I’m not sleeping, it’s 4 am in a small village within the province of Chaiyaphum Thailand, and there are speakers right outside our door blaring and making tons of noise. Music and then a man comes on and he starts talking in Thai, it’s just annoying to us but here in this small village in the middle of Thailand it’s completely normal.
The people here get up as soon and maybe even before the sun comes up which is around 4 or 5 am sometimes, they do this to beat the heat.
The months of April and May are considered the hottest months of the year and then the rainy season starts in June, its funny because I think that the rainy season has started a little early because for the last two days the clouds have done a lot of pouring down on us.
Anyway back to the day, it’s 6:30, I’m up, crawling over Tanna’s bed and out of the mosquito netting around Tanna’s, Jenae’s and my beds and walking outside over the wet mud to the hut to eat breakfast; everyone is already up dressed and ready to go. I eat quickly, just some dry cereal and fruit. I walk over to the two pots that are used to wash the dishes and clean my coffee cup that had Milo in it. I walk back inside and put on some work shorts to start working on our cement wall that we are building behind the garden. It’s kind of cool for all of us to know that this will be here even after we leave and hopefully for years to come. Nan our Contact’s husband uses what little English he knows, with the help of Ram (our contact), and some hand signals to tell us what we need to start working on today.
We get to work, it’s 8 am. The last few days that I’ve worked on this project I’ve been bending wires to make them into ties for the rebar and metal squares that will hold up our walls. I’m “teamed up” with Jillian, a member of team seven; she has been hammering the bent parts together to make them flat so they are easier to tie. I also carried buckets over to Nan so he could dump the cement into the mold that had been made a few days before. While we work Jessie is blaring music from her iPod speakers usually something I’ve never heard of but it’s mostly just there to motivate us to work, a wake up.
We work for about two hours and in that time it’s gotten a bit hotter and we are usually drenched in our own sweat, a few of the kids have come from different parts of the village, to get away from their current and a little more difficult situations, they laugh and play with us for a bit and then we clean up and get ready for English class. it’s 10am.
There are two groups for teaching English one is the younger kids, being taught by Sarah, Emily, Ashley and Alycia, which are just learning letters and words that go along with them. The older and more experienced group, that has dwindled because University has started now, goes to another location on the base and gets taught by Jessie and a few others about sentence structure and how to use common phrases I usually jump between the classes. We spend about two hours doing that. It’s 12pm.
It’s lunch time we all sit together under the hut and pile what ever they have made for us today, usually something really AMAZING, into our mouths. Then we have our team meetings talking about the day so far and the evening before, what happened and getting past whatever issues that came up and needs to be cleared. Its 1pm.
Then comes the hottest part of the afternoon which is usually spent just laying around trying to nap to get away from the over 100 degree weather, but sleeping is usually impossible so we just read what ever book we have available to us or talk and have bible studies.
It’s 6pm, dinner time, and a time for the weather to cool off and we can just sit and enjoy the rare breeze that blows through our eating area. Talking and laughing together as a team trying to come up with ideas of what do to on out off days to get away from the heat. It’s 7pm.
We are off to dance practice. On the morning of the 16 we are performing with other women of the village for the governor of the Province of Chaiyaphum. We learn some traditional Thai dance that is so precise and beautiful I can’t help but get excited for this new experience. We sweat through it because well the practice is outside in the shadow of the Buddhist temple of the village kind of creepy and extremely humid. Monks take their time looking at all the foreign women learning the traditional dance. It’s 8pm.
We walk back to the base and talk about God and everything that we are learning. I like to listen to what everyone is saying learning from them about scripture and thoughts they have on the bible. When we get back to the house, and get ready for bed. Different people do different things before bed, some watch movies or journal about the day I usually read from what ever book I have or from my bible. Take a big gulp of water and put my iPod in and worship for a little bit but the exhaustion from the day usually knocks me out before I can even get my hands up to pray I feel like my Zoe worship is a lullaby from God. Its 9pm.
when I wake up in the morning the whole day will start over again almost the same, we never really know what is going to happen but we know that God has a plan. Some of us didn’t want to be here, they wanted to be somewhere else helping another cause. God called us here, we don’t know why but we do know that our team Tabitha is growing and forming into something strong. I’m growing and changing as well, this person I see coming out of me is different, new and ready to know my God and all he has planned for me.
So this is the day in the life of a missionary in Chaiyaphum Thailand, but that’s just my journey and day not someone else’s I don’t know what goes on in the minds and bodies of my teammates I don’t know what God is doing in them. I do know that he is growing us into something, something powerful and strong that will conquer this world behind the Lord and savior that we call Jehovah.
