Rice Planting oh my!

Last week most of our group had the opportunity to help the girls at the Monsaengdao Recovery Center plant rice.  I haven't blogged at all about Monsaengdao (or as we call it, the Recovery School) since I am always so busy at DEPDC.

The Recovery school is a residential living campus that houses girls who have been abused, trafficked, or otherwise mistreated or abandoned by their families. The girls range in age from 12-18 and they currently have a little over 30 girls living at the center. The center focuses heavily on the natural environment and both protecting and using these resources responsibly.

This brings me back to the rice fields. The school has about 10 rice fields, and since it is rice planting season, we were asked to help the girls plant!

Let me tell you, rice planting is HARD. I will never eat rice again without appreciating the back breaking time and effort it takes to harvest tiny bits of rice.

Us with the rice plants. We had to stick individual strands of these into the water, one at a time....

 Hudson trying to help me out. As we say in Thailand, Hudson jaidee!

  We were pretty much bent over like this the entire time.

Manasa, Jamie, Me, and Lars on the bus after a hard days work planting. This pictures does not do our level of dirtiness justice.

While I had fun and bonded with my teammates and the girls, I think I can safely say that I have ruled out rice farmer as my future profession.