Home

This is my home for the next year. I live with Julia and Steph. We are staying at our leaders' house because they are back in the States for the year. They raised four children in Laos, so their house is nice and big and furnished. 

We live at the end of a little dirt road. During rainy season the holes filled with sand can be pretty treacherous! 

This is our beautiful yard! We have lots of trees; even two mango trees I think, which will be wonderful to pick in March and April!

 This is our living room. We spend a bit of time sitting in here doing lesson plans at night. It's especially nice now, in cool season, with the windows open and a fan on.

This is the dining room. Another great thing about this house is our mae baan (maid) Joi. She comes two days a week to sweep, mop, do dishes and laundry, dust, cook (if we so desire), clean the bathrooms.... She really does all of the housework for us so we don't have to! She is helpful in so many ways - calling our water guy to deliver more drinking water, and the gas guy to bring us a new gas tank (?) for our stove. She has brought our sinhs to be dry cleaned.... It's great having her here!!

 Here's our kitchen! It's been so nice to be able to do some cooking (since our first 6 weeks in the guest house, we ate out every dinner and supper out). Fresh veggies are super cheap here too, which is awesome! I have not been able to purchase any meat from the market yet and I do not plan on purchasing any while I'm here. Walking past the freshly slaughtered chicken, fish, and pork smells bad enough, I do not want to be any closer to it! And veggies taste way better than meat anyway! Since our leaders had lived here for many years previously, we have an abundant supply of pots, pans, dishes, Tupperware.... which is also great!

This is a little storage area. My motorbike sleeps in here at night. The racks are where Joi dries our clothes. The washing machine is in the big reddish/brownish thing at the back. The first person who leaves in the morning has quite a few locks to unlock. The first one is the door to the kitchen. This storage area is surrounded by fencing, which is padlocked. Then the gate in front of our house needs to be un-pad-locked and relocked. Not quite like Sheldon where nothing ever really got locked. But at least we know we're safe!

And this is my bedroom! We each have our own bedroom (and a spare if anyone wants to come visit!) You can also see my amour (closet thing) and a little bookshelf that was here before me.

And here is the bathroom that I share with Julia. (Steph has her own.) We have 4 bathrooms in the house too! Joi also cleans these for us so we don't have to! :)

This is my house! We also have a ping pong table outside and a nice veranda/porch upstairs off of the office. It is beautiful up there in the mornings!

This weekend is the Boat Racing Festival. It has some stuff to do with Buddhists and such, but I don't understand it very well. Last night we went down the the river and saw everything they were selling and tried some yummy food! Festivals are similar all over the world- yummy food and people selling stuff. The boat races are on Sunday. There's like 50 people in each boat and two boats race at a time. We'll go back tonight and tomorrow to check it out again.

Teaching is still going good! :) I love my students so much! And am slowly learning their names! I still need to improve my lesson planning....