Tag Archives: The SOLD Project

A Special Series on Modern Slavery

Most of you who read my blog know that I work with an organization in northern Thailand that attempts to prevent the trafficking of children into sexual servitude. That’s a lot of big 25-cent words to basically say: people kidnap kids and force them to have sex with {insert your adjectives of choice here} adults for money. A filthy, stinking lot of money. (Globally, human trafficking constitutes a $32 billion industry, annually, second only to guns and drugs.) Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s truth.

I don’t talk too much about my work here on my blog for a variety of reasons: the kids’ privacy, and the sensitive nature of the topic, first and foremost. But also I shy away from turning my blog into a soapbox for the issue because I know it’s not polite. It’s not a nice thing to talk about. It’s violent, and it’s hard for people to hear. And if I blather on about it too much, I fear it’ll make people care less, not more.

But in the year that I have been working here on the ground, I’ve learned a lot: about the issue, about the people involved, about myself. And I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t share some of the harder lessons I’ve learned and some of the more transformative experiences. So each day this week, I’ll share a post, and I hope you’ll join me. I won’t be cramming your head with facts and figures or tearing at your heart with tear-jerking anecdotes about the horrible things inflicted upon the innocent. My aim isn’t to motivate you to send dollars or anything like that. I think the real reason I feel compelled to speak up is two-fold. 1) I want you to be able to protect yourself or your children, because trafficking isn’t something that just happens over there to those people. Sure, it happens predominantly in under-developed or developing countries, but it also happens at home, in the U.S., in Europe. The tactics might be different, savvier…but the end result is the same. And, 2) Should you wish to become involved, I hope to encourage you to do so in an informed way, because the solutions that are easiest and most glorious are often the ones with unintended consequences: at best, benign, at worst, detrimental to the very people you wish to help.

So over the course of this week, I’ll be talking a bit about things like:
* how it happens
* on intervention: why rescues are sexy, but we don’t do them
* on the legal side: some surprising news about what laws can really work
* and prevention work: overcoming my own hubris and learning to get out of my own way when reaching out to the kids

A quick note: it’s not just little girls this happens to. Boys are prey to this too. I focus on sex trafficking, but people are trafficked (deceived, abducted, bought and sold) for all kinds of forced labor – it’s even done for the acquisition and sale of their organs. There really are no limits to the depravity.

At any point, please feel free to ask any questions you’d like about the issue or my experiences. If there are any questions, I’ll end the series with a Q & A post with my responses.

In the meantime, if you’re new to the topic or want to know more about what trafficking is, or how and why it happens, please take some time to watch this MTV Exit video hosted by Angelina Jolie. It’s about 20 minutes long, but if you don’t have 20 minutes now, please keep it open in a tab in your browser to remind you to watch it when you do have 20 minutes.

{{Click this link to go to the video.}}

When I was little, my parents and teachers at school used to warn me about not going off with strangers. So when I thought about kidnapping, I used to have this image in my head of big, burly guys in masks stealing kids off the street or from their schools. It rarely happens like that. Here, it often happens that kids are lured away from their families by people they know and trust, by aunts or uncles or friends with promises of a good job and money for their impoverished families. In the West or in Latin America, the lures often involve a really sweet boyfriend, who fills an unsuspecting girl with tales of love and romance, investing even as much as 6 months or a year in building a relationship with her, until he can get her away from her family.

I don’t wish to make you afraid of your fellow man or terrified and untrusting in this world. But I do wish to put you on your guard and encourage you to put your children on their guard when they hear offers of a job far away from family, or a chance to go abroad. Be sure to investigate it before you go. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Be wary of anyone who tries to isolate you, emotionally or physically, from the ones who love you. Be on your guard with anyone who tries to take you away from or cut your ties with your friends and family. That goes, not just for trafficking, but for avoiding abusive relationships in general. Terrorism happens most effectively when you think you are all alone.

I know this isn’t the happiest of topics to talk about, but I do hope at the end of this series, I’ll not only have drawn back the veil on what we’re dealing with here, but also dispel some myths as well as share some things that give me joy and hope and a sense of meaning.

Every child we work with has a face and a story, their own burgeoning personality, hopes and fears. It may be hard to picture them from so far away, but they are real, and just like any other child, they revel in simple joys.

*Disclaimer: The stories and information presented in this series of posts are all things I’ve learned or heard about through research or my experiences working here. The views expressed here are my own and do not represent any organization I work with or the sources I cite. Getting accurate information on this topic is not always easy, but anything discussed here is to the best of my current knowledge, and I will gladly consider any evidence to the contrary. Any errors or inaccuracies are mine.

Click here to go to Part Two. Click here for Part Three. Part Four is here. And finally, the conclusion.

Life Skills {A Bigger Picture Moment}

Last week, I went to spend some time at a place called Urban Light (such a fantastic name for what they do). It’s an aftercare center geared towards helping teenage boys who’ve been trafficked into working in boy bars by offering them a safe place to go and find help and support for trying to leave the bars. It’s really beautiful work they do there, and the ladies who run it have become like a mother and sister figure to these boys.

It was so inspiring to be there and see some of the projects they do. Like, they had the boys develop first aid kits – they designed the logos and collaborated on putting together the kits – and then went to deliver them in poor neighborhoods around the city and outlying villages. (How awesome is that? Empowering AND giving back.) They have regular English classes and guitar lessons. The ladies take the boys on camping trips and they have weekly baking days.

So simple…and yet it blew my mind.

I got so many ideas from talking to these ladies about projects I could do with the kids at SOLD. And I realized (as a former university educator), my mind was SO stuck on teaching the kids things they’d need for school and things that school teaches are important for life. Things like: how to write a 5-paragraph essay, how to think critically, how to question and how to form an argument. Those are all important in their own way. But life skills are so much broader than that. There are so many things we do from day-to-day that we each have to figure out…and probably never really took a class for.

Things like baking. (Unless you had home ec. My high school did not have home ec, and I’m pretty sure these kids don’t have it either.) And simple community projects. And how to show up and reach out to someone in need.

As I’m writing this, in my mind I’m thinking a big, fat “DUH.” We all know there’s a difference between book smarts and street smarts. But somehow I just had such a huge blinder focusing myself on my role as “Teacher,” thinking I could only teach school related things.

But the world is so much bigger than that, isn’t it? Tell me, what are some of the things you had to learn on your own? What lessons did you not have a class for?

Each Thursday, we come together to celebrate living life with intention by capturing a glimmer of the bigger picture through a simple moment. Have you found yourself in such a moment lately? Share it with us! 

Live.
Reflect on the moments that shimmered in your heart.Capture.
Harvest them!

Share.
Link up your gleaned moment this week at Sarah’s! Please be sure to link to your post, not your blog, and include our button or a link back to the host page. 

Encourage.
Visit some of the other participants and encourage each other in this journey we call life.

Imagine You Are Thirteen Again

Imagine you are thirteen years old again. Do you remember what that was like? Do you remember how you dressed, who your friends were, what boys you liked? Do you remember what your biggest hope was? Your biggest fear?

Now imagine you’re a thirteen-year-old girl and you live someplace where girls don’t dream about John Cusack or Zack from Saved by the Bell. You don’t dream about becoming Prom Queen or Valedictorian. You might hope that boy you like will notice you – that is, if you hope at all – but mostly, you’re worried about your father who has no stable income, your mother who is sick and can’t afford a doctor, your belly that is undernourished, or the fact that you are thirteen and simply cannot afford to go to school anymore. If you can’t go to school, you have to work to support the family.

So you try to find a job, but you are too young to work anywhere highly visible or even remotely respectable. You have no experience, and only a minimum of education.

So a neighbor, your uncle, a friend of your aunt, an old teacher tells you about a job in the big city. Or overseas. You could be a waitress in a hotel, a bar, a nice restaurant. It’s far from home, but they assure you that you will make more money than you can plausibly imagine. You can feed your family. You can get your mother to a doctor. You can get your entire family out of poverty. You can afford to finish school – hell, even go to college if you want. They tell you this.

It sounds too good to be true. You don’t believe them.

“It’s true,” they insist. “My niece did it. My cousin is there right now. Look, they sent me all these fine things: the beautiful necklace, the nice stereo system, the pretty shoes I always wear. My cousin, she wears nothing but Prada. The real thing. I tell you, you can get out of here and make so much money.”

“Is it safe?” you wonder.

“Of course, it is safe! Do you think I would tell you to go if it weren’t? My cousin, she’ll watch after you. She’ll make sure you’re okay and let us know if you have any trouble. You can always come back if you don’t like it. What’s to lose?”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course! Don’t you trust me?”

And because it is your uncle, your aunt, your neighbor, your friend, ultimately you do trust. Because you are thirteen and you’ve known them all your life.

They introduce you to someone else. You get in a van, still telling yourself you can leave at any time. Other girls are there. They seem friendly and happy too. You drive away from your family, full of hope and only a little afraid. When you arrive in the big city, you are amazed by what you see, they treat you to a makeover, and you feel so very grown up.

They take you to where you will work. You think you’ll have some time to rest, but you find out you start right away. But it’s only when they ask if you’ve ever had sex before that you begin to have an inkling that something is wrong.

Then it is too late to scream, though you try. You’ve already been sold.

Trafficked. Modern-day slavery: this is how it happens.

This free write happened because sometimes I just can’t keep silent about what I work with, and the things that are done to children.
 

Join in the free writes at Heather’s!

Play

He sat splay-legged on the wooden floor, amongst the pell-mell of scattered markers and paper scraps, lost in his own daydream world. He sat by himself, his back turned towards me, but seeing him there, my breath caught in my throat, and my mind snapped a picture to remember.

He was playing.

He danced his little dragon in the air, his shoulders rigid with the wonder and fascination at this creation he had made with his own two hands.

I had just shown the kids how to make little Chinese dragon puppets. At the beginning, I had to show this little 8-year-old how to color. He watched me filling in the spaces with a marker, himself too daunted to put his own pen to paper. I worried he would never finish his, he was so busy looking at mine, terrified of doing something wrong. There are no wrong answers, I wanted to say, but too often I’ve seen disbelief in their eyes. So instead, I gave him time and whispers of encouragement. When the other kids left, he began to color in earnest.

And then he finished. This child, for whom imagination was a forgotten story, for whom fear is a constant houseguest, and for whom pride and creation are foreign concepts, this child was playing with a beautiful dragon he had made.

With his own two hands.

My breath got caught in my throat.

He stole my voice for a moment, and I thought I might give mine if it meant he’d find his.

Did he see? It was there all the time, just waiting to be understood.

As Spotted on the Thai Side

Journaling Life in Thailand

Happy Tuesday! What’s in your cup today? Me, I’m drinking some nice, floral Jasmine tea. Life is slowly settling back into routine, and I find I like that just fine.

We went up to Chiang Rai this weekend to work at SOLD, and this time I taught the kids how to make Chinese dragon puppets. I’m all excited about it because I think I’ve finally hit on something that seems just right for their speed.

 (It only took me a year of Saturdays to figure it out…)

They may not be ready for fine art lessons, or deeper reflections on life. But these kinds of arts and crafts, they can do.

They’re super shy at the beginning, skeptical of the point of doing anything, and absolutely terrified of making mistakes. But when they finish, and hold something beautiful that they created with their own hands…

That wonder and amazement in their eyes makes everything worth it. I feel like dancing. So I will continue with crafts like these to help build up their confidence, and then, when I feel they’re ready, I’ll start slipping in some higher lessons.

It’s a process, and I’m learning too. Sometimes, it’s hard to see how this is really helping, but I have to believe that every bit of pride in self I can instill in them is just one more barrier preventing them from thinking that selling themselves is a way out of poverty.


In other news, I’m currently awaiting feedback on my novel from a small group of writers and readers. Once I hear back from them, I can make a final set of edits and then start shopping my book out. Call me Excitement and Impatience. I think this is the part where I feel most unproductive. I’m still writing and practicing my craft…but mostly I’m just waiting.

Otherwise, this is a pretty low key day. Laundry demands some attention, and we have to go renew the registration on our motorbikes, but I’ll spend most of the day writing. I have plans to make some home made hamburgers for dinner tonight. I even splurged and bought some cheese – really expensive stuff here, probably twice the price that it is in the States. After entertaining for over three months, we’re ready for some serious downtime, with simple home cooked food.

Salads. We miss salads.

Last night, I made some rice and chicken (rubbed with cumin, salt, garlic, spices, and a touch of Worcestershire sauce) and steamed asparagus. Simple, right? Heavenly because we didn’t have to go out anywhere and it wasn’t restaurant food. It’s funny how eating out used to be an indulgence, and now the rare meal at home has become the treat.


If we were really meeting for coffee today, I’d probably tell you how I’ve been getting back into listening to music lately, especially with some old favorites. Tori Amos is one in particular I’ve had on repeat. I remember listening to Cornflake Girl on the bus on my way to high school in the mornings and liking the song well enough, but I never knew what it was about. Only just a couple of days ago, I actually read up on the song’s meaning and inspiration…and realized Tori Amos is far more complex than I originally appreciated. And these lines, from Silent All These Years, keep running through my head: “Cause what if I’m a mermaid/In these jeans of his/With her name still on it/Hey but I don’t care/Cause sometimes/I said sometimes/I hear my voice/And it’s been here/Silent all these years”

Anyway, it’s getting late. I’d better get going on that laundry if it’s going to get dry before that sun goes down. What’s on the docket for you this week? (And let’s just not talk about how it’s already February tomorrow, m’kay?)

 

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Let’s Share a Smoothie, Ok?

So today is actually Wednesday and it’s the afternoon, so instead of coffee, I indulged in a fresh mango, strawberry, and raspberry smoothie, but I’m just going to go ahead and pretend this actually qualifies for Virtual Coffee and Communal Global, m’kay?

But I can share the cup of coffee I had last night if we need imagery to complete the illusion!

It was a latte from one of our favorite cafes, Ristr8o, which I enjoyed with a small bite of fresh roti (covered in chocolate and condensed milk). Yummy dessert!

We are now entering the fifth week of my parents’ visit here with us, and I think we’ve almost taken them to all the restaurants we like here in town. We’ve also spent a lot of time shopping and trying as many fun and interesting things as we can. A few massages have been thrown in too.

Last weekend, we took them to Chiang Rai, to see where I work at SOLD. It was good to see the kids again and I told them all about Halloween. I had them draw scary pictures and the ones with the scariest drawings would win a prize. It was so cute to see what they came up with! These two boys drew crazy people with snakes coming out of eyeballs, blood dripping, and crazy fangs. But wouldn’t you know, it was a shy, quiet little girl who won first prize with a picture of an amazing zombie creature! Color me proud.

Here’s what she drew:

I just love the expression on the zombie’s face and the fact that he’s wearing a tie, but has lost a shoe. And I love the little grave with that arm sticking out! Makes me smile! Not bad for a kid who’d only just heard about Halloween, eh?

Anyway, the big excitement this week is the Loi Kratong Festival, which starts tonight and ends Friday night. Some of you, especially if you’re on Pinterest or Flickr, might be familiar with this photo, by Yang Tee Mon:

Floating Lantern 2

Yeah, that. We’re gonna’ go see that! I’ve been wanting to see it for years, and finally I’m in Chiang Mai at the right time of year. It’s a festival to celebrate and give gratitude to the mother river: the Mae Ping River. The people gather together in the city and release thousands of these floating lanterns into the sky. They also make these beautiful little floats made of banana leaves and fresh flowers and candles, like a little boat lantern, and float them down the river at night. It’s so gorgeous. I can’t wait to see it! I’m not such a great photographer though, so we’ll see if I can figure out how to take a photo in such little light and still manage a halfway sharp image of moving objects.

Anyway, if you’re following the Pinnacle Moments series, today I’m sharing my own Pinnacle Moment: a little piece of my history when I had to make a decision that changed the course of my life. {Hint, hint: it’s about me and my hubby!} If you’d like to find out more, join me back here today!

Hope you’re all doing well and enjoying the shift into autumn! And have something yummy and delicious, full of cinnamon and pumpkin spice for me because I’m missing that this year!

Kisses,
- Jade

P.S. I know a lot of you, like me are total fans of Brene Brown and her work on perfectionism. I just wanted to spread the word that there’s going to be a global conversation to discuss her work and ideas and how they’ve affected us. She’ll be joining in too! It’s going to be on Sunday, Nov. 20, from 2-4 p.m. EST. Be sure to register if you want to join in! More info here: http://globalconversation.eventbrite.com/ I really want to join in, but that’s 2-4 A.M. in Thailand…Not sure I can make that….But if I know some of you are joining, I may go ahead and join in (and just prepare extra coffee for myself that night).

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Writing Themselves

A couple of weeks ago, I got a few of the kids at The SOLD Project to try their hand at Writing Me. I was blown away at the result and want to share it with you all. If you like their words too, please leave a comment and I’d love to pass on the encouragement to the kids! {Love!}

 

Writing Me: Where I’m From
A Compilation

I am from the lotus flower, from Buddhist Lent, and warm family.

I am from high school, from cozy bedroom, from sister and brother and brother-in-law.

From “Did you eat yet?” and “Do your homework.”

I am from temple and monks and novices, from Chiang Rai, from Pasang.

I am from Thai griddle cakes and vibrant family.

I am from jasmine blossoms, from Songkran, from harmony.

From a home small, wooden, and warm.

I am from rice fields, from banana trees and 7-11.

From kind-hearted and warm farmers who like to eat fish.

I’m from “Son, time to eat” and “Son, time to sleep.”

I am from the longan fruit, from milk, and from mango.

I am from rice and I am from God.

Soi Cowboy – A Walk into Thailand’s Bright Underworld

When I walked into Soi Cowboy, one of Bangkok’s three most prominent red-light districts, it was not what I expected to see.

The novel I’m writing involves a character who once upon a time used to work on Soi Cowboy, so I wanted to go there to find what writers call “the telling detail”: the seemingly innocuous piece of information that gives a description of setting dimensionality, that makes it real in the readers’ mind’s eye. To offer such detail, I had to witness it for myself.

Since I’m involved with SOLD, I find it also important to have a clear idea of what we’re up against. We hear girls are drawn to this bright, flashy life, but can’t imagine it would really be such a draw worth selling yourself for. It’s something girls like us, who come from a privileged upbringing and who have been taught to value our bodies and our self-respect, can’t really quite wrap our heads around.

Before I went, what I expected to see was seedy bars filled with dim lighting, the smoke of stale cigarettes, and poorly dressed women with bad hair, gaudy makeup, and bitter, hardened faces – an understanding bred of American TV shows. What I expected to see were gauche and leering men, dictionary perfect images of pedophilia. Men you wouldn’t go near with a proverbial 10-foot-pole. Maybe I’d see some college boys looking for a party.

What I actually saw was….not that.

What I saw was a street lit up brighter than the Disneyland Light Parade. And not with horrid red and blue neon lights, but with large twinkling white orbs calling Christmas to mind. I saw young, beautiful, laughing girls chatting together. They wore little more than bikinis and short shorts, but their faces were chipper and flirty as they called out to men passing by. They weren’t working. They were having fun. (By all appearances.) They honestly did not look far different from American college girls on a party night. (I’ll refrain from further comment about that.) What I saw were men that looked like the kind of grandfathers who would bounce their grandchildren on their knees. I saw middle-aged business men in clean-pressed suits, fresh from work with their laptop cases still hanging from their shoulders. I saw men with wedding rings emerge from the bars adjusting their belts like they’d just eaten a large, satisfying meal. What I saw were children playing together in the street, not two feet away from the sex worker tugging on a passerby’s arm until he capitulated and followed her past the curtained door. (Where were these children’s mothers?) What I saw were families of tourists with their young kids perched upon their shoulders as they walked past, goggling at the sights. (WTF.)

I expected to feel sick to my stomach, to have all my senses scream about how wrong it feels, but I learned that unless you really know what’s going on, it’s easy – so easy – to believe the lie. It doesn’t look quite like debauchery; it looks like it’s just one big party. Parts of Vegas feel sketchier than this. The bar girls know how to wear a happy face, even when no one is looking, because someone is always looking. They know their clientele too, saying nary a word to my husband as he walked past, even when I trailed several feet behind. They know who’s there just to look and they can spot who’s there to experience – and they sure as heck know who’s undecided, but can be convinced. And a small subsect of well dressed young men, boys really, know how to spot the right man, and soft as shadows, move in close.

It’s easy to see why young girls would be drawn to the show, thinking it’s not so bad – just look at everyone having fun. It’s easy to see why a man who otherwise would never dream of going with a prostitute could convince himself this is different – just look at the families out here to play too. If you haven’t seen the aftermath: the depression, the guilt, the shame, the desire to escape and the feeling of being stuck from the girls who have worked there and wanted out, you too might be convinced that some people just like to party and that’s all that this is.

I didn’t expect the lie to be told quite so well.

Virtual Coffee

Today I drink my coffee black because we ran out of milk. I would make the trek out to a store, but today also marks the day we return home to Chiang Mai, so it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Living here at the SOLD resource center for almost three weeks has allowed something to creep and crawl under my skin in ways that I think I’m still trying to understand. I haven’t posted much, partly because I’m busy experiencing, participating, and stepping in, and to reflect back what I see here requires stepping back out. But also I haven’t posted much because I’m not sure how much you all want to know.

I can offer you a cup of joe and tell you about the superficial. I can tell you about how the climate is somehow different now and it’s caused my hair to become greasy and my face to break out. It’s not a pretty sight and I’ve tried every remedy from “let it be” to “scrub this sh*te!” and nothing works. And oh, when the water system fails? That also does not help the greasy-hair-and-face-scenario. I can tell you how frustrating it is to live someplace with intermittent electricity when your laptop battery decides to swell up and you have to do without and you’re in the middle of something long and involved and the power blips for just a second, but that second was enough to kill your laptop.

But then I can also tell you how humbling it is to go on a home visit to check on the kids and families we’re trying to help, and to see them without electricity at all. How scary it must be for those kids who will have to walk in the dark at night down a slippery mountain slope to the outhouse if they have to go to the bathroom. To smell a vague sickly sour smell of tropical rot. To see clothes hanging out to dry that will never be properly clean, and scars up and down the children’s skin from God-knows-what. How dangerous it is for two young girls to be tucked away up on a mountain slope alone, with no neighbors around in sight.

But then, as I pour you a cup of coffee, could I tell you how hard it is to come back from that and browse Pinterest (which I love, just like anyone else) and read about first-world “problems” (which I’ve complained about, just like everyone else)? Could I tell you how caught that makes me feel, how stuck between two worlds?

As we sip our collective mugs, could I tell you how my heart both swells with happiness and breaks a little every time I see one of our scholarship kids, the one we’ve been able to help go to university so he can pursue a law degree, the one who is optimistic and bright, driven, courteous, humble and kind, but is the son of refugees from Burma and has so far been unable to get Thai citizenship, without which he cannot get a job? And so when he finishes that law degree, what hope does he have of using it, without citizenship?

And yet, there is more. There are the hugs from the children; the big pile and scramble of love and affection. There are the shared moments between staff as we sit around a table of food and just talk. There is a wedding coming up and the attendant joy and bliss. There is the child who sat in the corner and didn’t say a word and then turned in a drawing that made me proud. There is the bright opening of the kid’s faces when I stumble on a way to explain something that manages to make things clear. There are the visits from foreigners who saw what we do and heard what we had to say and asked time after time, “How can we help? What can we do? How can we do more?” Just as there is hate and ignorance and apathy, there is also kindness and generosity and compassion. There is the feeling of humility and grace as you watch another sacrifice of themselves for others.

As we share coffee together, tell me how much you wish to hear. As for me, I sit here, trying to take it all in.

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Virtual Coffee

Happy Tuesday everyone! It’s actually just about midnight here, so this isn’t coffee so much as a nightcap. I just wanted to pop in, especially for those wondering, to say we’re still alive and kicking, just busy. I hitched the bus to Chiang Rai on Saturday, and it’s been a bit of nonstop action ever since. We’ve been hosting another organization of young university students in a leadership program, introducing them to what SOLD does, talking about the issue of child trafficking and sexual slavery, and giving them time to spend with the kids in our program.

It’s been truly rewarding hosting this lively group. They’ve been jumping in head first into everything and asking tons of fabulous questions. They’ve had loads of great energy, so we’ve ended each day feeling enthused, fulfilled and…exhausted. Though the exhaustion probably has more to do with the fact that it’s hotter than heck here even though it just rained.

Unfortunately there was a tiny snafu with a little water pipe that then left the resource center without water for a day or so, as one problem led to another. Which meant I had to go sans shower for rather longer than preferable, use the outhouse bathrooms instead of the indoor ones, and brush my teeth with drinking water in a cup, camping style. When I finally did get a chance to shower, it was with water we were able to get in a bucket. I haven’t had a bucket shower since I first came to Thailand when I was eight! Still not my preference, though I did have to marvel at how much water is saved. It’s nice now, when a cool shower feels best, but I wouldn’t like it at all if the weather was colder.

Thankfully, however, water was restored this evening and I can now shower normally and reduce the likelihood of offending the neighbors.

I was making dinner a couple of nights ago, when I spotted this little guy on the window pane.


I thought it would make such a lovely photo, with his wings pressed so neatly upon the glass. I went and snapped a couple of shots and then put the camera away. I walked back to the window, smiling at the little guy, until, to my shock, a gecko popped out and ate him right before my disbelieving eyes.

Poor little guy. It’s a weird thought, that I caught a picture of him just in the last few seconds of his life.

Hm. I totally didn’t mean to end on such a melancholy note! So, instead, I’ll tell you the real reason I’m writing so late is because I was busy finishing listening to the audiobook version of Harry Potter Book 5 (for what must be at least the fourth time – not counting all the times I’ve read the book or seen the movie) because I’m in a reminiscing mood. But with that I will now turn to bed. Do send me a hello for I want to hear what I’ve been missing in your world! I’d love to wake up to tales of your weekend and such.

Cheers and thanks for the nightcap/coffee!

- Jade -
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