It’s so hot that even my Thai neighbors are complaining.

It’s so hot that the slum dogs are too tired to get up to scratch their mange.

It’s so hot that I routinely have sweat running down my legs and pooling at my ankles.

It’s so hot that I actually appreciated the cowboy hat my music teacher made me wear home.

It’s so hot that people in my slum are eating ice cream at 10 a.m.

It’s so hot that my refrigerator is hot to the touch from the strain of keeping the inside cool.

It’s so hot that two showers a day is a minimum.

It’s so hot that a cold drink can soak your clothes with its condensation.

It’s so hot that the pages of all my books at home are curling.

It’s so hot that when I’m in the sun I expect to hear my skin sizzling.

Last night my roommate Christy and I woke up because rats had waged war on us.  They had chewed through the string holding up our mosquito net in two places, causing half of it to fall on us while we were sleeping.  We then attempted to scare it out of the house, only to have it peek out from the wall, run across the wall and outside, and then run back in, over and over, as if saying “I’m not afraid of you.”

Also, the glue trap we had placed out was not only unsuccessful in trapping any of our unwanted house guests, but was covered with plastic bags, which rats must have dropped on it from our collection of them hanging on the wall a little ways away.  And my washcloth had been pulled off its hook and dragged to the corner of the bathroom.

Needless to say, it was difficult to go back to sleep with the sounds of squeaking from inside our wall and the fear of a toe getting eaten off during the night.  I would be thoroughly annoyed if it wasn’t so hilarious– I think our laughter and attempts to scare away the rat probably woke up most of our neighbors.

I wonder who is really trying to evict who from our house, and which side will be successful. 

Feeling very little control over my personal space is probably the difficulty I struggle the most with here.

For example. I love the kids in my slum, they have each found a special place in my heart, but when over a dozen of them make the main room in my house the public playroom, make as much noise as possible, and see anything in the refrigerator as obviously put there for their consumption… I start to go a little crazy.

So a major accomplishment I made before going on furlough was learning how to set boundaries with the kids. When the door is open, they can come in. When it’s closed, that means I want to be alone. If I’m disciplined to not give into their puppy-dog pouts when I really need my space, this system works well.

But children are only one imposition on my personal space. Three mornings in a row I awoke to discover rats had come into my bedroom and made off with random objects, of seemingly no use to a rodent. Mosquito coils, for instance. They swiped my stash right out of its box. Or a plastic bag from a grocery store. A visitor’s toothbrush. Come on! Sometimes I think they’re purely out to torment me.

In the States, it is a valid assumption that the things in your bedroom will be there in the morning. Not so here. You also don’t need to protect yourself from insects, or at least convince yourself that they won’t find their way into your bed tonight.

I sleep underneath a mosquito net, tucked tightly around my floor mat to keep out not just mosquitoes but bigger things too, like roaches or spiders or even rats. Well, that illusion of security was taken away as well, when I woke up the other day with a cockroach running across my hand. I proceeded to have to fight it out from under my net with a broom, and then convince my nerves to calm back down enough to go back to sleep.

I hear the details of my neighbors’ personal lives because our plywood walls do nothing to block out sound. A couple nights last week one of my neighbors was drunk and throwing up out his window into the swamp that separates his house from mine. My first week back one of the slum dogs had 7 puppies which yipped all night long, keeping me awake.

I often end up sharing more with my slum than I would like to.

In the midst of this, it struck me how truly amazing it is that Phothong has welcomed me in the way it has. Moving into a slum is more like joining a large family, moving into someone else’s living room, sharing in the joys and difficulties that family faces. I came not only as a stranger, but a complete foreigner, barely able to communicate, different not only in appearance but in mannerisms, values, lifestyle… I’ve tried to adapt as much of the culture and lifestyle as I can (and still honor God), but I will always be a foreigner.

I see and experience up close both the beauty and the shame in the slum, and yet my neighbors have welcomed me, a stranger, into that. As one of my Thai friends there said recently, I’m “part of the family now”. That is very humbling to me.

So I’m praying that I would continue to reflect Jesus in the midst of the stress this lifestyle places on me. In the ways Jesus was able to remain patient and loving while crowds pressed in on him, and at other times retreat to be alone with his Father, I long to also have that balance. Pray that I would be so tapped into God’s love and peace that the things most likely to bring out my worst would instead cause grace and compassion to flow.

For your amusement, here are some of the things Thai people have said to me:

“Why don’t you cut your toenails more often?”

“It seems like you’re fatter.” (This accompanied by hand motions which seemed to indicate that my face had swollen up like a balloon.)

“Have you been eating a lot lately?”

“You don’t speak Thai well at all.” (Thankfully, lately people have been complimenting me on my Thai almost every day. But for awhile this was very discouraging.)

[neighbor] “Sara! Where are you?”
[me] (washing my face before bed) “In the bathroom!”
[neighbor] (waits for me to emerge) “Oh, were you showering?”
[me] (thinking “to shower” might be a general term for washing in general) “yes.”
[neighbor] (looking into my bathroom) “You didn’t use much water…. you didn’t shower!” (accusatory, for Thais shower at least twice a day, religiously). “Why not, because it’s cold?”
[me] “Yes, and because in the States people only shower once a day.”
[neighbor] “But it’s not hot there. You need to shower twice a day. In the morning and when you get home in the evening.”
–Since then she has been watching to see if shower in the evening and will often ask me about it. I’m considering sucking it up and showering twice a day so I make a little more sense in her eyes.

“How much did you pay for your haircut?” “How much did it cost you to fly here?” “How much did that shirt cost?” “How much do you spend on food every day?” (Followed by very blunt opinions, almost always– “too expensive.”)

“Don’t eat too much food or when you go home your friends will tell you how fat you got in Thailand.”

“Narak jung luuy!” (or “So cute!”)– yelled at me by random people on the street.

“You’re 23?! I thought you were about 16!”

“Your skin is so white and beautiful. You have such pretty blonde hair. Thai people aren’t pretty at all– we all have black eyes and black skin.”

(in broken English) “Hellooooooo! Hey you! Farang! (foreigner)”

“Hello! I don’t have a girlfriend yet!”