Home-Stay #13 Part 2

Part 2 aka Day 2-4

There is something about homestead that I just love, maybe its the chickens waking you up at 4am or the flutter they do before they wake you. Which ever I love homestay. We woke up and after doing my few things in the morning I went to help our host mother prepare breaky. I love homestay food! So delicious, not that our food at Mirror isn't good too, just something different.

I was so excited one of the kids brought me a fresh sunflower to eat the seeds. I eat a lot of sunflower seeds back home but had never tried them fresh like this, it tasted like peas or bean seeds. They were yum! Chekidek is what they call them in Turkish (Tys sorry on the spelling). Me with my sunflower, do I need to say more...

Off to work we went, the first day was a little slow as we are really just used for manual labor, unless a volunteer comes with some type of tradesmen skill. But not many do, so its more moving sand or buckets of stuff from one place to another and usually a few cement mixing sessions. Obviously everything has to be done by hand, buckets and a hoe with a bamboo handle. Just a quick note to say bamboo is one of the most amazing things ever in the world!! Some of the villagers who have not been far from the village have never seen white people before so we supplied them with some entrainment. Below is a shot of some of the villagers and the kids that go to the child care centre we were working at.

Our job essentially was to tear down a sala (open air structure made from bamboo) which was at the local Child care centre and rebuild a concrete, walled version. So first was the destruction, it took maybe 1 hour to tear the whole thing down. Its amazing how it is so easy to tear something down so quickly that took so long to build. It was a matter of preparing the foundation and then building the skeleton roof. There were so many villagers there to help (as the village was quite large) so we just did odd bits and pieces. We had some Indoor Program people with us who spent the days there teaching the children. Below is the before picture...

Some volunteers also had to go off site to get sand with a tractor looking vehicle. There was one villager who was a little intoxicated or rather quite a lot that was helping us out. The locals just laughed at him and we tried to avoid him. But no one can say that he didn't do anything, he helped with the sand quite a lot. And saying 'Thank you' in English a lot too.

It took us two days to finish the building, the second day for us was a lot more work that we could do like mixing the cement, cutting the bamboo, getting the sand used as a filler etc. Below is the finished product, we also added in paths.

Our last night we had a celebration and was able to do Lahu dancing, which is similar to line-dancing but you do it in a circle. I love it, its so much fun. And some of the women, including our host mum dressed up in traditional clothing.

We also donated blankets to the village, representatives from each family lined up to receive the blankets from the volunteers. In winter it gets really cold at night (ok not like in Canada) but the thing that gets them here is that the houses are made from wood, bamboo and grass roofs, there is no isolation to keep warmth in, but no warmth to make as there is no heating. They have a fire in the kitchen but they light that every morning and can not sustain it burning all night. In the local village near Mirror, from memory they have a few cases of people dying each year, purely freezing to death during the night. Here are some ladies with their new blankets, 2nd from the right is our host mother.

At the moment Mirror is co-ordinating a blanket and jacket/jumper donation project, to supply blankets to as many houses that they can for the coming winter. If you would like to help this cause please do not hesitate to contact myself or Mirror directly.

Peace

Home-Stay #13 Part 1

So it's been a while. Life just got in my way I guess.

Rainy season is basically over and now things are starting the heat up, prior to them cooling down for winter.

Mirror as usual has been pretty busy. Last week we had home-stay for the new volunteers and the outdoor program. We went to village about 2-3 hours away, we packed up into two cars the Eco and the white truck. Linda, Jim and myself were in the back of the eco car and headed off. Of course stopping at the petrol station 20 mins away to get a bucket load of snacks and drinks for our trip, not that we knew how far it was at the time, you know thai time is a little different. And of course who could forget the ice-cream. YUM!
Off we went and was nice to be able to put some time in on Pimslers (?) Thai audio tapes, i think i did like 15 mins then went to music. La la la Needed a bit of a pick me up. Tis all fun a games.

The home-stay was organised last minute as our original village's access point was compromised and we were afraid we could not get there with the

cars. So we went to another village, we met with another NGOs representative who lived at this village in a town near the village (30 mins away from the village). We followed him to our destination. Below is the track to the village.

The track to the village started to get really muddy. Someone popped up with 'how funny would it be if we got bogged'. That was the sign or jinx. The reps car got bogged trying to make it up the hill. We all jumped out to give a heave-ho (in thailand you get in the back of the ute and jump up and down, pretend your in a mosh pit thats elevated and moving so hold on tight!!) It was fun, then it started to rain and of course next the Eco car got stuck, we did the same and also had to push. Finally the white car had to come through, with Thellie at the wheel and a lot of muscle power they were able to make it through…. just. So we made it to our destination a little muddy, for some a lot muddy, and a few good laughs on the way. Below is Jayden who got a little muddy.

Our home-stay village was Lahu tribe, we spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out waiting for dinner and watching the village boys playing soccer, and one of the volunteers joined. All you could hear was 'galah' 'galah' which in Lahu is foreigner (not the bird). Jim played really well. And provided much entertainment to the locals I'm sure. Dinner was all together at one of the houses on top of the hill, after dinner we had a meeting where we got to learn a bit about the villages' history and traits. This is the view from the village, so beautiful.

After that we went to our host mothers house. I was roomed with Melissa, Caitlyn, Lydia. We set up our stuff in the house and sat down with the family, or rather the family sat there the entire time and watched us as if we where 'animals in a zoo'. We had to put up of mosquito nets and that was very comical for our hosts. They ended up getting string and hammering nails in their house for us. 'Thanks' Talk about being a inconvenience! All good though, I then just dropped my stuff and sat on the floor (no chairs I'm afraid). They spoke little thai or they couldn't understand me or just ignored my attempts at thai (I found out it was the later two). Which ever we sat there and stared at each other. They cut up a melon for us, eating casually as we could Ms. Lydia decides to drop a piece on the floor and picked it up to eat it. And shoved it quickly in her mouth, I started laughing which then everyone was laughing. They were having their Lahu/Thai convo and we were chatting in English. Can anyone say AWKWARD!

This is one of the local kids! So cute!

It was all good though I love homestays! Part 2 coming soon.