Ricky Oliveras

Everyone is finally here!  We have a great group of people here in Thailand. We've just finished our fast! It only ended up being a 3 day fast but it was sooooo hard. Today we were allowed to eat fruit and it tasted so good. I definitely appreciate food more now. For some reason throughout the fast I was craving a cheesy bean and rice burrito grilled from taco bell. yeah i had a lot of time to think about food. It was torture walking through the store's food aisles. haha but now I can eat again. The fasting was one part of our detox/cleansing. We also had to do a saltwater cleansing. That was really hard and made me feel sick that day. We had to drink a liter of warm salt water in 20 min. I did it and my stomach didn't agree with it. But I definitely got a lot out that way lol. Tonight we went to a funeral for a 12 year old boy. It was in Thai but funerals are never fun. The boy was struck by lightning last night and killed. Another boy his age is in the hospital with a 50/50 chance of waking up again. These kind of things really bring you down to earth and make you appreciate your life. I've had a lot of those experiences this past year so I've thought about it a lot. But anyway on Tuesday Me, Brian, and Rob are heading somewhere to get some footage for a new documentary project. I'm really excited for this one. Hopefully we eventually get enough footage to make a Karen tribe documentary. It will be a lot of fun to work on. Oh yeah we were just driving here to get internet and we got to see something really cool. It's dark out and we saw something in the road and we got closer and realized it was a big python! It was about 10 feet long and we immediately jumped out of the truck with the video camera. We got a few moments of the snake on tape and I got to touch it twice before it slithered back into the jungle! I love this place, it's awesome!