Perhaps it was last Saturday, when we got a call that a husband and father of five in our community had passed away at the hospital. Or perhaps it was the next five hours of trying to find his wife, who doesn’t have a phone, to tell her.
Perhaps it was last Sunday, after I’d talked for a few hours with a crying friend, convincing her of her worth, telling her we loved her, and giving her a key to our home to use if her husband hit her that evening.
Perhaps it was when I cried to Stephen that night about how little I could do about anything: about her life, about our adoption, about our community, in limited Burmese. Perhaps when I said I was tired of always having my hands tied.
Perhaps it was Monday morning, when a woman came into our house with fresh bruises covered in thanaka. Perhaps it was when she said her mother-in-law told her not to come to our house for protection.
I’m not sure where the breaking point was exactly, when Stephen said, “I think we might need something different for our Sabbath this week. Just a little more space.” It was pretty quickly after that when we got in the car.
The way the cookie crumbled that week (oh my, was it crumbling) we could manage three days away if we put a few delay-able things on hold. So we did.
We drove two hours to a little town we visited five years ago. It’s an ancient capital of Thailand, Sukhothai, famous for the ancient ruins from as far back as the thirteenth century.
We checked in to a hotel pretty late on Monday, and woke up pretty sick on Tuesday morning. The mold wasn’t too hard to find in the air conditioner.
We went to ask if they could either give us a new room or clean it, and–surprise!–they upgraded us! Pretty significantly, too. We found ourselves in an absolutely beautiful private villa. 🙌🏻
And then we just spent a few days resting. It’s a beautiful town to bicycle through, so we did quite a bit of that. We also had a lovely pool to enjoy and new foods to try.
And this: deep fried som tum. Som tum is a popular Thai dish, and we happened to have this deep-fried version of it five years ago when we visited. When we returned to Mae Sot, we asked around for it at restaurants with no luck. Not even that they just didn’t have it, but ridiculous stares as though we’d just asked to eat moon dirt. Perhaps it wasn’t available here, but only a different region of Thailand? Perhaps we were saying it incorrectly in Thai? So we asked a few Thai friends from different regions around the country, who all said they had never heard of it.
It’s things like this that make you begin to question your sanity: Did I really eat that? Was it something else? Why has no one ever heard of this?
But alas, we found the same restaurant. It was still on the menu, and it was still amazingly delicious.
And most importantly, I’m a little less crazy.
A few days of rest also made me feel a little less crazy.
So, here’s to that: a little less crazy!