Well, we are finished with our time in the village and are spending a few days in Chiang Mai before our group splits up for good.

Songkran weekend ended, and we made our way back to the village, thankful
 to escape the unbearable heat of Chiang Mai. It was nice to return to the
 village and a much slower pace of life. Our morning anthropology class was finished, so we
 started focusing on getting interviews and writing our papers. My partner and I wrote our term paper on the presence of Compassion International in the Musikhee village and their impact on the children. We became very passionate about our topic when we started finding out some very interesting facts about how money was being used and distributed. Compassion changed their policy a few years ago away from giving direct aid to the sponsored children to spending the money to “develop” the children using after school and weekend activities. While this may theoretically be better long-term, many of the poorest children are slipping through the cracks, not able to afford food or school and having to drop out or join Buddhist monasteries to continue their education. This is obviously not what overseas sponsors think their money is contributing to. This, along with a few other very disconcerting findings, convinced us that there needs to be a policy change. We plan on sending our paper to the corporate headquarters of Compassion International in Colorado Springs and presenting this information to them and, depending on their response, submitting a version of our paper to Sojourner’s or another such publication. If you would like to read more about this, I would be happy to send our paper to you.
But back to village life:
The random power outages, which 
strangely happen around the same time every day, made writing our 
papers a bit difficult for those of us using laptops. One could usually hear a
 shout of joy around the compound when the electricity 
finally came back on. 

A highlight of the third week was Sports day, an excuse for us to stop work on 
our papers and get out some energy. We had a men’s soccer and women’s
 volleyball team, and we played several Karen teams. Despite the immense 
skill (this is sarcasm) of our volleyball team, we didn’t manage to win a game. The boys
 had slightly more luck, winning one of their games. I think we all
 enjoyed taking the day off to play or cheer our friends on as they played.
 Another highlight of the week was going frogging, where we drove out to a
 rice field at night and caught tiny frogs, which we would eat the next 
day. Finding the frogs proved to be very difficult for some, but I think 
a few from our group may have found their life callings.
The last week in the village was filled with last-minute paper writing, making our final purchases from the Karen weaving store, and getting weaving lessons. In fact, I made my own bamboo rice sifter, which will possibly become a tea try in my apartment next year. The last day in the village we were thrown a goodbye party, complete with a roasted pig and sword dancing. It was very sad to say goodbye to the people we had come to love over the past month. The hospitality we were shown was incredible, and we will miss our Karen friends dearly.
We are now back in Chiang Mai spending our last few days with each other until we are parted indefinitely. Coming back to Chiang Mai really feels like coming home. It is strange to think that although I spent most of my life in Virginia, there is a random city in Southeast Asia that I know just as well as Warrenton. Most of our group will leave Saturday morning and begin their 24 hour trip back to America. I will not be on that flight, as I decided to stay an extra week. For the past couple of months I have been playing with the idea of going to Burma to teach English. I was pretty set on going until I really felt like God was calling me to examine my motives for going. After a lot of contemplation, I realized that I was mostly excited about the adventure of it, and that my motives were not entirely pure. So I gave it up to God and decided that I was going to go home. Well, about a week after I made that decision I overheard a conversation between my program director and another student about working in a refugee camp on the Thai/Burma border for a week after the program ended. After that, a series of very crazy events started happening, including one of my friends meeting a man on the side of the road who worked at this specific refugee camp and inviting us to come, my program director meeting and giving me the contact information of the director of a Bible school at that specific refugee camp, and one student and I being able to switch our plane tickets so that she could go home and I could stay longer. I have been reading in Isaiah about how God will do things and show His power so that His people know that He alone is God and is control. This idea has been so evident in the process of deciding to go to the refugee camp. Everything that I tried to work out fell through, and only when I gave up did God miraculously work them out. There are seven of us going, and we will be staying at a Bible School in Mae Sot (spelling?), which is a refugee camp on the Thai/Burma border that houses over 50,000 refugees. It is more like a permanent settlement than a refugee camp, and it sounds like we will be teaching English to the Karen refugees who are hoping to immigrate to America.
Please pray for us, that we would be kept safe and that we would find purpose there. God has made it so evident that this is in His will, and I am excited to be able to blog again about all the wonderful things that happen.