Hello Blessed (Bless-id) Followers!

Kara here! It was another beautiful (and humid) day here in Phuket.

I started out the day giving a devotional for the SHE staff and with a bowl of corn flakes. After breakfast, we were taken by our trusty wrangler to a Buddhist temple at the top of the dam. It was quite a trek. I have hiked many of hills, but this one was a doozy. After arriving, we took time to pray over the temple and admire God’s creation. Unfortunately, some of God’s creatures called bugs decided to bite a few of us. 

The food here is pretty tasty. If you know me, this sounds weird to you since I do not handle spice well AT ALL! The lovely Thai staff actually makes the food we are given to be less spicy so those of us who are wimps can actually eat it.

Anyway, after lunch, we were put onto a very….delightful project: cotton picking. To be fair, the founders of SHE had already gathered the cotton pods, but we weeded through the cotton taking out cotton seeds, grass, and sticks. The cotton we sorted will be eventually made to stuff pillows and furniture to use at SHE. The task itself was not difficult, painful, or generally unpleasant, but imagine playing with a whole bunch of soft, cotton that goes everywhere even when there is no breeze. Unfortunately, we did have a breeze (although it did not compare to Kansas “breezes”), and the cotton was hard to contain. We had cotton stuck to our clothes, hair, eyes, noses…everywhere. The task really was not THAT bad, and I enjoy helping out any way I can, but the cotton did like to tickle my nose. :-)

After dinner (fried chicken and curry rice!), it was time to prepare to go out to the bars. It is mandatory to worship before anyone goes out onto Bangla Road, and it definitely was great spending time with God. We went back to both of the bars we attended Monday night, and received a warm welcome by the whole staff at the first bar. This was a bar that we had previously been to, and we had already started to built relationships with the bar workers. We really enjoy the atmosphere of that particular bar and the people in it. Through the ice breaker of playing games (Jenga, Connect Four, Jackpot!, or this nail/hammer/wood game), we get the opportunities to connect with people. Tonight, I ended talking with the woman who owned the bar. To be honest, I was not sure if she owned the bar or her parents, but that specific detail did not matter. At one time, we were all talking to each of the personal of the bar. To me, this blows my mind that we are so welcome to have the WHOLE STAFF want to talk to us. I feel the time we spent there to be a God moment. After spending an acceptable amount of time at the first bar, we moved onto the second bar we had attended Monday.

Unfortunately, the bar owner did not receive us well, and the girl we had talked to Monday was not allowed to talk to us. It was a bummer because some of us really connected with her. Since we were not wanted there, we made it seem like we were there just to drink a beverage to try and make things better on her.

We decided to try a third bar because 1. we had enough time to. 2. there was a downpour, and we were trying to wait out the rain. This had really good results. I ended up meeting a girl who had only been working at that particular bar for eight days. Normally whenever I talk to someone, it’s been a few months or years, but not days. To not intimidate the girls, we tend to break up into mini-teams at the bars. The group I was not in ended up having a great time with the girl they talked to. The girl even took a picture of them to document the AWESOME Jenga game they were playing. I have to tell you the Jenga tower they had before Brittany O. knocked it down was REALLY impressive.

Random…whatever. I should have listened to my mother and brought an umbrella. It is rainy season here in Thailand; I come from Kansas, there is minimal rain, but the same cannot be said for Thailand. Even though the random downpours that sometime catch us at inopportune times, we are grateful for these showers because they cool things down a LOT! The result of tonight rain caused quite a bit of water to be on the road when our tut-tut was driving us home. As David stated, the rain kinda looked like chocolate milk that you would not want to drink…yum.

That brings you…us….me….whatever to now. It is after de-briefing, 1:05 in the morning, and I need to get myself to my hard mattress for some much needed sleeping. Thank you so much for the prayers, good wishes, and everything else you all are doing for us; we greatly appreciate all of it.

May the Lord bless you as you go about your day. I pray you be aware of the little things you take for granted and be appreciative. In Jesus’ precious, holy name, Amen.

<3 Kara

P.S. Happy Birthday to my favorite Sister-in-Law! Well, it’s today in the States, technically it’s the 24th here…