Bend Hotels
Jessamyjoy's travel blogs:
- Senegal 2007
- Two months translating, interpreting and... 2005
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Road Trip
Entry 4 of 33 | show all | print this entry |
Just for kicks I'm filling in the pre-travel travel. May 15 I drove up to Bend, Oregon (10 hours) and then May 16th Jeff (my boyfriend) returned from spending over two months in Thailand doing tsunami reconstruction. Needless to say, we were happy to see each other. He took literally thousands of pictures and we got a God-hug when the girls at Wal-Mart offered to develop ALL OF THEM in an hour and not only that, but to let us pay the send-out price! Seventy-two rolls! So we spent hours sifting through those. Lots of pictures of the complete destruction, beaches that retained their beauty, people hard at work, ancient Buddhist and Hindu temples with orange robed monks and crazy monkeys playing with dogs and smiling children. We relaxed for a couple days in Bend. I also got my oral typhoid vaccine from the hospital and random other helpful prescriptions and advice from a great travel doctor there.
If you're curious, Jeff volunteered through a clearinghouse organization and ended up working with the Red Cross in the area hardest hit. He was soon put in charge of various construction projects--building a day care (using wood from empty coffins), investigating some shady activities, working on a boat-building project, cleaning up and generally doing whatever needed to be done in 100+ heat and near 100 humidity! He loved every second. Met great volunteers and found the Thai people to be amazingly resilient and joyful. Life moving on. People so grateful for help but working alongside. Not many spoke English, but they managed to communicate and he learned a few phrases here and there. Everyone loved Jeff (big surprise to me :0) and he became friends with the head of the Thai Red Cross and an important Colonel who became General while he was there. They tried and tried to convince him to stay and offered to start paying him, but he had plans to come home and see me off to Africa! He totally spoiled me with scarves of Thai silk and sarongs from Thailand, Cambodia and Laos where he met with many adventures, learned to drive all kinds of vehicles on all sides of the road, ate mysterious food and saw the world from a whole new view. He may actually be going back if a proposal he wrote up is accepted for him to travel and document what needs to be done and what's already being done so the Red Cross can be more effective. I couldn't be more proud of him and both of us are excited to see how God will use our respective experiences and put us to work as a team in the future!
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