In an attempt to protect the identity of the organization and missionaries that we partnerned with in Laos this blog is going to be a little bit ambigious and I won’t be including any information such as names or exact locations, but I can include the nature of some of the work that we were able to do and pictures!!
December in Laos was amazing!! More amazing than anything I could have imagined since my team and I was on a pig and fish farm. I think that the best way to give you an acurate picture of what farm life was like is to give you a sample schedule…this is pretty much what each day looked like. The items in black were done everyday by everyone on the team and the items in blue and green were also done everyday but the team was split into 2 groups to accomplish this!
6:00 am – Wake up and have time with the Lord!
7:00 am – Start making breakfast, usually we ate bread with butter and jelly or scrambled eggs.
7:40 am – Prayer time with team to start the day.
8:00 am to 11:30 am – Clean indoor and outdoor pig pens. (Basically, this consisted of washing each pig thoroughly with a hose and using a squeegee to direct massive amounts of poop into troughs that ran around the perimeter of the barn)
11:30 am to 12:00 pm – Shower after cleaning the pens. (This was a necessity!!!)
or
8:00 am – 12:00 pm – Drive motorbikes to our contacts house and help with various things around the house…housework, preschool for their son, PR work for the farm, etc.
12:00 pm to 1 pm – Lunch on farm with Lao staff.
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm – Afternoon break for the hottest part of the day.
2:00 pm to 3:00 pm – Go to the market to buy food for the day. (We went the market and bought fresh fruits, veges, and meat almost everyday!!)
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm – Plan and host a basic English class for the neighborhood children.
or
2:00 pm to 4:30 pm – Clean the pig pens for the second time. (How dirty the pens get in those few hours in ridiculous.)
4:30 pm to 5:00 pm – Take another shower!
5:00 pm to 6:00 pm – Free time!!
6:00 pm to 7:30 pm – Dinner preparations and meal time. We ate almost every meal all month together, which was so good for team bonding!!
7:30 pm to 9:00 pm – Team time and worship.
9:00 pm – Bedtime!! (At this point, we were all exhausted and fell asleep almost immediately!!)
Life on the farm consisted mostly of this but there were also times that we planted garlic fields, painted the new bathroom, made cookies for local government officials, and dug trenches. All of this led to time on the farm being busy and tiring. But our team grew so much closer to each other and to the Lord! This month has been my favorite thus far on the race because of that closeness that could only come from being so physically removed from what seemed like all civilization!! Laos is a very spiritually dark place and the district that we were in was one of the darkest and least Christian according to our contacts, but the Lord is moving and we got the chance to see that on the farm! We got the opportunity to witness to the farm hands and to the local neighborhood children. But more than that, we got to be an encouragement to the missionaries that have left the comforts of America to follow the Lord’s call in Laos. And they could use your prayers!! Prayers for more workers on the farm, prayers for trust in the Lord’s timing, prayers for favor with local government officials, and prayers for growth of the farm into a farm training facility. The light that comes from that farm in such a dark place was awesome to be able to walk in and all of your prayers are so appreciated!!
Now here are some pictures to help you visualize what a farm in Laos looks like!!!
View of the farm from the girls’ house porch.
Typical sunset over the farm.
5 types of fish are breed on the farm, this pond was right outside of our door.
Now for the pigs…there are over 200 pigs on the farm and all of them are dirty.
And really big. These are the young boys and they like to bite you.
So many piglets!!!
7 sows gave birth during our month on the farm, including this momma.
My favorite pig, we named him Ollie.
My other favorite one, we’re twins!!
I loved time on the farm! The Lord blew all of my expectations out of the water and it was so good!! Now I leave for Cambodia tomorrow and I can’t wait to see what the Lord has in store there!!!
