Only One More Month!!!

Well hello everybody!!! Its been a long time, I know, I know. Only one more month and I will be back in Abby! How ccraaazzyy!! I still don’t know if I can believe that! It’s definitely going to be bittersweet coming home. I’m starting to hit the point where I’m ready to be back in Abby, sleeping on a legitimate mattress and having consistently hot water, but at the same time, I am going to miss the people on this team so much. Especially the ones that I have been on outreach with. We have definitely become a lot closer

         In fact, our team has been doing really well. We don’t fight, we generally have the same ideas of how things should go, and we agree on most things. Most of the people are pretty balanced and chill so that makes for easy relationships and stuff. But just because our team is doing well, doesn’t mean we haven’t hit some rough patches along the way. I’m not going to get too into it, but there have been some disagreements with the couple that we have been working for since we got here. Our main issue is that we just don’t get enough time to rest. We work hard all day, and then are asked to do things at night and on weekends as well. We don’t really get a chance for a day off either. A lot of us are getting very tired. Many of us aren’t sleeping like we should be, and now people are starting to get sick here and there.

         Another thing that we have been frustrated with is that we haven’t really had a chance to do a whole lot of actual outreach/evangelism. We mostly just work in the fields for the couple. There are two people on our team that have been able to do evangelism because they speak a different language so they are the only ones who are able to reach a certain people group in this village. So that has been good at least, but we would like to see our whole team being able to share the story of God. We have been told that if we would like to do outreach, we have to go door to door in what little free time we have in the evenings, which is not a whole lot, and people are usually pretty tired at that point.

         This week our leaders will be approaching the couple we are working for and asking for some time off so we can do some evangelism, so pray that that goes well and that we can see some progress through that.

         Anyways, enough of that, I’ll give you a bit of a summary of what else has been going on in the past couple weeks:

First off, its getting quite a bit warmer now as the hot season is fast approaching, making that the shortest winter I think I have ever experienced. It’s nice to wake up in the morning and not be able to see my breath anymore. J

This past weekend we climbed a mountain. Now let me tell you, it wasn’t just some quant little family hike, no no no no, it was a flippen CLIMB! It was 3 hours of super, crazy steep inclines. So much so, that the way down was just about as difficult as the way up because you had to make sure you didn’t just slide down the whole way. The mountain we climbed was almost the highest mountain in all of Thailand. I’m pretty sure that theres only one mountain that is higher than it. The view from the top was beautiful though. We had some sore muscles for a couple days afterwards though.

Like usual, we have been working in the tea fields, we finished weeding the whole field and now we have just about finished pruning all the tea plants as well. They will be ready for harvest in March and April. The plants they have produce three different kinds of tea. Not only have we pruned the tea bushes, but we have helped in the roasting, as well as the weighing and packaging and selling of the tea. It sells for anywhere between $3-$6 for 50g, depending on which type of tea it is.

 Something kind of new and exciting is that we started teaching at the school. For the first couple of days I was a little bit nervous because it was crazy. The kids were nuts and they didn’t listen very well. We always have one English speaker and one Thai translator in the class and I think we have a pretty good system down now that we have made some plans for each class. Melissa and I teach grades 1-3 and David and Jennifer teach grades 4-6, and we switch out translators every day. The goal is to teach them some English. It’s harder than I thought it would be because you want to be able to teach them the letters of the alphabet and their sounds, but if they don’t know any English words, you have no way of helping them apply it. BUT if you want to teach the English words, you find yourself wanting to write the world on the board, but they can’t read, so its this vicious little cycle. We have figured out ways of using pictures and repetition to help the things stick in their heads though, and because they’re young, they learn pretty quick. At the end of each class, we read out of this flip Bible story thing we have, and the kids love it. It goes through the Bible from Adam and Eve to Jesus. We usually read it to them outside the classroom because we don’t know if the teachers would let us read them if they knew because most of them are Buddhist.

Anyways, I think that’s about it for this week. I hope all is well at home. And I will see you all soon-ish!

Today’s Fun Fact:

Those lovely little Christmas flowers we call poinsettias? They grow wild in parts of Thailand.