Thailand!

Gotta love technology, I cannot upload my pictures, anyway, here it is!
With India still fresh in our memories the Northbound team arrived in Bankok, Thailand. The contrast was unmistakable. Coming from a place where the street is used as a bathroom and to this clean place where the suffucientcy of the , there is a Seven Eleven around every corner and the trafic lights have a countdown timer!
We spent two days de-briefing our India experience and had some time off just to rest and to get ready for our next ministry point.
Out team split into two groups, one group went to Cambodia and my group went to Phuket which is an island but still part of Thailand. We took a low class bus that was much cheaper than any bus in South Africa and expected the worse for our twelve hour long trip. We were pleasantly surprised when the bus was so much better anything back home and to top ot all off, we later discovered that the bus ticket included a food voucher! We didn’t pick it up because the ticket was written in Thai and I couldn’t read Thai yet ; )
We were warmly welcomed to the school by our hosts with mango and Pepsi! We stayed in a classroom and our task was to paint certain areas of the school. We are getting really good at painting now!
During our time there we also experienced a Tsunami warning and two earthquakes. The second earthquake measured a 5.4 on the Richter scale!On our off day we hired Schooters and explored the island. We went from beach to beach and enjoyed Phuket like propper tourists. We met some elephants and got soaked on the ride! We mastered the art of ‘hitch hiking’ to the beach after work but not before a failed attempt that ended up in a two hour night walk!
The last night we camped at a nature reserve next to the airport for free. What a blessing! There was coral everywhere and you could walk into the ocean for about 300m! We experievced the most amazing sunset! We had to get up really early the next morning to catch our flight to Kuala Lumpur! The locals gave us some Durian, which is a delicacy to them but not very tasty to westerners, it has a very distinctive and strong smell, it cannot be mistaken! The people are extremely friendly but their language is completely different from ours! Communication with the locals was very difficult and a lot of the sighnage was in Thai which looked something like scribbled hyroglyphics! Their alphabet has ten vowels and they can’t pronounce the first part of my name, so I ended up being called ‘Loaf’ most of the time, very flattering.
I was blown away by the generosity that people showed us. We were continuously blessed with food from moms from the school and the staffmembers. This was perfect because our budget for theour time there was pretty tight! God provides abundantly and he even uses people that don’t even know him! The language barrier made things difficult but we could see God working in the headmistresses heart.
There you go, Thailand is not just a good holiday destination!