Ping Pong
Yesterday was the time I had hoped to hold a Bible study with available people. As it turned out, everyone was out of town for the weekend or longer, so no shows. But I had a good time at the worship service of Jai Samarn in Bangkok.
Then at 4 pm Gop came up to study English, and this time he brought his friend Ink, who is one of the landlord's sons. Teaching Gop is a challenge; he is so curious about everything and has a very short attention span. He is so funny running around my room when he should be sitting reading. He finds my stuffed elephant and squeezes it so its belly rumbles; then he sits on my poor little elephant and jumps up and down to give the appearance of passing gas. Then he finds my nice brown scarf and pulls it over his head like a bandit. Oh, and then there is my small flashlight which he confiscates and cheerily calls out one English word he remembers: "flashlight!".:) After that he feeds my fish. But somehow, one and a half hours later, we have managed to cover 4 or 5 pages of his English book from school. I must confess, that 1 1/2 hours is probably the longest 1 1/2 hours I experience each week.:) But Gop is so good natured, it makes up for the frazzled nerves.
At 6:30 Gop called me and invited me to supper down in the office. After eating supper together with the family, I discovered that Kitti built a basic ping pong table for the extra room. So I ended up playing ping pong with Gop for another hour or so. That was fun, but oh, so hot! There was no air conditioning, and we couldn't run the ceiling fan because it swayed the ping pong ball. So it was "sweat city", but it was fun--more vigorous exercise than I usually get here.
Once back in my room I called down to Kun on 4th floor, so she came up and we chatted until 10:30. She and her boyfriend were originally going to study English with me, but they have too much going and no time to study English. I am happy for the friendship though, and Kun is very patient in speaking Thai with me as well. She is a teacher by occupation, and it is easy to see that gift as she speaks with me, repeating or explaining words as necessary.