...and now back to Thailand

This is my one attempt at coherent thought during a battle with some sort of bug before I return my couch for another nap. Maybe this will give me dreams of warmer weather and lighthearted laughter.
This is the church we stayed at our first night in Thailand in Nathon Pakhon.
The church is quite large, made of cinderblock throughout and the roof was built specifically to look like praying hands. The rafter beams which you can see a little of are one solid piece of wood. They go throughout the building and are just beautiful. It is hard to believe they found one solid piece of wood to do even one beam, much less many of them. It is an open chapel space with lots of fans to help keep it cool. When the flooding occurred, it had minimum damage and held up to 200 people a day feeding and sheltering them for 2 months. There was no governments assistance for this. Just the church members giving all that they could to help others. Our students were excited but unsure at first without true running plumbing for some things. Showers were buckets of water over the head if they wanted them. No air conditioning and lots of mosquitoes. Plus they had their first interactions with gecko's. Lets just say a lot of girlish screams echoed the building for quite some time.

As with most Asian customs, you take your shoes off, especially for church. I just wish they wouldn't leave them right in the middle of getting into the building but at least to this point they are lined up decently. You will see how that epically fails later on in our visit.
Below you can see the start of our tent city for the night. The pastor and other
          family and friends helped us to put up
mosquito nets while we slept. We had small, thin, mattresses to sleep on with everything from teddy bears to spiderman to fruit on them, and as with most things in Thailand, they are not afraid of color! Between that and the fans it was definitely a place we could rest in and we would need it. The next morning would begin our work day at a church that had more trouble from the flooding. Manual labor and these kids was going to be interesting but had an element of excitement to it for our kids which I was happy to see.


When we woke the next morning, there was a great deal of activity going on outside the church. Many of the local kids were coming to school which was in a building just next door.
School buses really are not something they have in Thailand and their public buses are scary at

best so most students are brought via scooter or the back of trucks or just by walking. This is a Christian school and they do pay a tuition to come. They knew we were around their area today but were quite surprised when they came out fo their morning chapel to see us. I think for some, we were the first foreigners they had seen. At one moment there was kind of a line between the local children and us. Too shy to know what to do on either side. Then our students began to wave at them and give them the traditional Thai bow greeting. At that point the grins and giggles came out and you could tell they would have loved to just come up to us to say hello or to see if we were real. This is a school that would desperately like to sponsor us to come and teach an English camp for them next year. Who knows, maybe we will see some of them again sooner than expected. For now, it was a great start to a busy day ahead. I think it gave our students more motivation to help these kids out. When you can start putting a face to the people you are going to help, it definitely makes it more personal.