[watching the sunrise]
it's a simple morning.
i'm sitting on my bed eating cinnamon sugar toast and watching the ebb and flow of my green curtains as a soft wind circulates throughout my room.life moving further out and further in.
i'm finding joy in the routine of my everyday.
every morning i wake up and am reminded that 5:30 am is the best part of the day to lay in bed.
the room is still, cool and beautifully quiet.
but it doesn't last long before my roommates and i roll out of our beds and stumble out to our bikes for the morning ride.
we all slowly meander into the volunteer room and crash on the couches for the brief moment where our bodies make a jump start from tried to tried but faking it.
each new day and each new shift is so entirely different from the last one, we always recap and recuperate between each one with the all-knowing nods and laughter. there are seven of us volunteers at the moment, alice, rachel, kelsey, donna, christina, sarah and myself. if nothing else there is one universal bond
between us, we all came here to thailand and to work at Agape Home.
and we laugh, a lot.
each day we have a 6ish hour break between shifts while the kids are in school. i use this time to sleep, study thai, talk to people from home and other generally lazy activities, and usually in that order.
evening shift is from 4 to 7 and the bike ride home always acts like an unavoidable obstacle course as we keep our heads down in a vain effort to protect ourselves from the hundreds of bugs flying in the air and pelting us on our bikes. having some little creature land in my eye is almost a daily occurrence [and for some reason it always seems to be my right eye...].
my roommates and i divide and conquer for our dinners, dispersing to our favorite market stands and returning home with styrofoam boxes and plastic bags [here almost everything is a bag then put in another bag, it's not uncommon to see someone even drinking something out of a bag].
we park ourselves at the table or in front of the tv to laugh or commiserate about our day while pirated dvds play in the background. then one by one we go off and do our own thing, be it reading a book or just checking facebook before we all slowly go to sleep with our fans blowing over us.
my days off are almost always spent in town with sarah and amy, sitting in coffee shops or going on some adventure on our motorbikes and finding
ourselves lost, again.
some days feel slow and monotonous, others are gone before i realize once again i'm waking up at 5:30. the idea of a daily routine always seemed so boring to me but having one here makes me feel more lived in and makes the whole 'living in thailand' thing seem normal and comforting. i no longer feel like i'm just visiting. i may be a farang [a westerner] and there is nothing that will change my appearance that would make me fit in more with the dark skinned, black hair, black eyes, and not to mention short thai people.
but i belong here nonetheless.
[sunset over doi suket and the rice fields]
