Opportunity Blog

Add and Amanda

Add, my daughter in law is in Nang Rong now. She hoped to join Nathan here but due to the unpredictability of the IRS, which employs Nathan, he is back in the U.S. already. They did have a week together before Add came. She needs to renew her passport and Thai national ID card, not to mention visit her parents who she has not seen for 6 years. Add returns to the US at the end of January. She is due in May when we will be back in Texas to see our newest grandchild.

She is currently visiting us. She is over at the foundation office right now helping Sue teach an English lesson. In fact, I have to interrupt this to go get them both, along with our volunteer Amanda for a trip to the new “big box store” of Nang Rong, Hokee. Back in an hour or so….

Since August most of our English teaching has been done by Amanda, our 22 year old volunteer from Texas. She will be here until mid February and is doing a great job. She did take six weeks off to go to India with Sue. You can read all about all this in Amanda’s blog. She’s been keeping it up since before she came to Thailand. I just found out about it yesterday. To get another point of view click here to see all the details, with pictures!

In Mae Ui’s house Amanda shows some pictures on her computer. Sue to the left. Yai Et, one of our elderly, to the right.

I’m not sure just any American could come over and work and live at our foundation like Amanda does, but it has certainly worked out well for her. She fits in great and does a great job living with people who speak only a very small amount of English. We do have some English speakers around here at the foundation, but none living in the foundation homes, except for Amanda. Add will be spending time out there now that she is here, however, and several are applying to come as volunteers before Amanda leaves.

One place her blog disagrees with mine is about mosquitoes. We hardly ever see them where I live in Nang Rong, but they do seem to have more at the foundation property lately. I think this is due partly to the wet rice fields which are just now dried out since the harvest. The other part is due to lack of screen doors on her house, which I will look into fixing tomorrow. It is still not up to the level of my son’s backyard in Austin Texas, but I think we can improve things even so.

I thought it humorous how Amanda was determined to pack her rain boots for Thailand. They must have taken up a lot of room. We don’t use boots here unless we are up to our knees in mud in a wet rice field. Otherwise we just have sandals. Your feet might get a bit wet, but they dry and it’s warm here. I’ll ask her today whether she has had any occasion to use them.