Day 4/The Work Begins!

Hello All.

Apologies that I have not updated y'all in a bit. However, I have spent the time well, and I am still recovering from jet lag. It is the weekend now, though, so after working a half day we have free time and I am not exhausted yet. A nap does sound delicious! however, I shall resist so that I hopefully do not continue to spend time in the night staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping. Enough about sleep!!

I shall now take you through a day by day breakdown... with pictures!

Day 2 was another pretty chill day. I tried to get breakfast at the hotel, but when I showed up there was nobody in the breakfast room. I later discovered that you have to tell them what time you would like breakfast the night before or call the front desk and ask in the morning. Which totally makes sense because it is a small hotel. It is a good thing I decided I might as well leave my half protein bar in my bag when I was packing! After "breakfast" I walked over to the office for worship with the staff, which was a wonderful combo of English and Vietnamese. It is always nice to see how He is at work around the world.

About an hour later the racing ladies arrived. They are fantastic! I love them already and we are having such fun, even as we work. We started with an orientation for them to learn more about what Orphan Voice does and what their values and goals are.

 
 The white board overview of area 1 of Orphan Voice's work. They have hugely varying levels of involvement with the children they serve. For the 20 at Promise house they are there every day and extremely involved. For the 32 at Dai Loc they visit multiple times a week. For the others, they in general make quarterly visits. They might bring coats for the kids one time, and have a team fix a room on another.

Tony, the one giving our orientation, is the co-founder and head of Orphan Voice. The other two areas they work in are special needs children, and sex trafficking, which I will talk more about another day.

For the rest of the day we just napped (I didn't) and hung out.

Off to find the ocean!

Palm trees are the best.

Totally found it :)

I do not know how they steer these half ball boats. Also, the geougus young lady is my roommate.

Day 3 we had a super breakfast at the hotel and took a three hour bus ride to Phu Ninh to start work on the deaf school.

Our crazy awesome translator Kelbin (that is his American name) He is already teasing and playing jokes on us like a brother. On the other hand he is taking such good care of us!

We painted the two rooms you can see in this photo all day. We started by preping the walls with sandpaper, that was a new one. Thankfully, I did not have to climb that crazy bamboo ladder, it was rather frightening to watch it wobble when one of the guys climbed the fifteen or so feet to the top to work on the wiring.

 Some of the girls on my team.

The rest of the ladies. Center right is our fantastic leader Kimberly (who I also call Mama K) She is  an ordained Assemblies of God minister and one of the most genuinely loving people I have ever met. I got to share a room with her last night when we stayed over in Phu Ninh.

Day 4!!! This morning we went back to the to be school to continue painting. We are doing four rooms, a classroom, a recreation room, a teachers lounge, and a bedroom for the kids who will be boarding there. We are painting murals in every room with different themes. We started with the rec room which has an undersea theme. 

 Carrie starting the boat

 
Carrie and See Eun starting out!

Mama K made the cutest seahorse couple!

Our master designer Cori, who sketched everything in pen, and then joined us in filling it in and bringing it to life :)

Michelle working on Noah

Shayne working on the super cute puffer fish.

Kimberly mixing some paint to get the perfect color

On the left is Jillian, Tony's oldest girl. She knows a lot of Vietnamese which is super helpful. She also does the funniest fake Asian accent like she is a little old Chinese lady.

The big fish/whale.

Sitting on this ladder was actually a little scary because it was a little unstable, and then Kelbin came and shook it for me :P

Everybody's got a waterbuffelow!!!

As soon as I took this photo See Eun said "I know, that was super Asian of me."

Did not See Eun paint a super cute lobster?

I love my shark, and I am very proud of it, even if I just did a paint by number where I got to pick the color. However, I had to mix my own color we had no gray!

Kimberly became a master at outlining with the black "tar"

Brook working on cleaning all the supplies so they can be used again.

Michelle drawing the water necessary for the cleaning. Which is rather hard when you are using a plastic bucket to draw it because it wants to float on top of the water and pretend it is a boat.

We have a little left to do, but for three and a half hours of work I think we did good.

They are so cute, I love them all!

Kelbin entered the photo at the last minute, and I figured it added character. That, and everyone was headed for the bus and I did not want them to be waiting on me reshooting.

A few shots from the bus ride back.

For the rest of tonight, because yes for my American friends it is Saturday night already, I wrote this. Also, I went to K-mart to buy water, went out for dinner at this awesome restaurant run by an American couple. They employ deaf people for the entire kitchen staff, and the runners and busers, the only employees that are not deaf are the waitresses. And our waitress was an amputee. She came to our table on crutches to take our order. The entire staff is so nice and the food was amazing. After dinner we went to watch the dragon bridge that spits fire and water every Saturday night of which I got one really awful photo. It's killing me to not have my good camera. Kelbin took it to the repair shop today, so hopefully I will have it back in working order soon without too much expense!

Goodnight all I am off to set up breakfast for all the girls, and then sleep!!