Volunteering in Thailand Progress
Hello everyone. This is the first update with our fancy, new Volunteer in Thailand Friends for Asia Facebook page. How exciting! It’s Thursday afternoon and my brain is a bit numb from the pounding music all day at my school’s annual fair. Therefore, please forgive any typos. Group 62 is now in their fourth day of the volunteer project and doing great. The photo of this group is sitting on Aom’s computer, and I’ll have to attach it to next week’s update.
Volunteer for Teaching Monks
We normally conduct project start dates for the first and third Monday of each month. Next week, I have made the unusual exception, to allow a young American woman begin her project Teaching Monks, on the 8th (the second Monday of November). Conducting orientations and start dates outside of our normal schedule is something we rarely do. However, this 24 year old from Texas is an officer in the army and has only these two weeks free before being shipped out to Afghanistan. According to our partner organization, which assisted in sending us her file, she wants to learn about Buddhism, meditation and do something good before she begins her mandatory service in Afghanistan. How does someone in my position say “no” to this? That’s right… they can’t… and I didn’t. We look forward to her arrival late this weekend and hope that she experiences the Teaching Monks Volunteer Project, Chiang Mai and Thailand to the absolute fullest.
Volunteers at any Age
On the subject of future volunteers, I just received a new booking for a 60 year old Californian to serve in our Teaching Monks Volunteer Project in January. Although most of our volunteers are generally in their early 20s, we fortunately do sometimes receive volunteers with lots of life experience. As with the army officer, we also look forward to the Californian’s arrival and hope she too has a great trip and a great experience.
Loy Krathong Holiday Approaches
Attached are a couple of photos of Loy Krathong, one of Northern Thailand’s biggest festivals. This event is scheduled for to occur in a couple of week’s time. More about this holiday and the beautiful weather we have been having in next week’s update. On a completely differet note, we’ve done a lot of work on our website recently and it looks great! Please visit our Volunteering in Thailand website, if you haven’t done so for a while.
Thanks for reading.
Warm regards,
-Todd
