I suppose that many people know by now that I have decided to partake in a socially approved nuptial ritual, even though I spent the previous 10 years telling friends and family that said nuptial ritual was for stupid breeders.

As if I don’t have enough to do trying to figure out how to feed 43 children and send another 35 of them to school, now I have to plan a wedding from Thailand. My wedding! Easy enough for girls who have been thinking about their wedding since age five, but I just put my mind to it for the first time in my life. Did you know that if I wear a cream-colored dress the men cannot wear white shirts, or that most formal invitations involve five pieces of paper, or that if one of my best friends is a man (Jon) I can’t put him in a pink bridesmaid dress like all the other maids?

Jordan (who I have been dating for two years and nine months) flew to Thailand and gave me a “stand-in, anti-mugger” ring that looks low-profile, so that in the unfortunate event that I get robbed while traveling/working I won’t have my finger cut off. It will be replaced when I return home in November. We got engaged on August 27, the supposed day that my visa expired, although through some stroke of luck, my visa is good until September 24, which would have been nice to know before we spent five hours traveling to the immigration office the next day to get it renewed.

No date for the wedding yet, but it will probably take place some time in late February.

No not on Valentines Day. Don’t be cliché…

Today, to distract myself from the fact that Jordan will be here in two days and I am sick of waiting, Julia and I decided to climb to the top of wat Doi Kong Mu at the request of our teenage girl students. They said they wanted to pray or meditate, or make an offering...I couldnt really understand exactly what they were talking about. Julia and I both wore long skirts and nice shirts because we were unsure of the formality of the situation on top of the wat. The girls didn't show up, so the two of us sweated slowly up the hill, the agonizing steps to the top were each punctuated with the deafening sound of our own perspiration hitting the pavement.

It wasn't really that bad, we're just out of shape.

The wat was completely empty. We took pictures, and then skipped back downt to the bottom of the hill, only to meet six of our girls coming up. The grabbed our hands, and boundless energy, they dragged us to the top of the wat again. We decided that two trips to the top of the wat in one day merited a tasty treat, so we ate ice cream, browsed slowly through the temple shops, and took photos of our cute, wild girls while the teenage novice monks peeked at them from around trees and doorways.

A curious thing is beginning to happen to me. I am starting to develop that loathsome habit that many western parents have of thinking that “my children” are better than all other children and that the world revolves around them. I first noticed the problem when Blaise and I were leaving the public school last month and I blurted out “Blaise our children are MUCH more intelligent than these other kids!” To which he replied “Our children??!”

I hang their sloppy paintings up on my wall because I have no refrigerator. I obsessively take photos of every little accomplishment, brag to other people about how intelligent and cute they are, and if another adult so much as gives them one cross look I prickle with irritation …but say nothing. It is hard to be an irritating parent-type in a different language.

In a country full of nose pickers, why do epidemics ever suprise anyone?

After teaching at the public school last week I was accosted by a rainstorm and had to spend a half hour sitting in a noodle shop waiting for it to pass. The phone rang as I sat. It was Julia, our new volunteer from Austria. She told me that a Thai NGO was at our office with a woman and child and they wanted us to take them both. I told her to see if she could get them to leave.

After the rain calmed I drove to the office. The NGO workers were still there. Two men and two women. Sitting on the floor of the office, with a sleeping baby on her legs, was the most sad looking woman I had ever seen. Her face was badly sunburned, one of her eyes stared dully in the wrong direction. Slow tears dribbled from her eyes and made clean tracks on her dirty face. They told me she was 24 years old, but she looked like she was 40. The baby had thin, short hair and looked to be about 2 years old. Both the mother and the child were infected with HIV and had been living in a corner of the market in Mae Hong Son. The Thai authorities were worried for her safety because several men had been hanging around, taking an interest in her.

I tried to explain to them that we are not properly equipped to take care of so many people with HIV. They require special care and more attention than we cannot give. We simply do not have enough money or staff. I also am worried about the risk of having infected people near our otherwise mostly healthy children.

The NGO workers wouldn't leave, and the woman continued to sit by my feet crying. I knew that we couldn't take her, but I couldn't turn her away. Kham Chuen was nowhere to be found still. "What will you do?" they asked. I decided to let her stay for a night until I could talk to Kham Chuen and figure out what we should do. I stayed up most of the night worrying about them. Where will they stay? How will we ever be able to afford the cost of their medication? What measures will we have to take to contain the virus? Can we trust this woman?

Today Kham Chuen cleaned out a small hut that is just outside the shelter and moved the woman and her baby inside so they will not be around the other chidlren. He arranged a deal with the Thai NGO that brought her to us: if we house her they will pay for all the children's hospital visits and medical bills, so there is an upside to all of this...

Today was Tuesday which means that I teach the most difficult class of the week: public school kids aged 6 - 14, who either have no idea how to say the alphabet or can have good English conversations. I hate this class.

Today I tried to get the kids to play tic tac toe. We used letters first. I put an X in the "e" square and asked the kids where they wanted to go next. "E!" they shouted.

"Mai me E, it is already taken, try a different one".

"E" They shouted again, as if they had just hit on a new idea.

Finally one team had three in a row and all they needed to do was put an X in the J square.

"Where next?" I asked them.

"L!" they screamed.

"Are you sure you don't' want J?" I asked.

"L!" they yelled again.

After 10 more minutes of choosing every square except J, no one won.

Ok, so the next time I tried it with numbers since they can't seem to remember anything past 11. "Where?" I asked them

"Q!" they yelled.

"There is no Q. These are numbers, not letters."
They pondered this quietly for a few minutes. One kid yelled out "H!" then everyone yelled out "H!" I started swearing at the blackboard. I can't wait until school semester ends in October.

OPC's website has changed to www.opportunityforpoorchildren.com Please take a few minutes to check it out. We'll be doing a site refresh soon and there will be some new content as this current site is pretty out-of-date.

Our current needs are the same:
1. We need a truck to transport munchkins to school and to drive chicken and pig food from the market to our farm
2. We need food for over 40 little mouths
3. We need funds to cover our administrative costs (staff salaries) until we can secure another long-term donor

I thought for a few days that if I left Mae Hong Son for a few days all of the problems at OPC would magically disappear and I could return and have a fresh start. When I walked into the office on Monday morning Kham Chuen informed me that a belligerent drunk woman had come into the office the day before threatening Sonny and demanding money to buy more alcohol. When I taught class that evening one of my 14 year old boys lost his temper, picked up a chair and threw it across the room in frustration. Shortly afterwards our neighbor, a toothless, suntanned old woman, walked in. She had just picked all of our beautiful flowers that bloom outside the office. "Hey, those are our flowers!" we told her. She grinned and then offered to sell them to us for 25 baht per bouquet.

It is absolutely impossible to maintain a decent case of denial here.