School on the Mat

Welcome to School on the Mat -- Cambodia style. This is the CHO (Cambodian Hope Organization)'s school that they do in villages. Most Cambodian children do not go to school because the have to have the proper paper work (birth certificate, etc) and just because education is not a priority. If you know anything about Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge killed all of the educated people in the 70s. It's really a crazy thing to read about, but even crazier to be there and see these fields where you know hundreds, if not thousands, of people died.

Anyway, we visited a school on the mat and I think it was one of my favorite places. CHO has 15 teachers that teach 5 classes/day with 10-12 students in each class. So, they have over 600 students in their schools!!

CHO has devotions at 7:30 am and then everyone hops on their mopeds and heads out to their job. These teachers spread a tarp out on the ground and set up their whiteboards and have school . . . yes, outside.

This is one class. On the far left side of the mat, you see the little girl in the yellow shirt? She is little. . . not sure how old, but her older sister is on the left of her (out of the picture). Her sister's job is to take care of her all day while her parents either work or they are just not there. Her sister was called up to the front to read from the board and the little sister followed her. But, the little sister sat so quiet on the mat. That is a house in the background (the blue building).

Yes, this is a monkey that was at the school/house they were in front of. It was the family pet. . . yes, that was weird.

The lesson that day was about obeying your parents. These kids are role playing. The kids on the left are brothers and the kids on the right are mom and dad. The "brothers" were fighting and Dad stepped in and told them to stop. The kids thought this was pretty funny. When she announced who was mom and dad, all of the kids giggled.

Taking your shoes off is the appropriate thing to do before you go into a building in Cambodia. I really started to like the whole idea and walking around barefoot! So, the kids take their shoes off before they get on the mat. So, around the mat are all these shoes. This pair of flip flops caught my eye. Notice that the back of the shoe is gone. Both of the shoes were like that.

The boy is reading something off of the board and the class is repeating him.
Wayne sang "Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes" with them. They know that song pretty well from different English speaking teams that come through because it's the easiest song to "translate". You point to whatever you are saying, so it also teaches them a little bit of English.

Here's a video of them singing "This is the Day". It was too cute!! First, they sing in English and then they sing in Khmer (their language).

These kids followed our van down the road to the school. These kids aren't in school, but they acted like we were celebrities. They stared and pointed and talked with each other. The little girls fell in love with Joel.

I thought this little boy looked like Trip. He rode his bike down the road and hung out for a little while.
As we were driving away, this laundry was hanging out to dry. See that nasty water in the background? That's the washing machine!! ;)

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.

Cambodia -- The accomidations

I'm still in the processing stages of the whole trip and I haven't had much time to edit more pictures, so I'll share with you some of the pictures from our hotels. Nothing too terribly fancy, but I'll share them anyways. They are interesting!!

This was my hotel room in Bangkok. I loved the painting on the wall. It cost roughly $25 a night.

It had a little vanity area. There were a ton of snacks on the table, but they weren't free. They sure were tempting, though!!

Here is a shot of the bathroom. That spray thing by the toilet is a bidet -- what you're supposed to use instead of toilet paper. Luckily, I never had to use it . . . just didn't make sense to me. I did make good use of it washing my feet off at the end of the day!! The shower is to the left of the toilet. While you took a shower, the toilet got all wet. Weird engineering for sure.
This is how you turned the shower on. You set your hot water level and turned the knob. Again, interesting. I was just glad there was hot water at that point. . . wasn't quite ready for the cold showers.

This is our hotel room in Poipet, Cambodia. Nothing spectacular. Felt like a dorm room. It costs $15 USD/night. The beds were very firm, but at the end of the day, I don't think I cared very much. I crashed!! The room key had a little plastic thing on it that you had to put into this slot so that your electricity would work. I wish I had gotten a picture of that. Every time you left the hotel, you had to take your key to the front desk, so your electricity was off. The good news was that our room didn't take too long to cool off at the end of the day. The good news about the key thing was that there was only one key and if your roommate came back before you, they could have access to the room. That's the a/c up on the wall. The girls from the UK are living in this hotel for 6 months. They celebrated their 2 month anniversary of being there the day we left.

Here's the view from our 5th story "lobby" window. There was a little sitting area outside our doors with giant windows. I did a lot of people watching from this window. I fell in love with a little boy under that blue tarp thing of a "house" in the middle of the picture. He's actually outside in this picture, but you can't see him. He is the first character in my book.

Again, toilet & bidet or foot shower in my case.

Straight across from the toilet is the shower. No walls, just the shower head. There wasn't hot water here. We had it a few times for about 2 minutes, but it was so hot that you couldn't stand underneath it. The water wasn't extremely cold, though. The water tanks sat outside and I'm sure the heat warmed the water so that it wasn't freezing like it would be here in the US. You would think that red knob over there would mean something to do with the hot water, but it doesn't. I'm not really sure what it's purpose was.

A picture of some kids from our hotel room window. I was really zoomed in, but they have plastic sacks with plastic water bottles in them. Again, I loved watching the people from our hotel room. I was so glad that we were on the 5th floor so that I had a little secret "hideout" to people watch from!!

This is a video looking out our window. I think you can see a volleyball court in it (at about 10 seconds). There were always kid playing volleyball over there! There was even a rain storm that came in one afternoon and it was pouring down rain and it didn't seem to bother them at all. At the end, you can also see my little boy. He's outside sitting on that log thing. He's still far away, so you can't see him very good. My only regret? Not going down there and getting a picture of him.

I have pictures of the hotel in Siem Reap (the touristy parts of our trip), but they're on my phone. I'll have to e-mail them to myself and then put them on here. You really won't believe how amazing it was!! I'll try to get them up soon!

Cambodia -- The Food

I've been back a few days now, but it's taking some adjusting. Time wise, while we were there, it seemed like everyone woke up about 4 am. I thought when we got back, that would be fixed, but it hasn't. Same thing-- I've been waking up at 4 am and can't go back to sleep. Plus, I've been having a hard time staying asleep. . . oh well. I've been told that it will all work itself out over the next few days.

I absolutely loved it there. I wouldn't want to sell everything and live there, but I could see myself going back and staying for longer periods of time. What they are doing over there will blow your mind. More on that over the next few days.

I thought I would break up the trip into a few parts so that my blog isn't forever long and you don't need an hour to get through it. So, I thought I would talk about the food first. I'll put a few pictures at the end of just random things, but I'm not finished editing and turning all of my pictures, so I'll post some of what I have done so far.

In preparing for this trip, I was warned about all kinds of weird foods -- squid, fried fish eyes, etc. I actually was going to try the fried fish eyes if someone got some. I thought I should go all out on the whole experience. I wanted to experience Cambodia, so why not?

So, as we were standing in line to get on the plane in Minneapolis, Joel laughed and said, "Say goodbye to all normal foods, dear." I was a little nervous. ;)

Well, I didn't get a chance to eat any fried fish eyes, but here's a list of a few of my food experiences:
* Cashew Chicken (no surprises there, but it was good)
* The most amazing coffee shake on the planet (yes, better than Starbucks)
* Really refreshing watermelon shakes
* Really amazing coffee
* Fried eggs & toast (I think this became my favorite breakfast while we were there)
* Fried rice w/ chicken at a coffee shop in the middle of nowhere. This was on our drive from Bangkok to Cambodia. It was all open, as in no walls. There were chickens walking around. I'm sure the chicken I was eating was walking around there once, too.
* Squid (yes, I ate it but I wasn't fond of the texture)
* Raw tuna (again, terrible texture, but I got it down)
* The thickest and yummiest and biggest pancakes ever
* Ate an ENTIRE meal with chopsticks (I had never used any before)
* Barbecued goat (again, texture got me on this one. . . good flavor, just a little too chewy for me)
* Fried potatoes (some kind of yellow potato, not white ones)
* Fried bananas (the girls from the UK loved these)

So, there is the beginning of my Cambodia posts. I know everyone is wanting to hear all of the other amazing things, and that will come, but I was shocked at myself for even trying some of these things and it is the easiest post to start out with.

Dr. J & Steve at the CHO restaurant where we ate almost every breakfast and lunch. This restaurant fixes 3 meals a day and delivers them to the AIDS & TB hospital for the patients there. See that watermelon shake on the bottom left? YUM!! I bet it was mine!

Trish & the UK girls (L to R: Nicole, Emily, Hannah (blue shirt), & Kathryn)
They had a train of massages going at one point. We loved hanging out with these girls. (By the way, their new year is like next week or something. That sign wasn't from January 1st)

Here's that coffee shop in the middle of nowhere. I'm not kidding. We were driving down the road and there is NOTHING. Then, all of a sudden, we pass this place. So, we turned around and went back for lunch.

These boys were at the school on the mat. They aren't in school, but they followed our van down to it. They just sat and watched what was going on in the school (outside, of course) and they watched us.

These girls were at our children's outreach. You can tell that they are probably sisters. People think that they have highlights in their hair, but it's actually a sign of malnutrition.
One afternoon, I was in my hotel room and I heard a pig squealing and squealing and squealing! At first, I didn't want to look because I thought they might be butchering it somewhere, but when I finally go the nerve to look, this is what I saw:
Yes, that's a live pig on the back of a motorcycle. Interesting, huh? Wayne said he saw a cow on the back of a moto later that afternoon.

As we were driving into Siem Reap for the touristy part of our trip, we saw this:
Another interesting thing. I think these chickens are alive. We would see them move their heads every once in a while. Funny how when you see a cattle truck going down I-20 full of cows, you don't think of it as tomorrow's lunch. But in Cambodia, that's all I could think!

And, my favorite picture of the whole trip. We were invited to a village by the assistant village leader (comparable to one step up from mayor, I think) and this baby was laying on a bed under their shelter (again, no walls). The grandma was so proud of her! Every time the camera would flash, she would laugh and smile really big. I absolutely love this picture!! Makes me feel like Angelina Jolie! ;) (Thanks, Trish!)

Heading Home . . .

Another airplane ride . . . fun, fun, fun! At least this one is only about an hour and a half. We're flying out of Cambodia and we're heading back to Bangkok. Then, tomorrow morning at 5:45 am (5:45 pm Texas time) here, we'll fly out to Tokyo. . . then, on to Detroit. . . then on to Dallas!! We land in Dallas at 9:45 pm on Wednesday.

Today we went out to a floating village. . . just plain craziness. People living on boats/houses out in the middle of the lake. They had kids, there were stores, they had tv in some. . . it's will just blow your mind. Not to mention another sun burn . . . not bad, though.Here's something else cool that happened.Trish & I went and got our toenails done and she got her fingernails done . . . all for $7!!! Complete with flowers and bows!! They are beautiful! Yes, $7 USD!! Anyway, our tuk-tuk driver took us to this place and we walked in and let the girls get started. One of the other "girls"started talking and it was no girl. . . it was a "lady boy"shop!! We laughed hysterically once we figured that out!!! But, the girls that did our hands & feet were not. It was a pretty funny moment.

While we got out of the tuk-tuk, I had my money in my pocket, but when I went to pay for my nails, it was gone. It wasn't in any of my pockets. I checked two or three times and it wasn't there. I was freaking out because I thought one of these girls had pick-pocketed me or that I dropped it getting out of the tuk-tuk. So, Trish covered me and we went to get in the tuk-tuk again (I like that word! ;) )

Anyway, my money was in a different pocket!! And not in one that I would have put it in and I checked it at least 2 times sitting in that chair!! What in the world? I'm just believing that God gave my money back to me.Then, we headed back to the market to pick up a few more gifts before heading home. That was fun!! I love the market!!

I've had a blast, but I'm ready to be back home. Well, internet time is about up. Got to run!!P.S. By the way, I've taken 495 pictures!!! Some are just of life kind of things . . . toilets, showers, bathing pots, etc. But, lots of awesome pictures!! Wishing I had my computer so I can edit them on the way home.

Cambodia

I'm sitting in the "Joel Famous" Blue Pumpkin little restuarant here in Siem Reip (sp?) Good food and time to be tourists. We are going to Angkor Wat (again sp?) this afternoon . . . it's some old Buddist temples.

Our hotel is like we're in a tropical resort. It's AMAZING! I almost don't feel like I'm on a mission trip!! ;)

We have had an absolute blast here and I definitely want to come back. What God has done here and is doing here will blow your mind away.

The other day, the guys put up a 30 foot tall water tower at the safe haven. I'll have to post the video when I get home. Cambodians and Americans working together to raise this amazing amount of metal with some electrical wire for rope and a few poles. . . other than that, it was pure man strength.

Well, I'm going to let Trish have her computer back now. I'll try to post when I can. . . if I don't, I'll be home late Wednesday!!!

Bangkok, Thailand

Greetings!!
I survived the longest plane rides EVER and I'm sitting in a hotel in Bangkok! How weird is that? I just had a great breakfast and we're about to head to the Cambodia border. From there, I'll only have internet at the safe haven, but I wanted to let everyone know that we made it and this is just amazing. I've mostly seen everything in the dark, but this morning just looking around, it's very interesting.

Right beside our table at breakfast, there was a Buddist shrine that a man was "fixing up" this morning. When people walk by it, they bow to it. You can smell the insence burning. It's interesting.

Everything on the plane was smooth and we had tremendous favor going through customs in Bangkok. When we got to Bangkok, some of our luggage wasn't there -- mine, Trish's, and one of Joel's. They told us that our luggage was on the way to Phenom Phen, which we are NOT going to! But, they were able to pull our luggage off of the plane and bring it to us. That was interesting!!

Then, going through customs, they didn't want to let us bring our medicine in. But, after Wayne & Dr. J finished, they let us go with our medicine.

So, our driver just got here and we're about to head to Cambodia. I'll e-mail when I can!!!