I would have to say Thailand is my second favorite month so far on the race. The culture, the abundance of natural beauty, our ministry, our contacts, our site/living arrangements, and being with the other all girls team made for a memorable and awesome month.
We worked with an organization that helps reach out to women at risk. Millions of women around the world are at high risk of trafficking and being brought into the sex industry due to economic and family pressures. This organization reaches out to women to give them an opportunity to have a job that can provide for their families and they can take pride in themselves and a skill they have been taught.
Our ministry during the day involved manual labor around the site; yard work, maintenance on some of the buildings, putting mosquito netting on the huts where teams stay, and cutting fabric for the product the women make. One team would also prayer walk down in the red light district during the day for the team that would be going down that night for bar ministry. Bar ministry consisted of going out and making friends with the women working in the bars, talking to them, showing them love. If a women would tell us that she wants to get out of working in the bars we could help our contact reach out to her.
We created some awesome friendships with some of the women and locals. We were sad to leave them but fortunately there are long term missionaries (one former world racer- woot woot) living and working full time in Phuket and can continue to invest in the relationships that we started.
I made a short video to share with you a little bit of what our month looked like. Enjoy.
Sidenote: I also made the decision to step down from team leading after six months and am now on a new team called Team TURN THE PAGE so go check out my new teammates (Alex Warren, Owen Siebring, Casey Jordan, Zach Miller, Nikki Frisen). Really excited for this new season of the race.
