Thursday 24th

As I sit by a cascade of waterfalls on Friday afternoon I will catch up on our activities from Thursday.

As our day at Thoo Mwee Khee school wasn’t going to start until after lunch Kevin and I decided to walk again to school and the girls would be picked up by Brandon at lunchtime.

Kevin and I wanted to get some more hardware for another tire swing. We thought we saw a shop that sold some u-bolts we could use. As we walked we found a hardware shop of sorts and they did have what we were looking for. We were able to put together another tire swing just off the soccer field.

The kids put this to use right away.

Today we were attending Jessica’s class with the first and second year students. The kids assignment was to interview each one of us (me, Jenny, Kevin and Sherry). They would have 10 minutes to interview each of us and then to continue their assignment they have to write a summary report on each person. Their questions ranged from our names, age, number of children, etc. to the funny ones asking if Teacher Jessica was ever naughty as a child, how many boyfriends did Jessica have in her life to even asking how we would feel if Jessica (or Brandon) married a Karen person. We had lots of fun doing this. We went through 2 different periods of this.

Afterwards we left and came to this same waterfalls I am sitting at now to look around. It is just beautiful here. I decided to walk here today as it’s only a mile or two from our hotel.

Today we had to get up early to go and listen, along with the whole BLA student body, about different teams that went back to villages in Karen state for an internship or student teaching. They send the second year students on this internship. There were 23 different pairs or teams that went back to Burma, into villages to help in any way they could with teaching, sports camps or cleanup in the villages. What a great experience this gave the students. We only got about halfway through the teams when we ran out of time and left for lunch. The others will have to go at a later date. Friday’s are Karen dress day so I took a picture of Jessica and Brandon showing off their Karen clothes.

Today is Brandon’s birthday so we are headed back to the school later this afternoon for supper. The Karen tradition is for the birthday person to feed others on their day so Kevin and Sherry are having the cooking team put together a meal for the 400 or so people on campus and in the dorms. Reminds me of when the Liberian team fed the churches in our Liberian version of the potluck we did. It should be interesting.

Tomorrow we have to leave around 8:00 a.m. as Brandon and Jessica are taking 12 or so students to Chiang Mai for some competitions. Jessica and Brandon are always running. I’m glad they’re young enough to handle it. Kevin, Sherry, Jenny and I will follow in another vehicle and drive the 6-8 hours to Chiang Mai. After dropping the students off we will look around Chiang Mai and spend the night up there. We will travel back on Sunday after church somewhere and stay another night away, possibly in Mae Sott. We’ll see where we end up.

Not sure when I’ll update next. Until then…