I absolutely love this month. I love how every month becomes my new favorite! As I talked about in my last blog, we are working with a ministry called Remember Nhu (www.remembernhu.org) and working on the prevention side of ending sex trafficking. We live with 80 girls and 8 boys that are housed in 3 houses on this property. We have a pretty blocked out schedule every day, so I’m able to give you an accurate glimpse into what our days look like, on average.
6am – Wake up with the girls for breakfast, usually consisting of rice, veggies and sometimes hot dogs.
6:30am – Bible study (in Thai) with PTone, the house dad.
7am – The girls head to school and we head back to bed for a quick nap.
8:30am – We pile into the back of a pickup for the 20 minute drive out to the New Land for work while the girls are gone. Chiang Mai is rapidly expanding and they want to keep the girls out of the city, so they bought a ton of new acreage. They want to build 5 new homes for buy and girls, plus open a tamarind business to sustain the organization (the land is a tamarind and mango orchard). Every day we are working on sustaining the organic farm they’ve started from drying seeds from plants at the market, building a “food machine” that involves fish and plants feeding off each other to grow tons of food, mowing down the waist high weeds to clear the land for construction, laying cement for the wells and wiring the newly acquired electricity.
12pm – Walk to a roadside Thai restaurant for the most delicious meals of our lives (usually a form of spicy noodle soup or curry that costs about 80 cents)
1pm – Head back to work. We’ve been spending this last hour picking tamarind for the girls back home.
2pm – Head back home, shower and have team time/feedback (we do this every day!)
4:30pm – The girls get home and we help them with homework, help them with English, play with them and love them lots!
6pm – Dinner
8pm – Bed time!
So, this is a our usual day in the live, but like everything… things change. We have one day off a week, but Saturdays and Sundays are spent just hanging out with the girls, not the manual labor on the New Land. Our contacts have a heart for showing us the culture here too, so they are taking us to a huge temple on Friday (95% of Thailand is Buddhist), making a cultural meal for us, taking us to ride elephants, to some hot springs/waterfall and the huge Sunday/Tuesday night markets and Bazars!
It’s crazy we only have 3 weeks here, especially since we had 6 in the Philippines! We are trying to pack as much into these 3 weeks and just love the heck out of these girls as much as we can while we are here. There are 6 long term missionaries that are here keeping the work going and short term missionaries in and out all the time. It’s been really great having fluent English speakers and other Americans to just chat with and to hear stories and relate too, it’s pretty refreshing. The newest is Elaine, who went to Calvin college and is from Indiana! Small world! She works in South Korea teaching English (what I’m thinking about after the race) and is here for her two months off.
Anyways, I’ll try to work on a video for you all tomorrow. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Holidays, Happy WInter Solstace, all that jazz. Love you guys and thanks for your love and prayers across the way 🙂
