First DTS Outreach

I just finished my first outreach. We stayed at a place called Baan Nam Jai (Home of the Open Heart) for just under two weeks. I did jobs like moving dirt around, picking weeds, cleaning up a tool shed, weeding a garden, planting flowers, and the always easy office work. I’ll just run through schedule and make a few notes afterward.

6:30AM - Breakfast
7:00AM - Quiet Time/Reading my Bible
7:30-8:30AM - Worship or Prayer Meeting
8:30AM-12:30PM - WORK TIME!
12:30-1:30PM - Lunch
1:30-3:30PM - Office Work/Teaching English
3:30-5:30PM - Free Time
5:30-6:30PM - Dinner
We had two hours of team time in the evening after dinner. We also had different duties ranging from breakfast/dinner clean-up to laundry to planning team time at night.

The biggest news was that the “bamboo palace” fell down during our stay there. This was the place where the women slept and we all hung out. We noticed in the beginning that it was starting to lean. The foundation was just wood posts stuck into the ground. Ryan, the only other guy on the team, and I stayed in another building. We were hanging out in it when we noticed the tilting was getting REAL bad. We then managed to move out all the stuff, including a small refrigerator. About 10 minutes later it collapsed, just after we took a picture in front of it! It really felt like God was holding it up just long enough for all of us to get our stuff out.

The outreach didn’t feel like a ton of work. I only had to work four hours in the morning. The afternoon work time was mostly office work. It didn’t feel like we were “roughing it” since we were staying just outside Chiang Rai. We traveled the least amount of time of the outreach groups. Most of them headed out to remote villages.

I enjoyed the time with my fellow team members. They are all pretty cool and easy going. Our leader is a bilingual Thai woman. Our team consists of two Thai women, one Indian woman, one Malaysian woman, three Aussies (one guy), one American woman, and me. I hardly even notice all the different nationalities. At this point I’m very used to being in the minority. There is only one other American guy in our class of 34.

After outreach all the groups met at the top of a huge waterfall. And yes, I did go behind it! On the inside it felt like a torrential rain storm though. I could barely keep my eyes open. It was a lot of fun, albeit cold.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking.