Motorcycle Ride in Taungoo

On August 13th, Legacy Institute celebrated the Queen of Thailand’s Birthday. In recognition of this national holiday, classes were cancelled. A former teacher graciously funded a field trip for the students and so, we packed all of the students into our blue Sung Tao (pickup truck) and headed off to the Mae Sa Waterfall.

It is that obnoxious season of the year again. Santa Clause is depicted in every shopping mall. Everywhere you look, there are those fake evergreen trees with red and silver balls hanging on them and sometimes a plastic angel perched on top. And then there is that maddening music. If I hear Jingle Bells one more time, I am going to scream! …And by the way, I am talking about Thailand, not Los Angeles or Dallas. It is now all over Thailand, too.

About a month and a half ago I was in the middle of our corn field doing a happy dance. The corn was taller than me and looking so strong! All our hard work had paid off and the corn was growing taller and faster than we had hoped. The following day we show up to the farm and a great amount of the corn had fallen over! I was devastated! The previous night there was a huge storm. The rain flattened out the mounds that the corn root buried itself into and with no foundation; all 7 feet of the corn had fallen over. Also there were some casualties just because the wind was so strong as well. Upon seeing the damage that was done I knew that we needed to fix the problem. So I cancelled planting beans and tending to our other farm in order to keep this corn alive. We went through each row and created stronger rows and mounded them up. We went in the jungle and cut down 10 foot long sticks to dig in next to each plant and we tied the corn to the stick so it could stand up straight. This process took 3 days to accomplish.