More of Cambodia

So, I'll post a few more pictures of my trip. I'll have to admit that it's been hard. I want everyone to see all 487 pictures and I want everyone to hear all of the stories behind them. But, I feel like people are tired of hearing about it. I'll spare you all 487 pictures. I think I'll just blog about the safe haven, the school on the mat, the motorcycle school, the CDC, the sewing school, and that's about it. . . sounds like a lot, huh? Don't worry. . . it will be over the next few days but what happened to me in Cambodia really did change my life.

Here's the gate to Cambodia. It was quite a difference between Thailand. The Thai side is paved and nice and then you hit the border. Dirt and that's where we saw most of the begging children. This is one of those moments that I think will be etched in my brain forever. We are almost ripped off with our visas. Kind of a long story, but a strange man had my passport, my picture, and all of my information. That might have been the only time I was scared on that trip. I was afraid I wouldn't get it back. It was a rookie tourist mistake, but he finally gave it back and we went on our way.


The thing I will remember, though, is the begging kids. We walk around the corner in the market and these girls are lined up with umbrellas. They come out to greet you and shade you and they want to carry on a conversation with you. But they want you to pay them for shading you at the end of the road. You just have to keep telling them, "No."

Then, there's the little girl with the messed up hair who I think I remember her carrying a baby doll that was disgusting. She was filthy. The doll was filthy. She was crying and begging us for money. I think Dr. J gave her a quarter or something. She followed us for what seemed like a long ways. She was pulling on our pants and just crying. It made you want to just pick her up and take her with you. But, when I made that comment to Wayne, he said, "Yeah, but I guarantee you that she could take care of herself if you tried to take her." This little girl was a little taller than Jaxon. . . probably a little older, but probably not 3 years old yet. Made me sad that she had been trained so well and that she had to already know how to take care of herself.

This is how we got our luggage across the border. In the Thai market, we stopped our van and all of these guys surrounded it! I was a little nervous because I was sitting by the door and I wasn't sure what they wanted. They wanted us to pay them to carry our stuff across the border. Wayne told us to take anything that we couldn't absolutely live without on the rest of the trip. This kid pushed the cart for us through the streets. Every once in a while, he would look over at us (we were walking along the sidewalk and going through the buildings for our visa stuff) and smile and wave. It was pretty funny.** Forgot to say in my original post that the crazy thing was that if this guy decided to make a run for it, he had all of our stuff with him! This cart was pretty heavy and full, so I don't think that was much of an option for him, but crazy to think that he had everything we had brought with us. **


Here's a picture of the safe haven from the entrance. The 3 houses on the left are where the kids will live. The house on the right is the guest house for people that come and want to spend 6 months living at the safe haven and working there. See those piles of rocks? We had to move those to make a driveway and sidewalks.


Here's a truck going down the street of Poipet. It was amazing how they would stack stuff on these trucks and tie it down to move it. This highway had recently been paved, which everyone said made a huge difference!


This is a house that is a pretty good picture of how they live. Most houses don't have that tarp stuff as walls. It's actually a pretty nice house too because it has a real door.


Here's the front gate/fence to the safe haven. It's crazy to think about how they built this thing -- remember, no machinery and only 1 wheelbarrow on the whole property. They made the brick. They dried the brick. They moved the brick and stacked the brick!! CRAZY!

This is their fish pond. They have a tank where they can breed these fish and put them in this pond and raise them. At the safe haven, in a few years, they will be completely self-sufficient. They have chickens and fish on the land right now and will have pigs soon.


This is Emily & Kathryn, the girls from the UK. We had a lot of fun with these girls while we were there. They are in Cambodia for 6 months, with 2 months down. In this picture, we are painting the bricks in one of the safe haven houses. Our scaffolding was a little scary, but you got used to it after a while.

This is the greenhouse at the safe haven. They are able to grow fruit trees to put around the safe haven and they grow fruit trees for the Cambodian government schools.

Here's a picture of the school at the safe haven. It wasn't finished yet, but it's still pretty amazing. It was awesome walking around thinking about how kids would be walking around that campus in a few weeks . . .

I'll leave you with these final pictures and video. The last day we were working at the safe haven, they threw us a little party and then Chumno told us that we were going to set the water tower up. So, everyone got around it and moved it.


This ditch will be for the water lines going from the water tower to the houses. They had to step over this ditch and dodge power lines . . . it was fun, though!!

In this video, you can see how they raise it up. You can hear Steve yelling "Pull!" At one point, it looked like it was going to fall over the other way, which would have been a disaster, so the guys stopped pulling. But, it put all the weight back on the guys who are walking it up. So, Steve is yelling "Pull! Pull!" But all of the Cambodians are yelling to stop in Khmer (their language). It was a nerve wrecking point for a few seconds, but it finally sat down just fine. The perfect way to end our stay there. Sorry it's sideways. . . It's not sideways on my computer, but it is on here. . . oh well.