Happy Birthday to Me!

As some of you know, and as some of you have just learned, today is my birthday. I had a nice birthday, my flatmate Katrina woke me a little cake garnished with Oreos and two temple candles, and tonight we released a fire-kite. I would have taken a picture of it, but it was to dark. It was a little mini hot-air balloon. There is a torch at the bottom, you set the torch on fire, it fills the balloon and the thing floats away. He wrote wishes and blessings on it and sent it up.

As for my birthday, some of you have kindly offered to send me packages or gifts. I really appreciate it, but really I have just about everything I need here in Mae Hong Son! However, if you really want to send me something, it would mean a lot to me if you made a donation to the organization that I work with, the Ban Nai Soi Community Learning Center, to help keep the school running smoothly and help the kids that I am staring to think of as my family. You can make a donation here.

The nice thing about donating is that 100% of the money will go to the school. Any donation that you make will probably go to food for the kids (about $5 feeds everyone for a day) or perhaps will go to buy blankets and sweatshirts for the cold season that Thailand is having now. Or, maybe it will be used to buy a bag of cement that will allow the students to make mud bricks and build a new classroom so that we can help even more students next year! It might go to buy supplies, such as the new notebooks that the boys received and are showing off below. The “worst” case scenario is that it will go to pay off some debts that the school acquired when it was built. But the nice thing is that the money will go to help the school-- there is no overhead here. And every little bit that you can give will help-- CLC was initially built with only $10,000, and much of that was for the purchase of the land.

If you do give money, I won't know that you gave it-- but it would really mean a lot to me if you did. The students are taking wonderful care of me and helping them will be helping me. I am very excited about working at the school and I am very excited about how my 31st year is starting out. CLC is exactly the place that I have been looking for for the last two years.

So as a birthday present, please whip out your calculators and figure out how much money I just saved you (don't forget shipping!) and send it this way. Thank you to everyone for your support and love during this time, and I wish you all a very happy and peaceful New Year.

(I know it's been a while since an update, one is coming I promise...)