The last two days we’ve spent around the orphanage helping with small projects that needed to get done. Yesterday I got to put my love for organization into practice and helped re-arrange/organize the library/toy room/hallway/game room area of the house. I’ll try to post pictures soon (I have before and after pictures) but don’t have time to upload them right now. Roger couldn’t get over how nice the room looks now, and that got me pretty excited that I was able to do something I love in order to bless somebody who needed help.
(that’s the “before” picture)
(“after” – notice how nice and straight and neat and full the bookshelves are!)
Today I joined the rest of the girls outside…and painted! Yesterday they had done the inside of the front wall of the orphanage so today our task was to work on the outside – the street side of the wall. I had a lot of fun doing the detail work (we rolled the wall, but had to touch up in the fancy designed parts of the brick – I’ll try to get pictures). We also painted a wall right next to the house (literally two feet between the wall and house) – again, I took a brush a did the touch-up between the bricks and was loving it!
After the painting was done, we helped plant some flowers in the front of the orphanage (sorry – I don’t have “before” pictures…and I’ll have to wait until at least tomorrow to take an “after” picture because it’s pretty dark outside now). We only had one trowel and there were about four of us planting…so I dug holes with my hands and got them covered in dirt over the layer of paint on them (should have taken a picture of that…my hands looked gross!!).
After lunch (yes, all the painting and planting occurred before lunch – we were busy!) we headed out to a couple schools to hand out Bibles (I think I mentioned this in my “Can I Have One Please” blog – how our host has a room full of Bibles to pass out). The first school we went in to an English class and talked to the students for a little while (there were fourteen of them and seven of us, so it didn’t get too crazy). They asked us questions like “do you have a boyfriend?” and “where are you from?” and “do you like Thai food and Thailand?” and we asked what they like to do in their spare time and where they’re from (Thailand, obviously, but we wanted to know if they were from Buriram – “our” town – or from somewhere else). It was a lot of fun to try and interact with the students…but all too soon the school day was done and we had to go outside and hand out Bibles to whoever walked past. I think we gave out around 200 at that school. We followed the principal out and were going to go to one of the student’s houses to see if the orphanage could find a sponsor for them to be able to go to school next year, but instead we headed to a pre-school and handed out Bibles to the parents who came to pick their kids up (side note: Thai kids are absolutely adorable and I want to take them all home with me.) This was just a quick stop before we headed to the big destination – a school within the city limits of Buriram where we handed out probably 800 more Bibles (I think our total today was about 1000 anyway). As a treat (and since we were in the car anyway) we got to help pick the orphanage kids up from school. They were excited to see us, and we were excited to see them because we knew it was time to go home and get a little bit of rest.
So that’s one day in Thailand…more to come on the rest of the days soon!
