One afternoon as I was sitting on the porch of the house we were staying at in Mae La Oop, I looked across the yard at the family’s raised wooden house and saw the grandmother of the family weaving. The grandmother was from the Karen Hill Tribe and spoke no English or Thai, only Karen. She wore traditional Karen clothing and was weaving a skirt in the tribe’s distinctive striped pattern. She was using a loom she attached to the porch and then to herself as she sat on the floor of the wooden porch.

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One of the first things I noticed when we arrived at the home in Mae La Oop was that there was no shower.  In the bathroom, there was a western style toilet (which was the envy of the others in our group whose homes only had squat toilets) and a concrete tub filled with water.

At first, I thought perhaps you were supposed to get into the concrete tub to bathe. But the side of the tub came up to my waist, so I wasn’t sure how to go about getting in. Sitting on the edge of the tub was a small pink bowl. I soon learned that using the pink bowl to scoop up water from the concrete tub and dump on yourself was how you shower in this part of the world.

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For the next part of our journey we traveled with Rand’s students to rural Northern Thailand where the students participated in an internship. We observed and sometimes join in.

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