Itsara

I had nearly forgotten that I asked for pictures of our land. Kelby sent me some a while ago, so now I’m finally showing them to you. As a disclaimer, I should add that we only had a hand drawn map to find our land with and nobody to tell us where it was. So we kinda guessed, but it was a fairly educated guess. Click on these pictures to get a closer look of what we think is where our orphanage will be.

Here’s your first look at it. Our land is essentially the tall, bright green grass in the middle and (we figure) extends from the trees in the distance to Sean on the right (note that Sean is not still standing there to mark the edge of our land, since he left when we did – I think the land marking job just wasn’t cool enough). That’s Wayland in the front there, probably doing some karate or something. And I’m behind him tempting the poisonous snakes and other wild beasts that no doubt lurk within the jungle that will one day be teeming with wild children instead.

Here’s another angle. Cindy’s looking pretty and cute (as always), while I itch one of my multitudinous and ubiquitous mosquito bites. I’m not sure, but I think the red roof at the end of the street is part of the Buddhist temple. I’ve had some interesting daydreams about “meeting the neighbors” in that temple before (“Hi, we’re the Heine’s, we just moved in next door. So… nice temple you’ve got here…”). And I think that’s Jamie back there walking the length of the land. We spent some time here praying, talking, thinking, sweating, and generally being funny towards the camera that Jess brought.

This shot is of the back of the land (so if you can imagine, the street is on the other side – actually sort of on the right and continuing away from the camera, parallel to the edge of the rice paddies). Again, our land is the taller grass right in front of Cindy, on the other side of the rice fields. I can imagine losing a lot of soccerballs and frisbees to those rice fields…

If nothing else, maybe you can get a sense of how beautiful and quiet it is out there. The city of Chiang Mai is a city in every sense of the word (by which I mean it has noise, people, and pollution), but this plot of land is only 5.5 miles from the main downtown area where we stayed this summer and it’s like the city doesn’t even exist. We heard nothing out there. I hope nobody minds us moving in with 30 kids and a drum kit…