Every Night, I Blog in the Morning

Today, Shawney and I decided to go to day two of the English Teaching conference. We had every intention of leaving after the morning session, but were having so much fun that we went back in the afternoon. We got to play games (which we included in our activities list for the schools!) and get to know some Thai teachers better. One woman in particular, Lorra, may be the most hilarious person that I ever met (and I’m totally stoked that she just friended me on Facebook!). She was cracking jokes all day and I couldn’t stop laughing! My personal favorite joke was when she told us that her boyfriend wasn’t handsome, but he was kind to her. And nice. And he had money. Yes, she totally knew what she was saying. To Lorra’s boyfriend: I’m sorry.

The lady running the conference also made a hilarious comment, but hers was more of an accident. When teaching everybody to make more complex sentences, she said something like, “Don’t just say ‘I woke up.’ Say, ‘Every morning at 6:30, I wake up at 8:00.’” It took everything I had to hold myself together on that one. In fact, as I was typing this post, I started cracking up at it again. (Warning: I’ll probably be saying phrases like this for awhile! Kind of like the title of this post, which oddly makes sense...!)

On a more serious note, God's hand played a more important role today than just a positive experience at the conference. We had a meeting with all of the volunteers this afternoon, and it got me fired up for the rest of the summer. One of our country directors asked us who would benefit from our help the most. Immediately, we realized that it's the tribe people, many of which are immigrants from Burma. Many of these people do not have citizenship, which means that they are not recognized by the Thai government and don't have the priveleges of citizens, one of which being public schooling. It's amazing to me that in the U.S., we take something like education for granted when there are so many people in the world, including the ones that we're about to impact in Thailand, that just don't have the opportunity to be educated. Now, our game plan is to continue the projects we've started, but to also head into the hills so that we can make a difference in the lives of the tribe people in any way possible. Please pray that God's hand continues to be shown as clearly as it was today so that we can make miracles happen here in northern Thailand... both at night AND in the morning!