i dreamt of a thai christmas

i know, i know.

you're wondering where i've been for the last couple of weeks.

am i still alive, did i come down with malaria and why haven't i updated?

well to be truthful [as one always should be], i've been painfully busy and i say painfully because there is a certain amount of busy i do enjoy but i have long past that line and am now dwelling somewhere near dazed and confused.

the holidays, whoa.

a whirl wind of well, weird and a total lack of the classic holiday spirit [for the most part]. that sounds terrible, which it wasn't but that really is the best way for me to describe it. it was so difficult to 'feel' like it was Christmas when it's 85 outside and i'm wearing shorts. my roommates and i did our best to decorate our cement walled hovel and make it a little more cozy. our 3ft. plastic tree received a lot of love.

even with the huge Agape Home Christmas party and other parties at other venues, familiarity was not reached. it just felt like any other day. but it was good. it was really good. hearing 'jingle bells' screamed at five in the morning on christmas day

and actually receiving a real stocking for the first time in my life, the moments that were good were so good.

and though i missed my family, i had some pretty spectacular stand-in's as anna's parents, Rob and Esther, opened their home to me and really made me feel like i belonged there. plus there have been so many people visiting for the holidays, including amy's whole family, anna herself and her fiance dom, and Esther's cousin rick and his whole family.

so if anything, i wasn't lonely.

i was fortunate to have Christmas eve off, which i spent with my friends doing some last minute shopping and general wandering around chiang mai. normally my family has what we call a 'traditional swedish meal', this year i had pizza,

a totally acceptable stand-in. one event that did stick to some form of tradition was the candle light service i went to at my church. it brought back so many fond memories of singing carols and trying to mold my candle with just the heat of my hands [totally works].

i worked Christmas morning which was fun because i was able to be apart of some of the classic Agape home traditions like eating buttered toast with condensed milk and drinking hot milo for breakfast. it was so much fun watching the faces of kids as they torn through so much neatly wrapped paper to get at the new treasures inside. after shift i went to a lunch with my friend's families that a missionary couple has at their home every year. we played volleyball and ate actual turkey, it was wonderful.

on Christmas night it so happened that all the people who actually had family here dispersed to be with each other, leaving me, sarah and our friends ozzie and shanna with no one to claim us. we decided to call ourselves the 4 orphanes and proceeded to go eat at Subway for our grand Christmas meal, and grand it surely was.

i realized then as i realize now that i kept waiting for it to feel like Christmas when everything i was longing for had nothing to do with what i really should have been rejoicing about. but i have everything to be thankful for and though rejoicing may come slowing, it does come...even when i don't 'feel' like it.

in fact especially then.

finding time to breath

so while i have a minute where my thoughts are still and i can breath deeply...

my days seem to get away from me before i realize where i am with what seems like a nonstop build up of busyness. sometimes i'm ok

with this go go go but then i realize i can't remember when the last it was that i was free to write in my journal or take a nap or just think. any second i let the gears slow down i get bombarded with reminders that i'm not done yet, my check list for the day has just been revised and now i have ten more things to do.

sometimes i find myself getting so frustrated that i get overwhelmed and claustrophobic that in one way or another i end up exploding. it's the shorts moments when i can actually breath that take me a step back though, making me realize that i need to learn to 'move like water' [some advice i received this week].

i realized today that i've witnessed a lot of celebrations in the last few days and weeks.

some were hard but as a whole wonderful, as three of the boys i worked with were adopted during the last few weeks. it was hard to let them go, seeing apart of the Agape family leave. but at the same time, witnessing people becoming parents was so amazing and knowing that now those boys will have a family of their own just overwhelmed me.

today we celebrated the near end of my roommates Maiken and Hanna's time here in thailand. they don't leave till right after Christmas but with all the festivities going on, we had to have their party a little early. I have really learned to love their friendship and watching them work as they are so committed and really love the children. I'm going to miss their laughs as my house will be a little more quite and a little less danish with out them.

side note: they made danish rice pudding and it kicks so much ass. i've never made my dislike for rice pudding a secret but their recipe made me a believer.

i can't believe it but Christmas is coming so soon upon me and i can barely get over the fact that i'm still wearing shorts in december. seeing Christmas celebrated so sparsely here makes me excited to even see a fake tree standing in someone's living room. this last saturday i had the pleasure of baking cookies all day with sarah, amy and our friend shanna. it felt good to be back in the kitchen along with all the cooking mishaps that are destined to happen. such as the salt slash sugar mix up sarah and i had with our first batch of molasses cookies. luckily we did some quality control before we actually baked them, only to realize what we thought was the sugar container was really salt. even after trying to possibly kick out the salt with some actual sugar, the batch had to be tossed.

esther [anna's mom, my home-away-from-home mom] used this experience to remind us that we are the salt of the earth. and honestly, until that moment, i never understood that story from the bible. so maybe that cookie dough didn't go completely to waste.

i keep waiting to feel like i've gotten the swing of things but i still end up confused every once in a while. trying to find a rhythem to my day to day can be difficult but maybe that's where i'm getting it all wrong in the first place. maybe i'm just trying to hard to make thailand fit for me, and really it's the other way around. i have to learn what it really means to be flexible and realize so called 'plans' can and will be changed or disregarded. i guess this is all one big lesson on patience...

my favorite.

little victories

life is moving on and at times it feels like there isn't really anything exciting to say. but lately i've come to appreciate the little victories that arise at different times of my day. i've heard amy talk about these 'little victories' for the past two years but i never really understood the importance of them till now. they are the little moments that happen where you win just a little bit even when it feels like everything sucks. when i would feel like the weight of my failures were overpowering, amy would always try to show me where the moments of triumph were amongst all of that. most of the time i just wanted to wallow in my own misery too much to realize the important of these little victories.

and even though i don't exactly have gloom hovering over me, my day to day can feel lackluster with routine and at times even isolating when i don't have the motivation to leave my house. however, it's come to my attention that despite the disagreements life and i may have, when it's all said and done, i'm doing pretty alright. and it's my little victories that give me a little peace with this understanding. my week's victory is walking into a room and hearing the kids scream my name and running up to hug me or at least attach themselves to my legs as i try and walk around. hearing them say my name has just been such a reward after the weeks of just feeling like a visitor.

they've accepted me.

next step: getting them to listen to me.

last night i had the pleasure to witness a huge victory. the nursing dorm that amy and sarah are r.a.'s for competed in this cheerleading competition between six other dorms at payap university. now when i say cheerleading, don't let images of crowd boosting catchy cheers and short skirts flood your mind [well, minus the short skirts, there were plenty of those]. thai

cheerleading is kind of a mix of traditional thai dancing, interpretive dance, broadway musical and mtv on crack all mixed together. this is a no joke huge production, pyrotechnics included.

the students take this competition seriously with practices starting with the beginning of school in october. during the week prior to the big event, amy and sarah could hear the dancers still working till 2 in the morning to get it perfect. and really, all their hard work paid off, their dance was hands down the best and absolutely phenomenal. i don't know any of these girls but i felt proud through association. watching the different dances was really fun and in some cases, um, interesting. one group left me with memories of a certain nfl wardrobe malfunction. over all the experience was awesome, i don't think i would every see anything quite like this in america.

oh and the best part...the nursing dorm won!

the screams of joy were over powering, jumping and hugging and crying all around. mind you thais' are not so keen to show heaps of emotion, let alone hug, so this was really a spectacle. not only was it great to enjoy the victory with the students who worked so hard, but it was also so good to see amy and sarah feel a little more apart of this huge family they've been trying so hard to break into. seeing them getting pulled into the coolest victory circle i've ever seen was such a epic moment.

...so a victory here and there, it makes each day something different from the rest and helps me escape the mundane.

today's victory:

i decided one of the little boys i work with looks like the thai version of gary coleman.

win? mmm yes, i think so.

[and the winner is...]