Project updates—English, Water Filters, and HIV (oh my!)

As far as projects are going, every week is different and we never know quite what to expect. Our first couple of weeks were hardcore manual labor, which was exhausting but satisfying to see the end result of our hard work and sweat. The past several weeks have involved more planning and communicating with local NGOs to create projects. Here’s an update on those!

First of all, teaching English to our 5th and 6th graders is going great. The kids are learning a lot and we are getting pretty attached to their funny personalities. They are getting used to us coming, and really enjoyed when we showed them pictures from home. 

 Thai kids meet the Grafs

Thai kids meet the Lambs

We teach each class for two hours, which is admittedly a lot of time, so for the last half hour we always play a game. It breaks up the time for all of us ;) This week we taught directions, so we played "Go forward, stop!" or in other words, "Red light, green light."

 It got pretty intense at times!

Justin and I teach English to two classes and some teachers on Mondays, which is great, but we also teach a group of teachers from a district about a half hour away on Tuesdays. It’s probably a rule somewhere that teachers should never choose favorite students, but if we did choose a favorite class to teach, it would be our Tuesday group. They are very anxious to learn and have a basic foundation of spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, but need help with speaking and pronunciation. They are willing to practice and make mistakes, which is exactly what we need from them! The idea of teaching teachers came up as a result of wanting the group’s English teaching to make the greatest impact possible, and this will come as we teach the people who will be around students year after year and hopefully make a difference there.

Our school is tucked back in the mountains about 40 minutes from where we live. We ride that little van out every Tuesday.

Justin showing off the school

This picture tells so much. During the middle of our lesson, a dog just walks into the room. This happens in Thailand ALL the time--whether it's a restaurant, a school, or the internet cafe. There are dogs everywhere!

Justin is pro at teaching! They have a sweet set up for us, complete with projector, laptop, and microphone.

A major project that has been in the works but that we can’t quite get into the implementation phase is installing water filters in communities where they collect rain water and use it as drinking water. We’ve been very excited about this project but we can’t find any Thai people who know exactly how to build the filters and would be willing to oversee the construction for us. It’s hard working with a culture that is much more laid back and less business-oriented than ours, but hopefully we will be able to start this soon!

UHDP headquarters

And the biggest project news of all! Justin and I are working with a small team on creating an HIV/AIDS awareness video to be distributed throughout the hill tribes of this region, people who have immigrated to Thailand from Burma or Laos because of political problems. HIV is a problem in these areas, so we are working with members of a local organization who help at a health clinic where people can go to be tested for HIV/AIDS, and they hope to spread the word about prevention and also treatment availability. They visit the tribes and hold community outreach meetings, where the video will eventually be shown. We came up with an idea about a man who has HIV and how it changes his life, had the Thai people we’re working with make necessary cultural changes to make sure it will be well-received, and we will hopefully begin shooting as soon as we find locals who are willing to act in our video! To make this project self-sufficient, we want to make this video for the group and then sit back and let them make a mental health video by the end of the summer based on what we teach them. We’re really excited for the opportunity to be involved and hope to make a difference with this project! It will probably take up the majority of our time from now on, which is fine. It’s actually really hard to not have enough to do here! It makes us long for American food or summer in Utah, so we’re happy for the chance to work hard. The time goes by at a perfect speed!

One month of greatness!

We hit our month mark today!! It’s hard to say whether it has gone fast or not—in some ways we feel like we’ve always been here, and yet our arrival still feels very recent!

In Taiwan, waiting to board our plane to Bangkok

Since a one month post is a good excuse to add old pictures and then not ever worry about catching up, we’re going to take that opportunity and run with it.

Getting pictures from other volunteers here has been exciting! We’ve been collecting them over the past month and it’s fun to see the “good old times” resurface. Like it was that long ago..haha.

The back of our heads and the backside of our elephants

Eating curry in Bangkok

Getting Japanese Encephalitis shots at a local health clinic...sketchy, but it saved us over $400!! Hard to say no to that.

 Justin and I trying to reach out to a lonely new student but he didn't want to ride horses with us..sad day.

Thailand is way exciting as far as wildlife goes. Millipedes, centipedes, shiny black worms, HUGE spiders, lizards, geckos, etc. Pretty soon after we got here,  we noticed an unusual smell in one corner of our room. Later that day when I was opening the window to let some warm air into our hot room (not really better but it helps a bit!), I noticed there was a smashed lizard behind the hinge outside our window. The poor little fellow had probably just been relaxing there one day when we closed it and crushed it. It was..incredibly disgusting and getting him off the window was one of the grossest things ever, so I’ll spare you the details! 

Gigantic spider with a crazy web

Cicada leftover bodies. They are so loud during the day.

Typical lunch! Instant noodles and fresh mangoes. 

The occasional festival is a good excuse to go out at night and see outdoor markets and blowup toys that remind us a lot of PG’s Strawberry Days! I bought sandals and a really neat skirt at one last month, and we bought Thai cotton candy. It is more stringy and hair-like than American cotton candy and is meant to be eaten wrapped in a crepe, but it’s really delicious!

The markets have a lot of other smelly dried meats and clothes but mostly we like hearing people talk about us: we learned the Thai word for foreigner, “fa-rang”, and kind of enjoy hearing it as we pass. This particular market was right as we were learning to listen for the word, but now that we know it we here it EVERYWHERE. From our English students, random people we pass on the street, food vendors, etc. If only we knew what they were saying about us!

And here are some random pictures we never posted but would be a shame to leave out!

Our first morning in Thailand! Up the mountain at the Buddhist temple. Still wearing the same clothes...

Spot the Angry Birds cake. Angry Birds are all over the place here!

Home sweet home. We miss our non-air conditioned room when we travel!

 Squatter potties! You grow to love them.

 One night Justin went to pull this converter out of the wall, and it came apart and those metal parts near the top touched and shot sparks everywhere. It lit up the room like lightning! It was terrifying and we're just glad Justin wasn't zapped! The power conversion is tricky sometimes.

And big news..after a month of living by a huge brown river, we finally got in it! People have gone swimming loads of times, but since we lost our swimwear on our way here, it was a good excuse for us to stay out of the river we watched elephants poop in on our first Sunday here (sure it was downstream, but who knows what it happening upstream in Burma!). We had a great time tubing down the river last week, and although the water really is about as dirty as it looks, it at least doesn’t smell bad and is really warm. That made it okay! We don't have pictures yet, but here's a nice view of the Buddhist temple from the river.

Every day is very different from the last, and despite the challenges we’ve had—losing a suitcase with all of our clothes in it on our way here, adjusting to a hot and humid climate, eating some questionable food, living in a house with 18 other people, not being able to communicate with any of the locals, lots of manual labor, and trying not to itch our legs off from all the mosquito bites—we’re loving every day! It is a really special time we’re able to spend together here as a brand new married couple, and truly an experience we will remember forever. And it’s not over yet! We have lots to do and learn before we ship off for America on August 4^th. On to wave two! Stay tuned ^_^

Khaodee Orphanage

We had a Saturday work day at an orphanage about an hour away from where we live. Khaodee translates to “good news”, and is an orphanage based around Christian values. We arrived just in time for Saturday chores, and Justin and I were fortunate enough to be assigned to help a group of girls weed a very overgrown and very muddy portion of the yard by the restroom. We trimmed a hibiscus tree, used a rice machete to cut down the tall grass, packed the leaves and branches into rice bags, and carried them down a steep muddy hill. Phew! We got incredibly muddy because it kept raining, and found more spiders than I ever wanted to see in a combined 30 minutes, but we all worked together to get the job done! 

Over-grown awesomeness

The craziest non-creepy bug we found while weeding.

Our happy crew. Someone handed me that random plaid shirt..I’ve learned not to ask questions. These girls were cute: they just kept giggling and having the oldest one ask us about ourselves and America. They asked if I had a boyfriend and were very surprised when I told them Justin and I were married, and they were very pleased when we told them we are Christian. We haven’t met very many Christians in Thailand so we were just as happy to be hanging out with them as they were to hang out with us!

Another Saturday chore that some people in our group were privileged (?) to participate in was slaughtering and butchering a pig. They told us all about how the pig was hung from a tree, killed, doused with boiling water, and gutted. We first saw it when it was in about 500 small pieces spread out on a thin mat by the cafeteria, with a team of about 15 widows sitting crossed-legged cutting it up. Everything up to that point sounded like standard procedure for killing a pig, but watching it be slice and diced on a mat on wooden stump cutting boards was a little too much.  We watched the skull cracked open, the brains come out, the teeth be cleaved off, and the skin be sliced. There was blood all over the mat and we could only guess it was the same mat they use every two weeks when a pig is killed. Every meal we ate at Khaodee was a little bit harder to get down than most of our meals in Thailand, just knowing how unsanitary it was. And we did have pork for every meal!

 All that pork and there's no bacon..unbelievable.

 The point of us going to the orphanage was to carry out an activity day for the children. Many children there are orphans, but others are there because their parents are drug addicts or cannot provide for them. Our group had the idea to do an activity day with soccer, four square, jump roping, yoga, hat-making, hair styling, and face painting, and it was a huge success! Justin and I were in charge of four square, although when we first prepared for the game all the kids wanted to do with the basketball we brought was (you guessed it) play basketball.  They started just shooting hoops but eventually organized a game.

Since most kids here grow up playing soccer and Tacraw, they were pretty awkward with a basketball, and after awhile we taught them how to play four square.  They caught on faster than we thought they would! After about half an hour of playing nonstop, we noticed the ball started to look a little egg-shaped. One of the kids picked it up to show us that the rubber was slowly splitting, revealing small stringy black fibers underneath. We gathered around watching it, when all of the sudden it EXPLODED!! Everyone jumped back and I screamed a little, and then we all just busted up laughing. We kept playing with a soccer ball, but the kids talked about it for like 20 minutes afterwards—we could tell because of how they pretended to hold a ball and make an exploding noise.

Before the big explosion

After so much hard play we ate dinner (cautiously) and freshened up for the evening in the amazing guesthouse they let us stay in. Seriously, it was nicer than the house we live in here!

Later we went to one of their services, which is most easily described as an EFY singalong session. There was a group of teens playing instruments and being the lead singers, but the rest of the kids in the audience were singing the words to all the songs as loud as possible. It was a really good time, and you could really feel their enthusiasm for Jesus Christ. We could hear it in their voices as they sang, and we saw it in the cafeteria during meal times when everyone loaded up their plates but no one ate a bite until one child was chosen to pray.

Our first meal when we didn't know to wait for the prayer..awkward! And ignore my crusty face..haha.

Especially considering what they’ve gone though, they are a strong group of children who will have better futures than the pasts they have behind them. All made possible by a group of loving Thai Christians who care!

Wave 1 is ending!

HELP International sends people out during the summer in six week increments they refer to as waves. We’re about to that point where people who only came for the first wave are leaving and we are anticipating the arrival of people coming for wave two! Justin and I leave at the end of wave two, so it’s hard to believe the first wave has already ended! Taylor was the first to leave, and she was generous enough to leave me with a couple of shirts and a skirt she wasn't taking with her. I now have a grand total of about five outfits and no longer feel like a homeless person with no clothes. Thank you, Taylor!

 Wave one group photo, Asian style.

To commemorate the end of the first group of us being here, we got Thai paper lanterns and sent them off across the river that runs by our house. They were a lot bigger than we expected and were actually more fragile and tempermental than we imagined, but once we got the hang of it we sent one off successfully. You light it on fire with the lantern hanging down, and once it’s ignited, flip it over (carefully!) and wait until it fills with smoke. Then send it up! Tangled makes it look wayyyy to easy.

 

 So beautiful in the night sky! It's really hard to get a good picture, but I'm sure we'll do this again.

Happy Buddha Day!

We barely found out it was a holiday, like, three days before it happened, but it was hard to complain about having a day off! We celebrated by taking it easy, finding a Chinese-owned shop in town (which Andrea loved), and doing laundry, but the last half of the day we were able to actually do some fun cultural stuff to commemorate. The waitresses at our land lady’s restaurant invited us to go up to the Buddhist temple with them in the evening, so we hitchhiked (sounded better than a 40 minute walk up the steep hill to the temple) and met up with them. First thing we noticed: everyone there was dressed in white, some from head to foot, and we most definitely were not. An was wearing black! Oops. I guess we hadn’t been able to communicate the dress standards with them.  At first we definitely felt like outsiders as we watched hundreds of Thai people sitting on mats listening to the monks, lighting incense, and bowing a lot, but after meeting up with our friends it turned into a really cool cultural experience.  Buddhism here is a big deal but probably doesn’t fit into what we think of as a religion.  It’s more a deep cultural tradition, philosophy, and way of life.  We climbed to the top of the temple, kneeled down next to some Thais, and got a great view of the valley at night. 

Yep, monks here all wear construction orange.  We can't escape from it even in Thailand ;)

Beautiful full moon across the river valley. It makes sense why the holiday follows the lunar calendar—the whole sky was illuminated!

After coming back down and pouring water over a wood carving of a lotus three times,  we noticed that almost all of the white-shirted people were now circling around the temple with incense, candles, and different kinds of plants and flowers.  

Our thai friends went and bought some for all of us, and we joined in, hands in “wai” prayer-style position.  After three times around the temple, we added our incense and candles to a pot with everyone else’s.  It was cool to be part of such a unique cultural experience! After listening to the whole group chant together with the monks, we walked back down to town.  

One of many pots with incense, flowers and candles.  The lotus is a symbol for enlightenment, but I'm not sure if the rest of them have any significance!

We found out on the way out that this year was the 2,600^th anniversary, so it was a really special year to be here for it! Since Buddhists believe that Buddha’s birth, death, and day of enlightenment were all on the same day, we’re not sure which one was 2,600 years ago, but we’re fortunate we were here for it!!

Bamboozled

We had an AWESOME time at church. It was testimony meeting, and while we've mostly just heard talks from the youth during sacrament meeting, we got to hear from some very solid adult members and it was amazing. They have so much faith! All they need is a branch of 80 people to be able to build a real chapel! They are humble and obedient to their leaders, and we hope they are able to have an actual chapel soon. Some of the people there have been members longer than Justin and I have been alive!

After church we hiked up to Khun Korn, a large waterfall near Chiang Rai. It was literally a hike through a bamboo jungle! We honestly thought we were on the island with the characters of Lost.

Bamboo falls over when it gets too tall and heavy 

 It also makes for lightweight, sturdy, and cheap building materials! Here we are on a bamboo bridge.

 

It was so big!

 Bamboo canopy

There were awesome bamboo steps along a lot of the path

Sunny 555

We had a relaxing Saturday of doing, well, nothing (I was feeling a bit sick the night before but luckily it didn't progress to anything nasty. Phew!) but when some of our group wanted to go mini golfing we couldn't stay home any longer. We all piled into the truck and went to Sunny 555, a restaurant where mini golfing is included with any purchase. In Thai, the number 5 is ‘hah,’ so ‘555’ is a cute way of writing ‘hahaha,’ and we’re guessing that’s what this mini golf place was referring to with its name. Their menu was large and featured a lot of American food, but we quickly noticed that the American half of the menu was verrrry expensive and only written in English, and the Thai food was priced at what you’d expect but was only written in Thai. That didn't fly with us, so we figured out a way to order fried rice and noodle soup. They were both great, and were about a fourth of the price of an American dish. When in Thailand, eat Thai food!

The golf was a little bit silly because there was just concrete on the courses, with standing water here and there and lots of right angles on walls that made it hard to get a whole in less than 8 strokes. It was a good time, though!

Notice the Thai kid trying to fish something out of the water. Nice.

Concrete is difficult..