Day 5 in Thailand: Saturday

I think that Saturday was our most amazing day so far (since I'm posting this on Tuesday, I am including all days since I've arrived). This morning, we were asked to help a lady plant her rice field. Here husband had to take care of a sick animal, so she was going to have to plant the whole field by hand alone. I don't know if that might not have been better than having 23 white people who had never even seen a rice field do the planting. Anyway, it was pretty amazing. We had to walk about 1/2 a mile to get from the road to her particular field. Then we took off our shoes and jumped in to about 2 feet of pure mud! I was worried about this, but it felt amazing. It was very wet in places, so it kept us kind of cool. We were given a bundle of rice plants to hold in one arm, and had to grab 3 stalks together and push them down into the mud. We planted them about every 8 inches. Just after I started, a little crab ran by my foot and I screamed (which freaked everyone out for a minute). We finished in about an hour (which was faster than expected), so everyone started catching the crabs to eat later. Then we "washed" up in a muddy ditch before walking back to the trucks. We were surprised with a trip to the National Park waterfall instead of going home, so I was very happy to be sitting in the cab of the air conditioned truck for the 45 minute drive, instead of sitting in the bed of the truck! The waterfall was amazing! We walked down to the bottom and swam in our clothes. We could climb boulders to go behind the waterfall and swim out under it. I did this, but slipped off a boulder into another boulder while going under the waterfall (nice big bruise and cuts on my knee, but it was worth it). Some Thai guys started jumping off the right side of the fall, and after much begging from the guys, and group finally swam over to check for underwater boulders (there were a lot on the side where we were swimming). Since they didn't find any, they were given permission to jump. It was pretty crazy, but they loved it! When we returned home that evening, we had to go to dinner at a Thai family's house. I can't imagine hosting 23 Americans and their Thai hosts, but that's what happened. I was in the first truck to leave for the house and we made the mistake of not getting a translator in the truck! When we got there, we had to sit on the floor (on grass mats) staring at the hosts, without being able to talk to them. They did serve us Pepsi, which was a bad thing for me because it meant that I had to go to the bathroom while we were still at the house (squatty potty and no shoes allowed). Who knows what liquid I was standing in, but my wet wipes and hand sanitizer sure came in handy. As the neighbors saw the Americans arrive, they started walking to the house to watch us. By the time all 23 of us arrived (which included one truck without a translator getting lost and arriving over an hour late) the street and yard was full of people. We ended up doing our stomp routine for them, as well as several dramas and then spent time roaming the yard and street "talking" to them. Most people on the team have classified this day as the best day of the trip, and several have said the best day of their entire life.