I know, I know. I'm behind again. Mea culpa.
The bad thing is I don't remember a whole lot from last week, except that things at the foundation were fairly uneventful. We got a whole new batch of people in, 18 additional gap year or college age kids to be exact. But, surprisingly, they are a fun group to hang out with. The one bad thing I discovered last week was that I'm allergic to coconut milk, which sorta stinks since coconut sticky rice was quite lovely and most of the curries hear are made with coconut milk. Oh well, add another thing to my long extensive list of allergies...
As I mentioned before we are now moving into the rainy season. We have these great rain storms that come on quickly, pour heavily with thunder and lighting, then it all stops just as quickly. Anyway, the storms have been causing quite a bit of damage to buildings on the foundation property as well as local villages. The outdoor team spent last week reinforcing the foundation of one of the newly constructed buildings here, fixing the sidewalk that was crumbling, and we demolished a building in town. Here's the crazy part... we had to do everything using only hammers, hoes and buckets...buckets with holes and cracks, I might add. Forget calling up a cement or dirt supplier or having backhoes or jackhammers, we had none of those modern conveniences you Farang (that's "foreigner" in Thai) have. We used the hammer to tear down the building walls, and the hoe and buckets to move the debris from the hillside down to the side of the road to be picked up and reused later. When it came time to repair the sidewalk we had to dig our own sand, collect buckets of rocks as well as mix our own concrete, again using only the hoes and buckets. Its backbreaking work carrying buckets of rocks and sand 150 feet because we had no other means to transport the stuff from the pits to the work site in the sweltering heat.
Needless to say, I'm a hot mess. Even with several applications of SPF50, I still managed to get a funky tan, I sweat constantly and I stink like a little boy. What I would give for a bottle of my perfume! But, its all for a good cause, right?
But, when you think about it, it really is amazing what you can do with just those three tools.I guess I now know what I would bring with me if I was stranded on a deserted island and could only bring three things. If I could bring four, I would throw in the bottle of Angel.
