photo journal no. 4

I’m currently sitting in the Miami Airport waiting for our last two flights to Nicaragua!! America is weird. Throwing toilet paper in the toilet instead of the trashcan is weird. Drinking tap water is weird. Anyways! more of that to come when I’m home for real. For now I’m enjoying some cheezits and taco bell!(:

soooo

THAILAND!! Here’s some of my favorite pictures that sum up my time here pretty well(:

meet Tik!!

Since being on the race, I either fall asleep or get carsick within ten minutes of being in some sort of moving vehicle. Something that helps a little bit with the carsickness is sitting in the front with our taxi drivers. Because our drive is around a half hour, the drivers that are learning English LOVE to talk to me and practice! Tik is one of our pretty regular drivers, and he’s always telling me history about Thailand and making sure I’m always ok. He has one of the sweetest souls I’ve ever met, and I’ve loved getting to know Him. Tik is also Buddhist, which opened the door for a lot of conversation about Jesus when he turned the question back on me. 

best lunch on the race??

One of my favorite things about Wildflower is that the women eat everything they grow! For me, that means fresh vegetables for the first time in FIVE MONTHS!!!! I never realized I could miss veggies, but folks, it happened. A usual staple is the white carrot soup and fried mushrooms & pumpkin. There’s always white rice, and there’s always some other dish with peppers and fruit. 

Pandas at ministry??

During our water breaks, one of my favorite things to do is visit the puppies!! This is Panda(: It’s so fun to run around with them and watch them explore the farm. They have grown so much in the last two months!

a taste of the midwest

With all of our manual labor, the ladies at Wildflower are constantly putting food in our mouths. Almost every time we have a water break there’s a new thai food or treat for us. This day we had corn! Here’s Elisa & I chowing down on some sweet corn(: 

I dare you! 

One of our first weekends here in Thailand, a group of us decided to go on more of a touristy outing! We played with elephants, went white water rafting, and my favorite part was this waterfall. It’s a natural waterfall that we took about a thirty minute hike to through the jungle to get to. You could slide down it like a legit slide! It was absolutely terrifying, but it was for sure the highlight of my day. And! it was smoother than the slides at American water parks where you go straight down too!

kitchen parties

We lived with another gap year for about a month at our hostel, and during the last week we had a party in the kitchen! There were no bake cookies and lots of laughter, and it all turned into a huge dance party!

hoein around in the fields

When we aren’t shoveling dirt, we usually end up hoeing in the banana fields. We get rid of the weeds and eventually move all the weeds & leaves into the bottom layer of the ditch. I’m not gonna lie, hoeing makes me miss my shovel. 

homemade soap!

During our Friday half days, the sisters like to give us a little break from manual labor. This specific day, the women & mothers taught us how to make shampoo with them! They learn new things to make all the time so that they can sell their things at the market. We cut up fruit and boiled it for the smell, and then we mixed some other ingredients with our hands to make it thick. At the end, there was so much shampoo that we had to stir it with a boat oar in a huge barrel.

dirt pilez for dayz 

If you read my “day in the life” blog, you’d know about the ditch that we filled for the past seven weeks at our ministry! Every time one dirt pile was gone, the next day it would be back – three times bigger. The sisters eventually started planning for our fast work, and the dirt was being refilled before we even got to the bottom! I found out that shoveling is actually a pretty good workout and that wheelbarrowing takes a lot of balance to make sure you don’t tip it. I’m not sure why, but I really like this kind of work. It’s repetitive so that we get into a rhythm, and we get to see our progress every day! 

street treats!

one of my favorite things to get at the market is mango sticky rice. It’s literally just mango, rice, coconut milk, and some little nuts on top, and I absolutely love it! I get it almost every single day, no joke. We leave this Sunday at midnight for Nicaragua, and that means I can go to the Sunday night market to get my last mango sticky rice!

ministry views

This is just one of my favorite pictures(:

best friends!!

Holly is one of the mothers at Wildflower that I’ve connected with the most. She’s pregnant right now with a little boy, so that means she’s usually just sitting and talking with us while we’re working. She has the biggest heart and is always checking in on us. Thanks for all the bear hugs & for holding my hand! You’re gonna be a tough one to leave. 

Surprise!!

One of the mother’s at wildflower was sold as a child and didn’t know when her birthday was, so we decided to throw her a surprise birthday party! She was so overjoyed and was weeping happy tears. It was such a beautiful blessing to celebrate her!

mushroom farming

Wildflower grows literally every vegetable imaginable. There’s even two sheds that are just for growing mushrooms. One of the days we weren’t shoveling we spent ‘planting’ the mushrooms. They explained the process to us in thai, so I’m not much help in explaining how we planted them or how they grow in the dark room. 

valentine’s day!

The night before valentine’s day, a group of us went shopping to make little goodie bags for the women. We bought flowers, nail polish, wrote notes, and made brownies for the bags, and Chloe and I lettered their names on the bags. That night we had a pizza party and we played a valentine’s themed game of fishbowl together. 

unexpected blessings

Elisa and I had a fun opportunity to go to a yoga studio and design a few things for decoration. We ended up lettering and drawing on her fridge and on a few other signs & places around her studio. She was such a blessing to us that day as she payed for our meals and just helped us process overseas missions through conversation.

EW

On the race you eat a lot of weird things: some by choice, and some not. This scorpion was by choice just so I could say that I did it. Was it disgusting? no. Would I ever eat it again? not by choice. Am I glad I did it? oh for sure. 

Thanks for reading! As always, let me know if there’s any way I can be supporting you or praying for you! I’d love to help encourage you!

I would love some prayers over our last leg of this travel for me and my squad! ALSO! I SEE MY PARENTS IN TWO WEEKS!! Prayers for safety and encouragement over our time together would be such a blessing<3 We start our new ministry in Nicaragua so soon, and I can’t wait to see what it will be! 

Kate(: