Starting early...

So every Thursday night all the CCT employees come over to the volunteer house for "family dinner", which is super prec. And last night, I got an awesome surprise when Wad (the in-country director) made me a birthday cake! For those of you who know me, you know that I'm a firm believer in celebrating birthdays for a minimum of three days, so starting the celebration Thursday night was totally fun. And it was espescially nice since Eve is a lactard, he said he had to try hella times to get the consistency right of a banana cake with NO sugar or milk. And it was surpisingly good! Heavy as all hell, but tasty nonetheless.

Today I actually had to work ALL DAY, a first for me in...well, maybe ever. It's super time-consuming and at times really difficult changing this whole report from Thai to broken english to something a native English speaker can actually comprehend. But it is cool to learn so much about the project and the ways TLSDF works. I think the next few weeks will be hard, as I will just be writing final reports for the project that just ended. But after that, we will start doing a situation analysis for a new project, which I'm excited about it. It will include travelling to project sites, and helping with the design of the new project. A lot of the work they do is HIV/AIDS education in schools, which is totally right up my ally. Eve and I are gonna look into designing one part of the project related to that, so I have high hopes I will leave here having accomplished more than just typing up reports.

In the meantime, my English cousin David gets into Chiang Mai in the next hour or so, so I can't wait to meet up with him. And the other American intern has some other friends in the city, so we are going tonight which should be fun. Even though my actual birthday isn't until Sunday and I'm having people go out to celebrate it on Saturday night, we all know that in my mind, the birthday weekend has begun.

xoxo
Rae