1. It’s so GREEN. We’ve been in cities for the past three months so I’ve forgotten how much I miss green things. There’s grass and mountains and whole forests of palm trees everywhere you look.
2. Water, elephant-shaped mountains, and so many other things to where you literally can’t look anywhere without seeing something beautiful.
3. FOOD. Besides the fact that I get to eat tons of noodles for a second month in a row, I get to eat peanut butter and jelly for breakfast every morning just like I do at home, and the rest of our meals are home cooked.
4. This is the 5th month that I’ve gotten to sleep on a top bunk. My teammates love me because most people fight over the bottom, but they know I’ll always beg for a top.
5. BOOKS! We have a whole library at our ministry’s office, and not just full of Jesus books(it does have plenty of great ones), but KID BOOKS. As in everything Roald Dahl’s ever written, and the Boxcar Children(we had a good laugh at that).
6. No Wifi at our house AND free internet at ministry. I’d asked God to please let us not have it wherever we lived this month so we could all just talk at night, even if that meant paying for it all month, but he gave me the best of both.
7. Fun teenagers to hang out with. Our hosts’ kids are 16 and 13 and they’re JUST like me and my brother except closer in age.
8. Eno spots! My hammock has been dead weight in my pack so long I’d planned on mailing it home this month, but then we got here and our yard is full of trees.
9. We have the sweetest cat in our backyard and a precious dog at our ministry. Any month is a better month if you give me animals to cuddle.
10. Manual labor. I LOVE people, but after two heavy relational months I need time to just THINK about people. So our ministry keeps my hands busy but leaves my mind free to process and pray and blog.
11. How do I decide on just one eleventh thing? I love that lizards are household pests here like roaches are in South Carolina. I love riding in the back of a truck. I love Cafe Amazon. I love singing hymns after dinner with our host family. I love that I can wake up, have Jesus time, exercise and eat breakfast all before ministry. I love that our hosts GET the World Race because they’ve hosted so many teams before us. I love how our team keeps pushing each other deeper every day and aren’t even close to settling down and getting complacent yet. I love that God gave us a family.
I love Thailand.
