We left for church ten minutes late today. Stephen was leading worship, so we needed to stop to print the lyrics, which would only make us even later. 

{This wasn’t the first time. It probably won’t be the last.} 

We were rushing out to kids asking if they could have water or play cards or give us hugs.  I gave out hugs but explained we were going to church, so they wouldn’t be able to play cards. 

“We are late,” Stephen explained. “Do you know what ‘late’ means? If you are going to be friends with us, you should probably learn this one, because we are always late.”

High: The students have cared for us so well. They have cooked really delicious food for us, help to wash our clothes, and keep water ready at our house every day. When I went to shower and there was no water, a group of six or seven people worked to get the water hooked up again, all returning soaked. They really are kind and work to make us comfortable.

 A very low Low: The mosquitoes are eating me alive. They usually are quite brutal, and I often have triple or quadruple the bites that Stephen will get, but this is a whole new ball game. I look like I have the chicken pox, and my lower legs and arms are just covered in red dots. I have eight bites on the soles of my feet and one on each palm. Really? I can’t even begin to count the rest as there are just way too many; I am discovering ten to twenty more every day! The students are always asking–and probably so are you–why don’t you wear mosquito repellent? Are you sleeping under a mosquito net? Yes and yes. I put on repellent a few times a day, I am sleeping under the mosquito net, I am wearing long pants whenever I can. They just like me for some reason I can’t explain, and it’s far worse here than it has been.

It is quite a bit of discomfort, as it does feel like I have the chicken pox. But it is making it difficult to sleep, waking me up in the middle of the night, and causing some concern for malaria. We are all praying that I stop getting bit, stop itching, and don’t get malaria!

High: Stephen is great, and he is nice to put cold water and anti-itch herbal greasy stuff on my bites. (Yim told me this will work. It smells like menthol and citronella, and it makes my legs all shiny and slimy. It might be a low in and of itself.)

High: There was a spider on the table the other day, and it was pretty significantly huge and striped and scary. Stephen asked if he could kill it, which Yim said yes to. He asked me to pass him a shoe, to which Yim adamantly exclaimed, “NO! You can’t shoot it!”

High: I love how much time I have to read in the jungle. I have already finished CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, which I read twice back to back, and Tim Keller’s Generous Justice, which I recommend with high esteem. And I’m halfway into Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, & Steel for the fourth time, and still finding it to be pivotal to my faith. Despite the fact that this is not his purpose or intent, this book consistently points me to truth and the sovereignty of God. I love having the time to read in the afternoons!

High: I have begun showering in the morning, mostly because there are less girls there to watch me. I understand the interest of a huge (taller & fatter), glaringly white girl in a sarong that she isn’t great at keeping up with crazy hair and shaving her legs. I’m sure it is a sight to behold, but it is still awkward to be watched. If I go in the mornings, there are just two or three girls instead of eight or nine.

However, it is very, very cold. The days only get to the low 80s here, and the nights get down into the 50s. When we shower in the morning, steam comes off our skin while when the icy cold water hits our 98.6 degree bodies.

Today, as I walked into the shower area, one of the girls said in plain English, “Teacher, are you sure?” I just burst into laughter. No cheery “good morning” or “how are you,” just an “Are you sure you want to do this?”

High: One of the boys was looking at my headlamp and turned it on to the red light setting. They usually haven’t seen this before, and he did ask me about it in Karen. I told him how the bugs didn’t like the red light and don’t fly into it, but they do like the white light. He asked me if it hurt your eyes. I thought he meant when you put it on the path in front of you, which I thought was kind of an odd question. I said no, it was no problem for your eyes.

He then turned it right into his eyes, and gave the expected look of shock, discomfort, and temporary blindness. He blinked a few times and looked me quite confused. I started laughing and told him sorry! I didn’t know he meant if he looked directly into the light; that certainly will hurt your eyes…Oops. Maybe we can blame that one on translation?

Low: The creatures. They are always a low, but the large snake I saw, a skinnier snake that went across Stephen’s path just inches in front of him, a HUGE snake he saw beside the river, two of the biggest spiders I’ve ever seen, and a trail of ants going across my bed, and mosquitoes with a personal vendetta against me are just exhausting me.

High: We have had time to study language! Stephen is working hard on his Burmese, and I have had time to listen to many Karen conversations and talk with many students. Their English level is quite low, so I have been forced to use Karen. I’m really thankful for this!

Low: America, family, and familiarity feels really far away right now. I’m not sure why that is, but I have been very homesick this week, both for America and Mae Sot. Maybe just for rest for our souls.

High: The training is going really well and quite quickly. We are hopeful to finish early next week, and I am hopeful that the students are understanding it! I still really love my job, and no matter how ridiculous it is, I find social development to be absolutely intriguing.

I made the trek down the side of the mountain, over the river, and up the next bank to get to the girls’ shower & bathroom area last night about 8pm. I don’t drink anything after dinner, so I try to make one last trip over to brush my teeth, wash my face, and use the restroom.

I started toward the bathroom and saw that the bathroom door was off it’s hinges. It’s usually a bamboo-framed door with tarp over it, somehow attached to the bamboo-framed bathroom. You pull it shut and put a loop over a nail to hold it shut.

It was now just propped against the wall. I wasn’t really sure what my options were, but I slipped through the ten inches or so open in the door frame, not wanting to touch it without knowing what was on the other side, and looked around.

You always check your surroundings first, especially if its a closed area or you’re about to be wearing less clothing.

There was a big snail in the corner of the door, but they move slow enough. I decided I’d just prop the door over a few more inches and hope anyone else understood that meant someone was inside.

As I went to grab the door, I looked again at the snail, kind of amazed. He was huge, with his shell maybe six or seven inches in diameter, and I didn’t know snails could get that big. I bent down, looking a little closer with my headlamp. The design on his shell was pretty incredible, and it looked like it was moving.

I was just about to revel in the beauty of this creation, when it hit me that this was no snail. It was a snake, coiled and moving.

And my head and feet (and entire self!) were waaaay to close to it.

It was just like the zoo, where they coil themselves in the corner and move in swirls against the glass: I was just lacking the oh-so-important glass.

OH MY.

I’m still proud of my response: I didn’t scream, and I didn’t hesitate too long. I knew I had to get past the door, so I inched out of the same ten inch space and picked up my pace without looking back.

And I’m sticking with the long drop bathroom for now.

After this trip, we will be heading from a little border town up to Bangkok and then on to Chiang Mai for some meetings and counseling appointments before we head back to Mae Sot. We have debated our options for getting around to all these places. We generally use the bus, which isn’t too slow, relatively safe, and significantly cheaper. There are flights between many of these places, but they are usually two to four times as expensive as the bus.

On many occasions, we have also considered which is safer. We see quite a few bus accidents along the side of the road, and it does feel very fast and out of control at times. But, if we were to wreck, there is a decent chance of us coming out alive.

There are fewer airplane accidents, but it can often feel equally as fast and out of control. The landings are particularly scary and rough, each and every time. And with a plane, an accident would likely mean immediate death.

So then the bus is better, right? Cheaper, and more of a chance of coming out alive. But do I want to be taken to a local hospital somewhere along the road in Thailand? I’m not sure.

For this trip from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, we also had the opportunity for a train. While the trains aren’t very dependable on their time scales, we aren’t really on a tight timescale per say. We thought it might be a fun opportunity to try it out.

Unfortunately, when you Google the train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, the time tables don’t come up first. Instead, we found article after article about the recent derailings on this particular path from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. From January to September, there were ten or twelve derailed trains on the path from Bangkok to Chiang Mai!

That seems a high statistic to overcome. And even if our train overcomes it, I don’t think I’d sleep through the night as intended.

We were back to square one, deciding between the bus and plane. And the bus wins most every time. We’re pretty cheap people.

So that brings us to last night, when we were getting Yim’s help to look up the bus times from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. She pulled up the time schedules, which showed our options of a VIP bus, first class, second class, and then another category we didn’t understand. She told us not to take that one, because it wasn’t government run. The VIP, first class, and second class buses are all under the government company.

“You can look at the statistics, like the train. The government bus has a good record and few accidents. But look after you go.”

{That good, hmm? So good that I should look after we go?}

“…And the government bus will give you 300 if you have an accident.”

“They pay you back 300 baht if you have accident?”
(Note that this is about $10, and about half of the price of the original ticket. It seemed like an odd apology to me.)

“No, 300,000 baht. But if you are already dead, to your family. But they have very good standards. The drivers have to take tests very often, and they change the driver every six hours. And they are not drunk.
…Well, they are drunk on holiday, but not while they are working!”

At this point I’m sure we were giving Yim our traditional response to conversations like this: laughter and a little bit of shock, to which she exasperated, “What?! I just have to tell you the truth!”

We are staying along a river, where the bank goes up steeply on both sides and buildings are built on both sides. Our “home” is in the office, on one high side of the river. The bathroom & showers we are to use are on the other side of the river, requiring a hike down the hill, across the log bridge, and up the hill again.

General Western laziness aside, this isn’t bad in the middle of a sunny day. It’s less enjoyable at night. But it is most unenjoyable in the pouring rain, when your risk of sliding down both sides or landing in the river are heightened.

But see, there is also a bathroom just up the hill from us, at a normal you-are-in-the-jungle distance. But when we asked if we could use that one, we were told to go to the other.

Hmm.

Stephen went to check it out, and we pretty quickly understood why they didn’t recommend it to the foreigners.

It’s a “long drop” as Stephen called it. Just a four {muddy, slippery} boards over a hole.

But it’s so much closer in the rain and in the middle of the night. And to be honest, being a “long drop,” you can drop your toilet paper right in rather than bringing it back with you from the squatty potty. Not too bad of a situation.

But I was a little nervous, and this was our resulting conversation:

“Can I fall in?”
“No, it’s not that big of a hole.”
“Could I miss?”
“No. …I guess you could fall in, if you fell the right way.
…Just don’t, okay?”

So far, so good. We’ll keep you posted 😉

Our latest follow up on Aung Moo, after three weeks in the hospital: he’s home!

We got the call at a pretty unfortunate time, right as we were about twelve hours from Mae Sot and on our way into the jungle a few hours later. Thankfully, we have wonderful friends, one of which who went up to the hospital with a translator and two of our neighbors to collect him, and helped pay for some of the bill.

And wow, was that a bill. Thankfully, we weren’t responsible for all of it, as the total came to 85,760 baht, or $2,724!  The doctors and nurses didn’t see us as responsible, and were really just thankful someone came to pick him up. We paid a very small portion, more as a peace offering than anything else.

Aung Moo is still on some medicine, but isn’t capable of caring for himself yet. He can’t walk currently. Some of the neighbors were ready to receive him and are caring for him, and we are praying for them to have patience. We are also praying for continued healing, and just for God’s will to be done overall. So please do keep praying for him, but also rejoicing that he is home, a miracle in and of itself!