Thailand Letter
Dearest Family, October 14, 1998 Wednesday
This has been such a busy and hectic week or so for me - I don't believe I have ever had such frustrating experiences as I am having!!!
PATRICE - THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR LONG AND WONDERFUL LETTER. I loved to read about Roy taking the children to the Arkansas State Fair - we always loved to go to that and I believe we went every year we were there - our children enjoyed the animals the most just like yours do. HOW WONDERFUL THAT YOU ARE GOING TO GO TO WALT DISNEY WORLD IN FLORIDA!!! I am thrilled you are going to take the children and go for four full days - they will love it and so will you. I will think of you on Saturday when you go (actually it will be Sunday here). That is just like magic to me and it will fortify all of you for the hard things in life. I would love to see how much the children will love it - I can just see little Jesse running from one place to another - I hope you will put a harness on him (on all of them). Emily and Timothy will "take it all in" and will talk about it for a long, long time. YOUR FRONT DOOR SOUNDS GORGEOUS - burgundy red. That is a perfect color to go with your home but what will it do with orange and black for Halloween - Ha!!! Will you carve jack-o-lanterns like you did several years ago when I visited you? I thought of you when Myrth and I visited a market yesterday and saw that they had okra - your garden sounds GREAT!!!
BOB - THANK YOU FOR YOUR WONDERFUL LETTER TOO AND THOSE FABULOUS PICTURES. Laura surely does take good pictures - she must have taken the one of you in downtown New York because she wasn't in the picture. You all look so bundled up and that made me envious. It makes me SO happy to know my family is having fun times with their children - they grow up much too fast!!! Your trip to New York sounded like so much fun - seeing Les Miserable, going to the Metropolitan Museum, the New York Stock Market and the World Trade Center. I want to go on a tour (in about five years) and visit the church historical sites in New York like you did - I haven't been there for a long, long time and I can't even remember the Sacred Grove. The church members in the Rochester Ward are all very successful students and business people so they are highly educated - you would fit right in. Isn't that where you saw Bang II last year (Marilyn Lucas)? I hope you are rested up by now - coming home at 2 A.M. is like missing two full days.
RICKY - I THOUGHT ABOUT HIM ALL DAY ON TUESDAY, THE 12TH!!! I can just imagine how hard it was to hug him and say goodbye for 2 full years. I am SO anxious to hear about his first few days in the mission field - HE WILL BE A GREAT MISSIONARY!!!
I gave my leadership presentation yesterday and that was quite an experience. Our Director's wife, Cherri Hall, was supposed to give me a syllabus to work from but I didn't get it until Sunday night and we were in meetings all day on Monday and I had to give mine first thing on Tuesday. I prepared my own and worked for many days on it and stayed up most of the night on Monday - I was SO well prepared with visual aids, handouts, etc. WELL - Cherri came up to the front to see what I was going to present and she told me I couldn't use some of it because it was copyrighted. It completely threw me!!! I went ahead and taught from it and then had them give the copies back to me but it wasn't as effective as it should have been. The funny thing is that I got the material from the things we all gathered about four months ago and most of it was from Cherri's brother and sister-in-law and nothing had ever been said about it before. Most of it has been put into the demonstration school resource centers.
I REALLY admire Marc and Cherri Hall but they are very poor administrators - they do a lot of work on their own and they just assume all of us know what is going on. We are in the dark most of the time and then they wonder why we don't do some of things they expect us to do.
I went back and forth from the townhouse to Ruam Rudi six times during the weekend because Myrth had gone "Up Country" and Helen and I couldn't stay alone. Virginia and I went to church at the Pakkrett Branch on Sunday - that is the first place we started going to church when we came out and they are such WONDERFUL people and I LOVED it - it brought back a million memories. I came home and started working on my presentation when a teacher from one of the schools came to cook for me - she is SO sweet and I loved her food but I needed time to work alone. She even brought me a little table to work on. Myrth didn't get home from up country until 9 p.m. and by the time I went to Ruam Rudi and back with her it was almost midnight.
The training meetings this week have been just excellent - I would have given anything to have had something like this when I first came. Myrth is thrilled to pieces - she says she has worried for four months (she received her mission call in May) because she has never taught before and now she tells everyone it is just like teaching Primary - Ha!!! She has a lot to learn but it is much more elementary than most people think. She is going to be a challenge but I can do anything for the next six weeks. She is hyper active and won't eat anything that I will - she has lived on candy bars for this entire week. I finally let her have our school driver stop at a big grocery store today so she could get some American things to make soup. I had taken her to a store last week when she first came but she wouldn't buy anything. I have a lot of food here but she is the pickiest person I have ever seen (No - Barji is worse, Ha!). She has cloroxed everything she bought and is in the kitchen now preparing her dinner - it is almost 6:30 p.m. and it will take her at least two more hours. I don't have that much time to spend cooking.
This group of volunteers has some VERY OLD people in it and Myrth is one of them. I know I am old too but I am better qualified in many ways - Ha!!! There is a Sister here who is 74 and she looks exactly like Aunt Carol. She has been sick since she got here and even missed the meetings yesterday - she is related to Charlotte Mellor (the Bartholomew Line) and she's from St. George. I am SO happy to have such good health - now I am working on my patience - Ha!!!
This second phase is going to be quite different from the first phase. We made up the curriculum and they will have to make sure the Thai people use it in the right way. The church is sending thousands of books over for the schools. The first shipment will arrive next Monday. I am going to have to visit 52 schools and make sure their resource centers are ready to receive the books allocated for them. I am VERY worried about this because I am taking Janet and Darlenes' places and they were not sold on the resource centers - I may be spending most of my time completing those and that will be HARD.
You wouldn't believe the thunder and lightning we are having. I guess I had better get off the computer - I feel like I am right out in the open.
I LOVE YOU ALL SO VERY, VERY MUCH. PLEASE BE SO VERY, VERY CAREFUL. Grandma B