Saturday February 6

Sirirat brought me to an award ceremony she was being honroed in this morning. she seemed as disinterested in it as i was.

most of the rest of the day we spent just hanging out. a slow saturday. i spent the morning drawing pictures with the orphans and doing portraits of them.

sirirat brought me over to her neighbor's house to invite them to come to my english class tomorrow. a few of them had come by the week before but she said most of them had to work on sundays helping their families. there was a mini family factory making brooms going on there. inside the house of thatched straw roofs ands walls and mud floors were about 40 or 50 people, all related according to sirirat. they worked 12 hours a day, including the kids when they wern't in school, on everythign from painting sticks for the broom handles to wiring straw-liek plants together for the part you sweep with. The first family of 5 we talked to had already made 600 brooms that morning.... it was only 1 oclock. sirirat said she wasnted to bring some of the orphans over to see how hard the kids were working here since she thought some of hers were pretty lazy. nothing like the strong influence of child labor to motivate hardwork.

Ayah (one of the older orphans) showed up to dinner with her hair cut short. she seemed self concious about it. i loved it. i made sure she knew. after dramatically approaching her with gleeful gasps, i tucked her hair behind her ears and put my hands on her face. "soooaye" i repeated a few times, "beautiful". she leaned into me andd gave me a long tight hug. "i lob you P. Jenny" I think that was the first time I had heard her speak english, it was like hearing your name as a baby's first words.

I had told sirirat i wanted to do somethign special with all of the kids and she suggested taking them all out to icecream. "Their favorite thing!" she told me. So after dinner we made the trek to the icecream shop. A huge group. They argued over who got to hold my hand. I ended up with a couple of each arm and hand. When we saw a big snake on the sidewalk, they all shrieked and clung to me. I enjoyed feeling like I was protecting them even though I was just standing there with no intention of going any nearer to the snake. The icecream shop had exactly 3 flavors. I couldn't figure otu what any of them were just by looking at them to i pointed to all 3 and mimed for him to mix them together. he looked at me like i was an idiot. I couldn't figure out what they were by tasting them either but the mixture of whatever I got was MARVELOUS. The kids slowly licked their icecream cones (which I don't think I've ever seen a child do before), savoring the sweetness with huge smiles. For a grand total of about $4 US I was a hero. AWESOME. The icecream shop hada TV in the corner playing Tom and Jerry dubbed over in Thai. we stayed until the end of the show. I laughed in all the right places.

Nid NOy held her arm up next to mine to recheck our color pallettes. She pointed back and forth at both arms, grinning, "same, same! P. Jenny!"