Every kid should have some monkey bars

Team Thailand is amazing. They have worked so hard all summer and this week we got to see some of the pay off. Today we had the big unveiling of our community playground!  In first coming to Thailand this summer the team went to many villages and tried to find the greatest need that they could help with. They came up with some great projects including education and health outreaches and working with small business ideas for local families. But one project that everyone because passionate about quickly was the idea of a community playground. The team stopped by a community center/school where the children had drawn pictures of a playground. This is one of the pictures they had drawn and had up on the school wall:

Development is hard. It's hard to work with culture and figure out what is right and what is opinion and what needs to happen and what could happen and what must change and what could change and all the in between. What the first world thinks the third world needs and what the third world thinks they need is often at odds. Evaluation is so important in trying to figure it out and I for one do not have all the answers as to how to do perfect development. But today I did get to see what it looks like to make a child's dream come true, and that was pretty impactful. Children were coming from all over the surrounding villages so see the grand opening of their playground that they had hoped for long before we showed up this summer. Their parents gathered around and watched as their kids played on the swings, chased each other on the boardwalk and mastered the monkey bars. It was happy. It was joyous. And in my opinion, it was good development. It brought the community together as we built it with them over the last couple of months and all rejoiced together today at the finished project. I'm so grateful I got to be apart of HELPthailand today. I love the Thai people already who are so quick to smile and ready to give love to me even though I don't speak their language.  The land of smiles is better than I ever imagined.