To the woman who taught herself the world.

Ploy grew up in a small village outside Surin, in Northeast Thailand — a region with, on average, the weakest English instruction in the country. There was no tutor, no formal program, no one coming to find her and hand her a way in. At nine years old, she found one anyway: a cassette tape, played over and over, until the sounds started meaning something. Nobody built that path for her. She built it herself, out of nothing, before she was old enough to understand what she was doing.

I think about that a lot, because it's the same thing she's done every year since. USAEnglish.com — the Isan Storytelling Championship — started because she noticed that kids in her home region had never once seen fluent, expressive English come out of someone who grew up exactly like they did. So she built the stage herself. The first year, she ran it alone: four cities, a fifty-thousand-baht grand prize, funded out of our own family's pocket, because waiting for someone else to fund it wasn't a plan she was interested in.

EnglishTeacher.com came out of the same instinct, just quieter — the after-school vocabulary drilling she was already doing with students, one word at a time, turned into a free site so more kids could have what she was giving a handful of them in person. The mascot is a parrot modeled after her, which is about right: repetition, patience, and showing up every single day is the whole method. ESLTeacher.com came next, built for the teachers themselves — a global job board with every salary posted honestly and every school verified, because she'd heard enough stories from friends about bad contracts to want to fix it.

Then there's ThaiBeef.com, which she owns outright — every bit of it, on her own — and built for our sons, so Lincoln, Martin, and William would have a real, working version of the ranching life on this side of the world. And Riverside Dispensary, hers too, 100%, from the year Thailand changed the law — she's the one in the grow room most mornings, she's the one at the counter most nights, she trained every budtender behind it herself. She doesn't even smoke it. I'm the one who does that part.

The newest one is the one that surprised me most: PloyCunningham.com, a matchmaking service where she built an AI model that takes a man's answers to her survey and cross-references them against a network of Isan women's profiles for real compatibility — and then, instead of stopping at the algorithm, she calls every match herself and helps set up the first date. It's very her: trust the data, but never let the data replace the phone call.

"I own it — all of it, on my own." — that's how she talks about her work. It's also, not coincidentally, how she's lived her whole life.

My own role in all of this is smaller than hers, and I've made peace with that. I don't own or run any part of what Ploy has built. I work for her — as a logotherapist at Logotherapist.com, the practice she owns, teaching young men in schools across Thailand using biblical stories and a curriculum I built myself, and as a volunteer teacher at ESLTeacher.com. I stopped measuring my life by what I earn a long time ago; these days I measure it by what I've ascended to in service to this community instead. The one exception to "it's all Ploy's" is Transcendent.com, our nonprofit confronting the sex trade and human trafficking in Thailand — the one thing on this page that's genuinely ours, not hers alone. (You can read more about Transcendent.com here, and about our family's faith at BaptizedBuddhist.com.) None of the rest of it happens without watching her do the harder version of it first, for a decade, without anyone telling her to.

A few of us

To Ploy — from Ben, and from Lincoln, Martin, and William.