It’s 5:56 am on Sunday morning. I tried desperately to fall back asleep, but to no avail. So, instead of pleasantly slumbering in my embarrassingly large bed, I decided to use this time to do that which I have been avoiding for the last week: writing.
On Tuesday night, around 9 O’clock, my final flight from Taipei landed at LAX. Five hours later I put my key in my door, listened to the lock click, and stepped inside, home for the first time in three weeks. And, consequently, entirely alone for the first time in three weeks. The silence of my own empty home was overwhelming and strange. So I made my own noise. As I munched on oatmeal deliciously saturated with peanut butter, I turned the music all the way up and listened to the songs I had missed most. But the sound wasn’t fulfilling. It was an artificial sound, and it did nothing to warm my dark, empty, silent house.
I’ve heard it said that home is never quite the same after you return from traveling. I believe the truth is quite the opposite. Most often, home is just as you left it, what has changed is your perspective. Your eyes don’t see quite the same, and your mind doesn’t think quite the same, and your heart doesn’t beat quite the same as the day you left. It is impossible to see the world and be unchanged, unmoved.
So, after three weeks in Thailand, home doesn’t feel like it used to. As the days pass I will become once again acclimated to life in San Diego, and home will begin to feel more and more like home, but it will never be quite the same, and that’s just fine with me.
As for my time in Thailand, it is challenging to put the experience to words without using blatant generalities like “good”, “amazing”, “eye-opening”, or “life-changing.” It is near impossible to convey the truth of what I felt and experienced and learned, but I believe a practical description of the trip is in order.
Last fall I decided to sign up for Point Loma’s LoveWorks short-term missions program. Every summer, teams of about ten to fifteen Point Loma students travel to different countries and work in conjunction with Nazarene churches around the world. This year the teams went to Brazil, Congo, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, Israel, Jordan, Peru, Tanzania, and Thailand. Each trip has different work to do, and I applied for Thailand because the purpose of the trip was to work with kids.
Fast forward six months and I’m stepping out of the Chiang Mai airport into the sweltering, humid heat of Thailand, wondering how I will survive heat stroke for three weeks. An hour drive later and we saw our first glance of where we would be spending the lion’s share of our time, the Maetang Tribal Children’s Home. In Northern Thailand there are many tribal villages in the hills far from the city. These villages are too far for students to commute to school daily, so if parents want their kids to get a quality education from the city school, they can send them to live at the Children’s Home. So, the Children’s Home is essentially a dorm for elementary and high school students.
One of our main jobs was to teach high school English. Essentially, we were substitute teachers for two weeks. We divided into groups of three and each teaching group would have three or four classes a day. We also put on an English camp at the high school for the students who excelled in English. Two days of our second week were spent teaching the elementary school, which was an entirely different experience than the high school. Every afternoon before dinner we would hang out at the Children’s Home and play with the kids as they got back from school. I’ve never sweat more in my life. Our team got used to permanently living in sweat.
Other than teaching, we also did some fun touristy things. We went shopping in Chiang Mai twice, we went to a waterfall, we celebrated the kids’ birthdays with a pool party, and on our last day we went on an elephant ride.
When it came time to leave, it wasn’t easy. I felt myself become attached to many of the kids, and I would have loved to spend the whole summer there, teaching high school and living at the Children’s Home. I met some truly amazing people and formed some wonderful relationships with my teammates. After living with them 24/7 for three weeks, it’s strange to be without them. You spend everyday with a group of fifteen people, and then suddenly, one day, you’re at home alone wondering what exactly happened, awake much too early in the morning, and writing about the experience without really knowing what to say.
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