Recap of Recent Events

The time between posts just gets away from me! It's been over a month since I updated my blog, and a lot has happened since then. Last weekend I went to Baan Maknoow (the Lemon Village) to visit my friend Orn and her family. They were having a Rocket Festival in her village so we went to check out the festivities.  I was a little disappointed because Baan Maknoow really didn't have any lemons, but there were plenty of coconuts and mangoes. Wow, I'm going to miss mangoes when I come back to the states! Orn had 2 huge mango trees in her yard and a few coconut trees too.

Here Orn is teaching me how to scrap the pulp out of a coconut to make coconut milk (They think it's funny that we buy the coconut milk from the store). It was pretty fun, but a little painful because you have to sit on this narrow wooden board that has a sharp grater at the end.

Sone's new roomate is from the same area as Orn so she came over to visit us while we were there. Her name is Dam and she has the cutest 2-year-old twin sisters.

 This is how kids get around in Laos...no such thing as car seats, so you have to learn to hold on and sit still from a really young age.

 The different villages had groups that danced around the temple...here's Orn dancing with the women from her village.  I don't know if you notice their hands, but this style is called faan and the way you hold your hands is very important and determines whether you can dance beautifully or not (I'm still working on that!)

Orn and me after her dance

 Sone, Orn and I waiting for the Rocket launching to start

 A few of the ladies from Orn's dancing group

 The ladder-like structure in the background is where they launch the rockets from. The men in the foreground are carrying some of the rockets. Different villages and companies create their own rockets to launch in the afternoon. The idea is that the rockets go up in the air and when they come back down, they will bring the rain for the crops. So essentially every village has a rocket festival as a way to petition for rain for the upcoming rice season.

In other news, our crowd of neighbor kids continues to grow. I must admit, for all my love of children, Christa is usually more patient with them and excited by their visits than I am. Sometimes I feel tired out and just want to be alone at home... and then the little heads peak in the window and they say "ma lin" which means, "we came to play." They really are sweet, and it's interesting to see how in our neighborhood  there really are two sides of the tracks and the behavior/manners of the kids from the "richer" side is much more polite and respectful than the kids from the "other" side of the tracks. I need to remember though, that it has way more to do with family situation than money in the bank. Two of the girls (about 7 and 9 years old) are sisters and their mom went to Thailand a few years ago to earn money and send it back to the family. She hasn't been heard from since, and they now live with their drug-addict father.  The ones who are sometimes a bit harder to love and enjoy are often the ones who need our love the most. You can be remembering Christa and I in that as we seek to love our neighbors (all of them!) well.

They helped me make a birthday cake for one of our teammates this week.

In still other news (but food related), several of my students have asked me to teach them how to make certain sweets or desserts and so I've decided to have a little cooking club on Thursday afternoons. This week 6 of my students came over and we made Hockey Pucks (Ritz Crackers with peanut butter covered in chocolate) and sugar cookies. It's a really fun (though quite hot - with the oven on!) way to build better friendships with my students. And it is also necessary since I've stockpiled so many amazing ingredients (afraid to use them before because I had to "save" them)... Well, now I only have about 6 weeks til we leave for the summer, so we're going to bake through my stockpile and hopefully have a lot of fun and not get too fat in the process!!