This morning started out with a lovely breakfast of…. Grilled cheese and corn sandwiches! And if you didn’t want that, you could have grilled cheese and sausage (think bland hot dog) or grilled cheese and raisin. Yum yum. Blech.
Today the environmental volunteers joined us in working at the school, so we traveled in a big bus. Yesterday Spud watched our driver collect tamarind pods from some trees on the school campus and he wondered how they taste. This morning he found a long stick and got help from the school caretaker and knocked a few pods out of the trees. He was so proud. To eat them you peel off the hard outer pod and you don’t eat the seeds inside. The fleshy part when ripe tastes kind of like a tart apricot with a little cinnamon.
We got right to work on painting light and dark blue. We completely finished the wall on the right side of the gate!
We got so close to finishing the entire middle section– ran out of time and dark blue paint to finish the touch ups, but it’s so close! All of the light blue is done, and it’s capped off with Nixi Ray’s cute elephant mural. Oh yeah, we also did everything from scraping to done on the last panel of the front side too- at least it’s ready for a new Welcome mural.
Here’s Nixi Ray showing off her artwork!
While some of us were still painting (we had about 20 minutes left before cleaning up), one of the coordinators recruited a few of the volunteers to start scrubbing and scraping the final section of wall on the far left. It was in full sun and about 90 degrees out. We were all so glad we still had paint in our buckets.
Here we are at the end of this service project! We all threw away our painting clothes after this. Plus I took some pictures of the front of the wall and inside the school campus so you can see the finished paintings and soccer field.
Spud got to play one last soccer game with the Thai kids and gave them all stickers. He had so much fun with his Thai friends!
We didn’t take lunch with us today because it’s Friday – beach day – so we jumped back on the bus after cleaning up. Spud surprised us with a lost tooth while I was cleaning out paintbrushes! The toothfairy will have to find him in Thailand!
We brought pins that say “You Make a Difference” from home, as well as cute waterbottle stickers. We handed them out to everyone on the bus on the way back, and then to everyone else at lunch. Small gesture, but it made a lot of people smile and say thank you.
We got back on the bus after lunch and went to Khao Takiab beach to enjoy the sand, sun & water for a few hours. Littlest girl took a long nap on the beach (she came down with a fever just as we were leaving the school… But it was gone after her beach nap. Grateful for that!) It felt really good to relax and cool off after a hard morning of work! There were thousands of teeny tiny crabs in little holes all over the wet sand– we had a blast watching them and catching some. Also, when we were leaving the beach we saw our first wild monkeys! They were dumpster diving in the parking lot. One of them got in a garbage can and lowered himself down while looking around like he was a secret agent. Made us laugh!
Back at the Sunshine Center for the last time we swam, had dinner, and enjoyed another sunset. We said goodbye to the people we had spent the week with – it’s interesting how even though we have almost zero in common with any of them, after a week of working side by side with people you become friends despite differences. That doesn’t mean we want to go hang out with them at a bar tonight… But they are good people trying to find their place in the world.
Even though this service week wasn’t exactly what we thought it would be, we are really glad that we had the opportunity to do something impactful while traveling and give our family this experience. We worked hard and did as much as we possibly could in the time that we had, and it was fun to see the difference we made in a few days– a difference that will last hopefully for years & help that community and the students at the school. We will definitely look for more opportunities to serve on future trips, but we’ll try to find things that are a better fit for families with kids.
Spud has been watching the house geckos all week long and tonight he was finally able to capture a tiny one before bed. They are so cute! It was a great wildlife day for him!
