You Might Be in Thailand If…
1. your friend gets called a cat lady at orientation.
2. the bus ticket seller growls at you for not wanting to get on the overcrowded bus.
3. you clean the bathrooms but use too much soap, and the bathroom ends up looking more like the scene from Willy Wonka with all the soap suds.
4. your travel day to Thailand includes over 30 hours of bus rides, and it officially takes 5 days to actually get to your ministry site.
5. for the first time all Race, your host is American and speaks perfect English so you always know what’s going on when he and his wife are around.
6. When your host is not around, communication gets difficult and is more or less replaced with smiles and thumbs up.
7. they load the bus you’re taking with over 15 packages of cocaine…(not really, but it looked like it, so maybe).
8. You feel like you’re back in the south because your mode of transportation for ministry is the back of the truck (Home sweet home).
9. You fall in love with all your hosts for the month and never want to leave this country or this place.
10. The food is the best food in the entire world, hands down, and you NEVER eat a bad meal.
11. A giant lizard crawls out of someone’s stuff leading to screaming and running out of the room.
12. You have the opportunity to meet up with a college friend on the complete opposite side of the world.
13. You pick fresh strawberries out of patch and can eat them because they are actually organic.
14. You become talented in balloon animals and origami.
15. You Explore national parks on off days that lead to hammocking, hiking, and creek hikes.
16. Your list of talents adds building a children’s playground, gardener, and painter.
17. Watching the Bachelor with your teammates involves either Krispy Kreme or strawberry shortcake, and lots of googly eyes over Ben H.
18. Worshiping looks like a speaker in the back of a truck on the way home from small group.
19. There are 7/11s everywhere and you feel back at home because of the slurpees.
20. You are cleaning the garage and accidentally knock a bee hive alive causing yourself and teammates to get stung…my bad.
21. The prayer meeting you expect to be an hour or two ends up being an all-night affair.
22. English class becomes one of your fondest memories because of the word trash can AKA trarsh crans.
23. You weep like a child leaving the first host as well as the second because God is just so good and so are HIs people.
24. Your teammate gets a weird plant disease involving splinters.
25. You think you might have lost your feminine products in your teammate’s things, but luckily they are found in your dirty laundry bag…obviously.
26. Ministry looks like cleaning up a house they just tore down and moving pillars the size of Jupiter.
27. Dance parties are the best kind of ministry.
28. You are asked to perform at an elementary school graduation, so you sing and dance to “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” (We rocked it out!! Right Jen?)
29. The team is asked to help lead worship, which turns to us leading 6 songs of worship, which turns to us basically leading 18 songs of worship because we sing in Thai, English, and then combined each song. Also, we don’t even know a couple of the songs…#disaster.
30. You go to a graduation walk for the high schoolers where they are carrying so much stuff that you pick it up and just stuff it wherever it looks like it might stay.
31. Prison ministry is one of the most impactful times of the month.
32. Your hosts become like family and it hurts to leave.
33. You spend your birthday in Phuket and rent scooters and go to the beach and visit Phi Phi Islands, which is possibly the most beautiful place in the world.
34. Sunrise service with your squad is so good and 13 of your squad-mates get baptized in the Indian Ocean.
35. You have the opportunity to play with elephants and you fall in love, so you let one give you your first kiss in who knows how long.
36. The squad sets lanterns off from the beach and you might as well be Rapunzel from Tangled (or at least that’s how I felt).
37. Thailand holds a piece of your heart and forever will…I must come back to this beautiful country one day.
