Thai ’08 Journal 13

Today I spent the entire work time on the farm picking sweet sop. It seemed initially to be easy work, but it turned out to be fairly exhausting. Lifting the heavy baskets of fruit in the hot tropical sun was surprisingly tiresome for the team. We also did a considerable amount of walking to and fro on the farm amongst the various orchards. However, the actual picking itself is not all that intensive in terms of hard labor. Before we left we spent some time with the injured owner of the farm. That was exciting. He asked one of us, in this case Vie, to bring a plant from the land that was neither edible nor medicinal. She brought a number of plants to him and he knew every one of them. Every plant was either edible or medicinal. Tomorrow we’ll try again.

The nurses spent the morning at the elementary school again looking for lice. You may want to take a look at some of the photos from either Ken Rogers’s or Bhima’s collections –their albums are now also located at my photo website, along with Kristine’s, Megan’s, Kyle Lafferty’s, and Kari’s. Ken spent the morning with the nurses and he says some of the kids’ heads were filled “colonies” of lice. It sounded like quite a sight to behold. But it was great to later see some of the kids with their shower caps still on when on their way home after having been treated by the nurses.

This evening almost everybody went to the Tuesday market. It was a crowded affair on one of the streets in town. As with all these street markets, there were lots of fascinating things for sale, including some pretty gross meats – at least from a western point of view.

Tonight we had our first group worship and debriefing. We had a wonderful time together – it’s certainly a great group. But it was the Dybdahl’s last night with our team and we will certainly miss them. After the meeting was over, many of the team members tried a number of new fruits that we’d brought from the farm and the market. A number were even brave enough to try eating mangos the “Pedrito way” – which is so much better than with a knife and fork.