Digging holes and building Character :)

Today was another long day in the country of Thailand. It was a long but great day! We spent our whole day at a village and started construction on an Obstacle course that we are building for this kids of this village! It was such a productive and happy day there! We started the day doing some business trainings with the women in the village!
The women is this village have been weaving coconut and sugar cane together in strips for awhile and only make about 5 baht (in Thai money) for their work. To give you an idea of how bad that is, 30 baht equals 1 American dollar. So they only get a few cents for their products which I know could sell for way more then that! We spent a while with them talking and trying to help them brainstorm ideas of different products that they could make and places that they could sell. I wouldn't say that it was the most successful meeting ever, but we now know exactly where they stand and where they want help and where we could help them. We are going to go back next week to talk to them about different ideas and hopefully we can help them!
After our little meeting they showed us the rick of the trade!

 

 

I love these girls that I am with in this picture! They have already become dear friends and I couldn't handle all these different experiences with out them! :)

 

 

The sweet village people cooked up lunch and then we all got to work at digging holes for an obstacle course for their kids! Now that was an experience!! We started around noon and were there until 7 that night! By the end of the day we were all hungry, tired, but happy with the work that we were able to accomplish today! Here are some fun pictures from our day!

 

 

 

 

 

You see those holes in the pictures? We all dug those by hand and did them with the most random tools ever! We didn't have proper shovels, so we pretty much just used these poky things and made holes that were 80 cm deep with poky things! It was quite the experience!! The people in the village were sooo happy though! It was so fun to see how excited they were that they were going to get  playground for their children! At times we had a huge audience watching us! Several people would come up to us and tell us that American women are so tough! They said the girls in Thailand don't like to get dirty and work hard, so it was fun to see American girls working so hard! I'm so grateful that we were able to make them smile that day!

We had this beautiful view on our drive home that night :)