I have been searching for bleach like a crazy person! Each day I run a program for MK’s (Missionary Kids) here at the hotel. My luggage was packed with play-doh, jewelry tools, rocks, games, pool noodles… I have to tell you that it is a personal weakness of mine (after careful planning and joyful children working hard) to have a project go south. We finished creating our masking tape designs on our red and blue shirts. I got out the spray bleach AND… no color change on the shirts… apparently the bleach I had brought (illegally, I later learned) was color safe. And so my OCD kicked in and the pursuit of bleach, real color whitening bleach, ensued.
Bleach seams like a fairly common product, and it is. You can do a bleach project in nearly any nation in the world. Here is the problem… the writing on the containers is in Thai and I know 3 Thai words: hello, thank you, and now “Bleach”. They do not use the roman/latin alphabet which makes it exceedingly hard in a store. I went to six places trying to explain what I was looking for. The funniest was when I found an English speaking barista at a coffee shop. I explained my situation to him and he patiently listened and said, “I don’t speak Thai. I’m Korean.” Ah! He proceeded to check with another worker and discovered he can’t communicate in a common language with her (Poor guy). In the end he gave me the building wifi code and I google-translated the word “bleach”, screen-shotted it, and headed back onto the streets to search for this common whitening product.
In the end, it was Dick (our team leader) who saved the day. On a trip to the grocery store he found a bottle which he could not read except one word in 10-point font that said “bleach”. We still weren’t sure it wasn’t color safe. But the results of our project were great!
There were never more prayers for bleach and my anxiety was unwarrantedly (real word?) high, but God is good and when these shirts finally dry from the hand-washing, I will be able to give them to the kids (4 days later…)
Gotta go to class now! Here is a pic of my great group (plus the teams worship leader who joined us for the day).
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