Rubbish

I've been a bit rubbish this past week at trying to get another blog up. Sorry for that...again. Last week went by pretty quick, culminating with a dinner at sizzler and Indiana Jones. Yeah, I was pretty excited to see the film, so were some people in the house. I figured it was time to treat myself to some western food (a rarity to say the least) and finish the meal with some Indiana Jones. With a free salad bar I ate so much I wanted to throw up. Then my burger came out and I had to finish that too. It was the first burger I had since I left at the beginning of January. All in all it was a good night. There were nine of us that went, the seven other volunteers and the volunteer coordinator that works for CCD. We treated her to dinner and the movie to say thank you for the work she does with us.

Most of the girls living in the house here have been sick from some kind of stomach flu or another, so the week was pretty depressing at the house here. I left thursday night into the city to see the family I know from Buriram as they were at a conference hosted by a church in Bangkok. The speaker was a pastor from Georgia, USA. It was good to see the family for the evening and they insisted on driving me back home. I tried to tell them it wasn't necessary, since I could take the sky train over all the traffic and then catch a bus and be back in a mere 45 minutes or so. It's hard to refuse the hospitality though, and probably by some cultural rules they felt some kind of obligation to make sure I made it home. They are a lovely family though, so I don't complain one bit...even though it took 2 hours to negotiate our way through the traffic before we made it back. They have been really good to me everytime I come out here, since I lived with them in the slums one summer. They call me their foreigner son, and I call them my Thai parents. I try to show their picture to people when I'm trying to negotiate for a Thai price on something and say that I'm not a foreigner at all. Doesn't work too well, think I might need a darker tan.

On that note, I'm trying to learn the Isaan dialect, which is the dialect spoken in the Northeast part of Thailand, where they are living now. It's hard to learn because there are different tone rules on the words, and around 15 to 20 percent of the words are completely different than Thai. It's hard not to confuse them, but I figure that if I can at least know the words to understand what is being spoken it will be a big help, since they can all speak central Thai up there.

I'll try to get another post up tomorrow with some pictures from today when we took one of the cerebal paulsy girls to church and then out for ice cream. She was super excited about the whole day and it was a lot easier than Tuesday when we took 6 of the girls out for dinner and ice cream all at once!