Birthday Roti

Today started with the best wake up call a girl could ask for. Because several people are getting ready to leave, Rob decided that we were going to have a thorough house cleaning this morning beginning at 7 A.M. sharp. At 6:52 A.M., there was a loud knock on our door with a bellow of, "TEAM CLEANING IN 8 MINUTES!" Naturally, I started hysterically laughing. Tell me that's not great!

Something else that's great is the fact that while I was still half asleep, I verbalized how I was envisioning everybody cleaning the house while listening to Jock Jams. That's when I decided to pursue my dreams of re-living our cleaning of the beach house at Lindsay's wedding. Yes, while we were all lined up, ready to start, a few stragglers were stumbling down the stairs. While lyrics that were literally screaming, "Areeee youuuu readyyyy?!" were playing, I used my best Katie-broadcasting voice to announce the volunteers into the "Cleaning Ceremony". I'd like to make a quick shout out to Katie for being my inspiration as well as everybody else that participated in the cleaning two summers ago that actually knows what I'm talking about.

In other news, I think I can officially consider today to be my last day of volunteering. Although I technically have tomorrow in northern Thailand, my work is literally done at this point (hallelujiah!). Shawney and I finished the activities today, burned them onto CDs, delivered them to the last schools, made master copies for the house, and then stood a little bit taller from the pride of our completed project. I turned to Shawney at that point and said, "Well... now what?"

Birthday roti. That's what! The HELP team really outdid themselves by bringing out a roti cake for my birthday after dinner (and by "roti cake," I really mean a bunch of rotis that are laid out on a tray). They even had our land-lady play her karaoke CD of "Happy Birthday," which had versions in literally every genre of music that you could imagine. Then, they did our team bonding activity (which started out as a joke, but has since turned into something very sincere!) that I mentioned several weeks ago of, "I love Meghan and I appreciate her because...". It was amazing! I love the HELP team! I love roti! I love birthdays! I love Thailand (even though I'm turning a half life tomorrow)! My whole life is great! I can do anything good! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!