1. Exercise

We all know that exercising on a regular basis will help you to stay healthy, right? Well, let\\\'s suppose you live in Thailand. And have two little children... The only time available to exercise is in the evenings, when they are sleeping. By then it\\\'s also cooler outside. But also dark. Plus if you went running in the dark about ten not so friendly street dogs would be chasing you home. Well, at least that would be a good motivation to exercise intensely, right?

If you have someone to watch the children during the day, you could go to a sports ground, or another public place like the middle of a round about: just follow the rythmic music and you will find a group of women doing aerobics. That can be fun and is also a good way to connect with people.

Swimming is also a good type of exercise in the hot season in Thailand. But if you are used to swim lanes without someone cro

ssing your way constantly: be careful. Especially when one half of the swimming pool is in shade and the other half in the sun. The Thais will just use the shady part, even if it means, that they cross your lane all the time... 

2. Eat a healthy diet

In Thailand it is so easy to go out and have lunch or dinner. But before we came here, people

tell us to be really careful with bying food on the street. So we went to expensive restaurants and were sure, that we wouldn\\\'t have any problems, because the food was surely clean... but how wrong we were! The few times we went to a bit more expensive places to get food, we ended up having diarrhoea, so now we go to really cheap places and we have never had any problems there.

Of course, you can always cook your own healthy meals, but honestly: buying the ingrediences is so much more expensive than just buying a meal at the takeaway around the corner...

Although we eat vegetables and a lot of fruit every day, we get sick much more often than back home in Switzerland. Somehow the bacteria and viruses here seem to be much more aggressive than back home. Of course, our body also has to get used to them first. We don\\\'t like taking pills all the time, but we found out that taking Vitamin C and garlic pills really helps us not getting sick so often...

3. Find a good pharmacy

And if you do get sick: going to see the doctor may not always be a good idea. Of course, our field medical advicer is always an important help, if we have any questions. But sometimes, it is important to actually let a doctor examine you or your child. Usually we end up going home with about ten different bottles of medicine. There is always one or more bottles with some kind of antibiotic, a bottle of paracethamol, a bottle of ibuprofen and a bottle of some kind of antihistamine. It really doesn\\\'t matter, what you have: you always get antibiotics. Despite coming from a country, where antibiotics are given just when nothing else is helping, and where people trust doctors, no matter what they say, we learnt to be careful, not to neccassarily take, what the doctors prescribe here.

Luckily we found a good pharmacy, where the pharmasist can speak english very well. Before going to the doctor, I usually talk to her first and together we try and find a suitable medicine for the problem. She is also careful about handing out antibiotics and enjoys talking, discussing and finding out, which treatment or medicine could help the best.

I thank God, we found her!

Staying healthy on the field has actually to many more aspects, but the most important is actually praying. God knows us, He knows the country we are serving in, He knows all circumstances and He knows, what we need. Staying close to our loving father is the best way to stay healthy: mentally, physically and sprititually...