A Louisiana woman has been recounting on social media her experience of sustaining herself in Thailand with only $7 in her bank account, relying on her faith in God, her adventurous spirit, and the generosity of her followers and friends.
However, her journey has not been devoid of challenges and sacrifices after she took a one-way flight to Japan. She stayed there one day and due to expenses, she took another one-way flight to Thailand.
Despite the allure of a carefree lifestyle, TikTok user @ExperiencingKiaa has found herself homeless at times and even in a situation where she had to leave the Southeast Asian nation due to seasonal contamination concerns.
At one point last year, Kiaa’s TikTok page was taken down. Her newly restored TikTok account has documented only a portion of her travels but shares that she decided to move from Baton Rouge to Asia within the last year with no desire to come back to America.
The young woman says she purchased a one-way ticket to Japan, but within one day there realized that did not want to stay there and bought herself a one-way ticket to Thailand.
She said she moved to the country “with no plans and not knowing anything about the country.”
“After staying in Thailand for five months, I still was not able to obtain income. I still wasn’t able to figure out how to make income. I ran out of money, and that is how I ended up homeless,” she says in one video pinned to the top of her profile.
Before becoming homeless, Kiaa moved to Pai, Thailand, and enjoyed living there with the locals. She was later able to find a home in what she calls the Treehouse.
In January, a few months after returning to TikTok, she shared that smoky/burning season was coming to her area and that she and her partner needed to leave for four months.
According to the 25-year-old Kiaa, smoky/burning season is when “the farmers are burning the old crops and getting ready for [the] new harvest.” This results in a thick layer of smoke and pollution in the air that she says “is equivalent to smoking 24 cigarettes a day” and is “extremely polluted and toxic.”
Her plan on Jan. 8, was to go to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, from Feb. 1 to March 20. Laos shares borders with Vietnam to the east and Cambodia to the southeast.
Kiaa said that she would then return to Thailand on March 26 to pick up her fiancée from Bangkok and the two will then travel to Vietnam for a month, staying there until the air is safer in April.
“If the air quality is better,” she said. “We will probably go to another country, probably Bali or somewhere else.”
On Jan. 11, Kiaa moved out of her Treehouse in Pai, breaking her year lease after six months, and moving to Pattaya, Thailand. Three days later she returned to her TikTok to share with her 44,000 followers that after leaving Pai and going to Pattaya she was homeless.
She shared her news on a TikTok livestream and received assistance from a follower who linked her with a Thai woman who not only gave her money and put her in a hotel, but also treated her to a spa day, Kiaa said.
As she documented her travels in Thailand, not leaving as she previously shared, she gave fans updates about her living situation and explained how though things are hard, she does not plan to go back to America.
“I moved to Pattaya Thailand … with $7.00 in my bank account not knowing what was going to happen. I was literally scared out of my mind,” she says, stating that she asked people to in her family for help and they did not come through. “I was really just like down.”
However, she said her faith in God sustained her, even when people asked her to just move back to the United States.
“People will say to me why don’t you go back to America and I will tell them, ‘… I gave up everything in America to come here to start a life abroad, why would I go and start from scratch at home when I’m starting from scratch here,’” she said.
Kiaa mentioned that although she had only $7 upon her initial move to Pattaya Beach, after seven days she managed to secure $650 in her account and has been diligently working as a hairstylist throughout the week.
@experiencinggkiaa When you take risk amazing things can happen
♬ original sound – Experiencingkiaa
God did sustain the loctician, introducing her to a new “wealthy” Thai family who lived in a condo and clients from her new hairstyling business that has embraced her as family and helped her learn to provide for herself.
However, there is no word on whether she moved to the other countries because of the burning season and the status of her partner.
