Welcome Homes

Today was a long day! After dinner last night, we tried to participate in Ricefields University, which is ideally four 30-minute sessions (Thai cooking, language, dance and a demonstration of the martial art, Muay Thai). After Thai Wars and dinner, the four sessions were reduced to two 20-minute sessions, Thai Dance and Thai Language.  We were not at our best. Across the board, everyone reflected that it was difficult to be attentive.  Chris, our Rustic Pathways guide, has been extremely understanding, both about the jet lag and the temperature.  Temps reached the upper 90s today, with a real feel over 100.  Even tonight, the temperature was still hovering around 85 degrees.

Tuesday morning greeted us with sunshine and a freshness.  After about 10 hours of sleep, the group enthusiastically ate breakfast and then heard the plan for the morning.  This morning we were on our way to our first service project.  Jeannie shares a reflection on her experience:

Welcome Homes was basically our first “real” activity since arriving to the Ricefields Base and was a pretty good way to start our first day. Everyone was a little uncertain as to what exactly we were going to be doing here but were given a quick wake-up call with all the hands on work that needed to be done. Seeing as none of us have had much of an experience in homebuilding, we weren’t sure if we were going to be more of a burden or a help on the jobsite. To our surprise, we were all much better handy workers than we imagined and got down and dirty helping build the foundation of the house. As grueling as churning cement for several hours might sound to a stranger, the thought of giving such an immense gift to a family in need managed to outweigh all the struggles it involved. We are all looking forward to seeing the work on the house progress over the next couple days and we can’t wait to see what we can help with tomorrow.  ~Jeannie

This is our project for the day. This is a progressive project for Rustic Pathways groups. There are two engineers responsible for the project and they were on hand to oversee the work. This home is being built for a poor family who is currently living in Bangkok, working to make money to return home to Udon Thani.  The land upon which the house is build was inherited by the current homeowners. It has one big room on the inside, with a bathroom out back and a kitchen out front.

Getting our first look at the house.

Getting our first instructions

Before we could plaster the walls, we had to make our own plaster

After sifting 12 buckets of sand, it was time to add to cement to the tub.  

It took teamwork to make three tubs of cement and apply two full tubs to the walls.

Just a small sampling of the walls which were plastered this morning!