The pictures that follow summarize my last 2 weeks pretty well.

We've been teaching hygiene - spreading colds, getting rid of amoebas and parasites, hand washing, how germs enter your body - and we had a hand and foot washing. Talk about some dirty water. We talked about why you need to wear shoes (so worms etc don't enter your feet) and when you should wash your hands, and encouraged parents to scrub down their kids periodically!

We're working in a section of the village going door to door where there are several families in a row that make rice noodles for a living. We watch and talk while they work. (They're sitting on the press that forces them out of the can with the holes and into the boiling water. Pretty cool!)

And sunset's... well, they just speak for themselves. I still ride my bike almost every evening to watch the sunset, think, pray, and, more recently, talk with my new friends that work the vegetable fields closeby.

‘We’re not going to get his arm casted, he’ll be fine. He deserved it – he’s such a rascal sometimes.’ This is what our team heard last week in the village regarding the boy that fell out of a tree and broke something in his forearm. And I think we were all caught off guard. We know medical treatment isn’t available or people don’t have money for it, but to say someone deserved something, especially in the situation of an accident and a child… to say you’re not even going to try to fix it when there’s a small clinic that could at least do an Xray 20 minutes away….

Is their thought process rooted in Buddhism belief that you need to suffer in this life in order not to have to suffer in the next life? Am I judging the situation because I believe Christian teachings that say every individual is valuable and suffering has a purpose but can and should be helped? Am I judging the situation because as Americans we fix things even when they don’t need to be fixed just to make them a little better, a little prettier? Is there a happy medium that doesn’t care about aesthetics as much as I might yet allows for elimination of certain areas of suffering? Is it OK that his arm is healing back a little crooked? Maybe. But I’m stuck at maybe not right now.

Tonight was one of those nights when I didn’t want to respond to all the ‘hellos’ yelled by small children as I biked. I wanted to go hard and fast to get a good workout. I smiled but didn’t respond to the first few, but had to smile at my selfishness (and God’s sense of humor) later on - several older woman and men yelled hello tonight! That’s never happened! There’s just something about an older person with no teeth yelling from their vegetable patch that melts you and forces you to wave and yell back or stop to chat.

I also cut down a different road than normal and saw 2 men in a cattle field doing what looked liked water-witching with long sticks. One yelled out to ask me where I was going, and I stopped to reply. We yelled back and forth while they worked, and I watched them carefully, finally asking what they were doing. ‘Looking for snakes for dinner’ – I’m outta here! I’ve only seen 1 snake so far, and I want to keep it that way.

A little further when I turned left to head through the rice fields to head back, at 2 different homes they asked me to stop and then offered me their kids. Its not a rare occurrence, and I just want to scream! I joked that my house isn’t too far from their house so there's no need to come with me. How sad to be willing to give your kid to a stranger just because you know you can’t give them a better life. That doesn’t even register with me to a large degree…