked hard,(sometimes with me pushing) :) to get tot his day. So we are going to celebrate it with a bang.

Seora and Maggie Going to Thailand

Hi Family and Friends,

I hope this letter finds all of you doing well. Life around here is busy for sure but it is good. We have watched God continue to be faithful and good to us. He reveals to us daily how much He loves us and it blows us away. I have been behind in blogging and keeping up my website but hope that this summer I will be a little more organized. Why are you smiling? I will!
Part of writing this note is to tell you about our daughters. Seora and Maggie, are now 21 and 20 years old. They are graduating from High School this June. We have been home schooling them for the last 5 years and they have made remarkable progress. God has done and is doing great works in their lives.
They will be going to Thailand to help with the childcare of some missionary friends of ours. Our friends’ ministry is very demanding with odd hours, so the girls will be of great help to them and the missionaries will have peace knowing their girls are being cared for and are safe when they have to go out to do street ministry. This will be a great answer to prayer for our missionary friends. They have been needing someone for sometime and so Our family decided, "Why not us?"
I am sure that opportunities of ministry will come up for them to participate in as well. We know this will be a great experience in their lives.
This is in part why I write this letter.
We need to raise money for them to travel next month. They need living expenses + airfare. They will be gone at least 3 months. They need $3500 each for this mission trip.
If want to donate to their trip,
You can donate by paypal to kdcarter@mac.com -- note: S and M
You can donate by participating in the chip-in on the right on my blog
http://oneeggshortofadozen.blogspot.com

You can send a check to Melissa Carter at 313 Harris Dr. Florence, AL 35634
Thanks so much for your help and your investing in the lives of others who are spreading the good news.
We are so proud of our girls wanting to do this. My and Duane's desire is that our children grow to have servant hearts and that they spread the LOVE of Jesus across the world. That they live in the Kingdom now. To us, this means we have been successful in life.
Thanks in advance for your support. Even if you can't give financially, You can pray for them. We will let you know more details as we move forward.

May our Daddy-God just send overwhelming waves of Love into your life today,
Duane and Melissa Carter

March 8, 2010

Self photo of Sanyaa and Me
Enjoying the pizza in the room
uh oh! Sanyaa's Mouth stuffed with m & m's
I do not want my picture taken!
Having fun swimming
Playing swirly
All of acting silly
Anna and me
Miss Lillie
Sanyaa
How many times are you going to take my pic?

Beautiful Anna
Miss Jane and Sanyaa
Having fun
Already to go swimming


We slept in a little and Jason and Sarah came to pick us up for lunch to meet with Nella, the founder of Tamar Center.
We met at the Mall and ate at KFC. It was a little different from ours back home but still very good. What a lunch. Mikki interviewed her asking great great questions about the center and where it started and how and what her visions were. Nella is a Dutch woman and has an incredible ministry. We had church in KFC as we prayed over Nella and then she prayed in return over Mikki. God gave me some words of encouragement for Nella that she accepted readily. Mikki and Sarah felt led to give her seed money for the house they want to buy for the girls and Nella about started to cry because she and her staff had started praying and fasting for the finances of this house. And so this was like God was saying yes, I am going to do this. After listening to Nella, I can only explain my self as feeling as if I was going to burst with joy over and for her. I am so excited about her ministry. I felt that God wants me to fundraise for her so she can do the work and stay on the field which is what she loves to do. So you all will be hearing more about this ministry and how she is helping to redeem a nation. You can also count on me to be bringing teams back here to help. After lunch we did a little shopping at the mall. Each of us taking a girl and heading in a different direction. Sarah and Anna took me to the grocery so I could stock up on authentic Thai spices and noodles and I got lots of goodies to bring home.

We also decided to keep the kids for Jason and Sarah to have a date that night. We felt that since we were here in part to encourage them, that a good date would be appropriate. We took the girls down to the pool at our hotel and they had a blast. Sanyaa ( their 2 year old) took up real well with me and loved the pool. Lillie and Jane had a great time and I got to spend some more time with Anna. After a while of swimming, they started to get hungry so I ran up to the room and got some American cheese, trail mix, and a couple of other stuff and they really enjoyed that. Sanyaa discovered the M&M's and before we knew it, had stuffed her little cheeks so full, she looked like a chipmunk. We had to finally hid them! We then went up tp the room and ordered Pizza. That was interesting. I tried to order in English and they couldn't understand my accent so finally I was like , Here Anna, you talk to them. Which she did and we got Pizza that was pretty good. If I had kept going, there is no telling what we would have ended up with. Afterwards the younger girls enjoyed a bubble bath and the older girls a good hot shower as their hot water had gone out the last few days. I think Jason and Sarah had a good time for a few hours and we definitely enjoyed the girls. Later we found out that Sanyaa did not sleep hardly at all but was pretty wired. Oops! I hope it wasn't the M& M's! :) We had planned on doing some street ministry that night but jet lag was catching up to us and so we decided to stay in and go to sleep.

Thailand March 6

Another synopsis: More details and pictures to follow later on my blog:

We are ending another busy day in Pattaya. Mikki, Sarah, and I had a great day ministering today. We began the day by visiting in two prisons, passing out food, water, and fruit, handing it through the bars to the inmates. Usually all the cells are full and there are lots of children in them but today there were only half full and we found no children. I for one was happy that no children were sitting in cells, so we can thank God that that was the case on this particular day.
One of the ladies from the Tamar Center has been ministering in these prisons three times a week for quite some time. We were able to pray for a couple of the women and pass out tracks to those who wanted them. We learned to say "Swadeeka" in Thai which means, hello and prayed for them as each one took the food from us. It was so sad to see these men and women, I could feel nothing but love and compassion for them. I felt no fear, only love. This is totally amazing to me as all of this is totally out of my comfort zone, but it is a testimony to myself that God is doing a work in my life and teaching me how to walk in Jesus' shoes. This is what I have been praying for in my own life for sometime. Please continue to pray for me that I will keep my eyes on Jesus so I can walk in the power of His might daily. It is such an awesome thing to walk in.

It is not unusual for the girls to be arrested for prostitution if the bar owners haven't paid their bribes to officials. The owners don't get arrested but the girls do. Prostitution is illegal here but there are literally thousands of prostitutes on the streets here and bars are an endless sight so bribes are a part of life. The way it works is that the bars only sell drinks. If you buy a drink, the girls must entertain you and talk to you. If you choose to take a girl out of the bar, you have to pay a bar fee, then the girl is yours for however long. If you take her to a hotel, you pay a service hotel fee to the hotel for your extra guest and then you pay the girl for her services.


Later we went to a mission and helped with a party for children of the area. They frosted heart shaped cookies and decorated them, the first time they had ever had an opportunity to do that. They did a great job and seemed to enjoy it greatly. The mission is run by an Australian teacher here. We got to lay hands on the kids and pray for them. They were so thankful for the prayers and hungry for love. We passed out candy and the paper heart cards our kids at Grace House had made for them. It was interesting at how from two parts of the world God threw a theme party! Hearts from AL to pass out and heart cookies to decorate and hugs to be given out! Isn't it just like God to choose LOVE for his theme?????? Oh, He is such a great creative God!!!!!!! I knew He LOVED parties!. We are going to pass out the rest of the cookies on the streets. What was interesting was that before we left and our church family prayed over us, that Mikki was given the word "cookie". That God was going to do something powerful that involved cookies. We had no idea! Mikki came looking for God and when they told us that we were going to help with cookies. We got excited! Sometimes we may not see all that God does behind the scenes but we can trust Him that he HAS done something to add to his kingdom.

There was an adjoining youth mission called the Crossing where youth hang out and skateboard, play pool, etc.

We had some interesting Thai food today, too. Jason and Sarah Ricketts, our missionary friends, have an amazing work laid out before them here and are doing a fantastic job. i'll tell you more about the work God has laid on their hearts later.
Love, Melissa

Thailand - March 5,2010

Hi Family and friends, I wanted to send you some updates from Thailand and remind you to continue to pray for us. I will post more details on the blog later with pictures but wanted to keep you posted. Mikki here on the trip has been typing synopsis of the trip and we all because of jet lag have not been able to post regularly. so I give her credit here for most of the info here though I modified it to add my own thoughts. :)

Day 1 March 5,
We had a busy day in Pattaya today. It is such a contradiction. Modern highways, a beautiful new mall, Starbucks, and streets with one bar after another after another after another. Hundreds and hundreds of young girls, women, and ladyboys sitting on the streets and beaches waiting for a taker.

We spent time at the Tamar Center. They have a building right in the middle of the bars, offer free English classes, job training skills, and much more. Most of the girls speak limited English but only have a grade school education so the center offers to teach them a skill so they can have an opportunity for another way of life. It seems most of them are from a region about 9 hours away. For many, it is a way to survive and help support their family which is of great cultural importance here. Some are slaves and work in closed bars. We went into the bars this afternoon. I sat and drank a Orange drink with 3 young Thai girls, some who already had children. We played Connect Four. As long as you are paying for something, they will talk to you. I can't tell you how sad it was to see them. They didn't seem "evil" at all. Just lost and lonely. Although it is certainly a dark place, I didn't feel the darkness, only love and compassion. They are caught up in this vicious cycle. As we learn more of the Thai thinking it only proves that the enemy has totally distorted their culture. Unlike China, girls are valued here because they can bring in money to the family through prostitution. Boys are a lot of times groomed to become ladyboys so they too can bring in money.

Later, we had a worship service led by a 30 year old woman who is devoting her life to this ministry. We sang and prayed over the city. More than once today, tears have filled my eyes. I have tried to see what Jesus would see and ask him what he would do.

We walked the beach tonight and looked for opportunities, open hearts, and prayed with one young woman and prayed for many as they walked by. As I walked I prayed over each girl I passed. Sarah knew we were looking for treasure and finally we found her. God said, "She's the one." We stopped and talked to her and prayed for her. She accepted it readily. "God , we ask that that seed be watered and that your love explode into her heart!"
Tomorrow morning we will visit in the prisons. Many children are there because their mothers are incarcerated.

Blessings and Love Melissa