Another Day At Mercy

Friday

We walked to Mercy this morning. I do not think it rained last night so it was an incredibly hot walk. The added weight of carrying around my laptop probably did not help. For my adult class in the morning we looked at a menu from the Dubliners in Bangkok. They were shocked at the prices, as it was more expensive than they would ever eat. This explains why you would never see a Thai person there, especially not someone from the slums. They were trying to argue that it would be cheap for Farangs, but I had to explain that even for us it was expensive.

After class Misty and I walked to the preschool, prepared for another lesson but also prepared with a back up plan just incase this preschool had a different group of children as well. However, we soon learned that we would not need to do either as the main gate of the school was locked. Although we did see children, they did not see us. We decided to head back to Mercy. On the walk back we stopped by a little café in the slums and ordered some smoothies. This place is a little secret of the slums and my strawberry yoghurt smoothie was amazing. If Heather and Carole are able to come back to Thailand next weekend, this will be a must stop for sure. In a way I am glad we did not stop here sooner as we would have stopped every week on the way home from preschool.

We visited some of the adults in the AIDS hospice. They asked us if we were staying for lunch today, but since I need to work on my presentation, Misty and I already planned on leaving before lunch. On our walk back to Soi 40 we stopped at a Kodak picture place and developed some of the pictures of us with the AIDS patients and some from Sister Joan on the milk run. We will bring the pictures back to them tonight, and hopefully see Sister Joan at sports day tomorrow. The pictures turned out great. I cannot wait to see more of them printed off as they show so much detail and the quality was excellent.

Momma is leaving on Tuesday. I cannot believe that I do not ha ve much time with her left. Some days she completely turned my day around. I do not know where her home province is, so I am not sure if it would be feasible for her to come and visit us. It is even harder to think that today is our last real day together, and I am instead working on my presentation.

Tomorrow Misty and I are participating in Sports Day, and Sunday we are going to do a Visa run to Cambodia. Our visa expires on the 20th, and we are not leaving for Laos until the end of the month, so we are in desperate need of a new stamp. Unfortunately this also means that we need to pay for a Cambodian visa just for the short time we enter the country, to leave Thailand and then have it stamped off as we exit. Frustrating because Misty and I will be traveling to Cambodia in July, but will then have to get another new visa. However, we do not really have any cheaper options, and if we do not get our visa renewed on time we could end up in jail. After seeing all of the books written about jail being compared to a living hell, I do not think that that is where I would like to end up, plus I am looking forward to going home.

In the evening we just taught our classes and then spent some time at the internet café.