Dangerous job

As many of you know, this has been an unusually hot, humid and long hot season. Because of the heavy usage it has gotten during these months of temperatures near or above 100 degrees we needed to have our air conditioner serviced. As part of the service, this guy is topping up the coolant in our unit. Because the air conditioner is on the second floor in our bedroom, the outside part of the unit is about 10 feet off the ground. Two guys came on a motorbike balancing a large metal case containing this tank, a compressor and some other very heavy equipment between them. I had only a stool to offer, so this guy climbed up to the top of the wall using only his arm strength, cleaned the whole unit and then hauled this tank up and balanced it on his knee while refilling the coolant. I have to think that if these guys were on some of the reality shows that involve physical challenges they'd have no problem.

Gabe and his little sister

March and April

I don't have any pictures of March. There wasn't much exciting happening in March. Hot season started and we just plugged away at work. Most of March is spent thinking about the long break in April and what has to happen before the break, then preparing. The 2nd of April we left for Thailand to attend our group mission conference. This is an annual get-together for the members of our regional group. It's always good to reconnect with members from other countries and to hear what God is doing. We arrived on a Friday night and were shocked by the traffic we encountered. We had planned that we would have 2 hours to get from the airport to the train station in another part of Bangkok. Our taxi driver pronounced this impossible and told us we'd be better off driving 2 hours north to the next train stop and embarking there. The heavy traffic volume was due to the large protests happening in Bangkok. Lots of people were coming into town to join the "Red shirt" protests. Thankfully, the traffic thinned out and we made it to the train station with one minute to spare. Then the train was 1 1/2 hours late:)

Conference was a really nice time and Eric, especially, enjoyed the chance to see some of his former students before they graduate. One of the sad realities of our life is that these students become sort of like family over the years that we get to know them and then we never see them again. It is rare for us to ever see them again once they leave to start life in their home countries. This was a particularly sad year as we said good-bye to a boy from New Zealand who lived with us for a short time. We have known him since he was 9, have gone on many vacations with his family and he was part of our family. It's hard to know when and if we'll see him again. Sad:( This year's graduating class also included our next-door neighbor and Gabe's favorite baby-sitter since he was 3 (the same person) On the plus side, these are some spectacular kids and it's wonderful to see the people they've become. We're excited to see what they'll do with their lives. Here's a picture of us praying for the kids at conference.

After conference we spent a few days in Chiang Mai and then headed back to Bangkok. We stayed down in the city center for one night. We were a bit nervous as we were in the heart of the protest area and just a few days before many people had been shot during the protests. However, it was the New Year holiday and everyone, including the red-shirts, was celebrating. Here's a picture close to our hotel. As you can see, it's water-play pandemonium. Poor Eric went to check his e-mail at a cafe and this is how he looked when he came back.

In past years Gabe has often been scared by the water fight, but this year he took is water gun everywhere he went and really enjoyed Songkran.

We returned to a quiet and steamy Phnom Penh 2 weeks after we left. It has grown steadily hotter as the weeks have gone by, but we now have only 5 more weeks of school until we can take a break!

February pics

Here I am, trying to get caught up on blog posts again. To summarize-February was a month of being sick with amoeba and other digestive diseases for the whole family. March was busy preparation for April, which is sort of like December in America. Khmer new year (in April) is the biggest holiday of the year and everything sort of shuts down during that time. Most people travel and even if you stay home, it's too hot to get much of anything done. So here's February. We did manage to enjoy many things that happened in February in spite of the illness: "Spirit Week"-It wasn't actually called spirit week, but it didn't really have a name, so Spirit week is the best equivalent of what it actually was. The entire week was a competition between three "houses" made of up of the students from preschool-12. The houses were randomly assigned and had kids from all grades in them. I assume that the idea of competing houses comes from the time when kids went to boarding school and lived in different houses. Anyway, school mostly went on as usual with competitions at the beginning of every school day. One was a crazy hair competition and Gabe decided to shave a mohawk. It looked pretty crazy and the next day we had to shave it all off because his hair looked like it had been cut with a weed-whacker.

The last day of the week was a sports competition day. Gabe won a green ribbon for his house in the long jump. This competition was held far outside of town at a college campus and many of the students spent a good part of their day watching the crazy foreigners run in the hot sun. I'm always amazed that the kids can put so much energy into competing when it's so hot. We did go through hundreds, if not thousands, of bottles of water that day. For this day, lots of kids who are part of Hope's distance learning program came in from the provinces to take part.



Also during February we had camp week. This week is designed for the older students to do the field work portion of their classes. However, they have programs for the younger kids as well. Eric went to Rabbit Island and Kep with his kids. Rabbit Island is beautiful, but very undeveloped and the accomodations were very basic. In spite of this, they seemed to have a really fun trip and I assume, got their work done. One of Eric's ice-breaker activities was to have teams design a rain-proof shelter and a sea-worthy boat for the 7 dwarves action-figures. Some went above and beyond and designed entire resorts for their dwarf.

Kep is a town on the edge of a national park known for its natural beauty. 100 years ago French colonialists built villas and plantations here and made it into a little Riviera for themselves. The Khmer Rouge hated that sort of thing and destroyed it. The ruined and blackened mansions tell 100 years of history very succinctly.

I didn't get any pictures of it, but Gabe had a great camp week as well. Preschool to year 3 stay at home for a day camp. They had a day of all art projects a day of all water play and at the end of the week, a year 1-3 sleepover. Gabe had a great time and it was one of the highlights of his year

Antipodes

I have some pictures to post, but instead I'll post this useless trivia. As a kid, didn't you always wonder, "If I tunneled straight down, where would I come out on the other side of the world." Now we can know the answer to that question. The answer, in my case, is somewhat disappointing. If I had tunneled straight down from my house just outside Chicago, I would have ended up in the ocean somewhere between western Australia and the French Southern and Antarctic Islands. Now if Gabe decides to take on this venture and tunnel straight down from our house in Phnom Penh, which I don't think he will as we have only cement to tunnel through, he would end up just south of the Pui Pui Protected forest of Peru which apparently is a mountainous jungle crisscrossed by streams and torrents. Even though it is of no benefit, it's nice to think of such a lovely jungle just below this urban jungle.

The Superbowl

Gabe was talking to Grandpa & Grandma on Sunday (Saturday night US time) and they said, "Tomorrow is the Superbowl." Gabe pumped his fist and said, "Yes!!!" I said, "Gabe, do you know what the Superbowl is?" He said, "Yes, it's a big soccer game where one team wins a cup."
No, son, that's the World Cup.
Eric, worried about Gabe's Americaness, determined that Gabe would get up at 6:30 the next morning to watch the Superbowl with him. Gabe actually enjoyed it and pretty much changed his alliance every time points were scored.

Moving

It was a busy December for us (as it probably was for most of you) and I'm way behind in my blogging. Here's something from November: Most of you probably think that we had our major move to Cambodia in August, but it wasn't until November that we could go back to Thailand and get many of things we needed for our house. When we left Thailand, we put many of our things in storage. Not big things of course; big items are just too difficult to store. We also got rid of a huge amount of our stuff in garage sales and giveaways. Even so, we still had at least 3 cubic meteres of stuff that we wanted to save. That probably doesn't seem like much to those of you who have moved house, but it's very difficult to move that much stuff between countries in this part of the world. We planned to return for our stuff as soon as we got to Cambodia, but visa problems stood in our way. In November, all the teachers were told to leave Cambodia for new visas and that was our opportunity to go and retrieve our stuff.

We decided to travel over land to Chiang Mai. It would have been nicer to travel by plane, but the bus is cheaper and also, we thought it would help us figure out how to get our stuff back, since the plane would not be an option with so much stuff. We left Phnom Penh at 6:30 in the morning and here is a picture of Eric & Gabe trying to stay awake after getting up at 5:00.

Within a short time of being on the bus, Eric texted me that we should have brought face masks. Everyone on the bus seemed to be sick. Looking around, I realized that many people were just motion sick. It isn't uncommon, in Cambodia, for people to be completely unused to traveling in an enclosed vehicle. Quite a few people were vomiting throughout the trip and at one point, we had to stop for more trash bags. Unfortunately, the bus company provides everyone with an opportunity to eat every two hours. Here's us at one of the rest stops. They have food ready to eat. In one case, Gabe found the available snacks very unpalatable. Here he's looking at a pan of fried whole baby birds.

By the time we'd been on the bus 4 hours, I decided we had to find another way back. After another 4 hours, we made it into Thailand. For reasons we never understood, we were put into a taxi for the remaining 4 hours to Bangkok. We shared the taxi with a very nice French couple. We were just glad they weren't car sick. We spent the night in Bangkok and took a train 12 hours to Chiang Mai. In all, it took us 24 hours to get to Chiang Mai.

Once we got to Chiang Mai, we had to sort through our stuff. Inevitably, we find ourselves wondering what madness prompted us to save some of the things that we saved. Thankfully, Grace was having a yard sale that week-end and we were able to donate about one cubic meter of our stuff. Another cubic meter went back into storage and we thought we could take a cubic meter back with us. Now we had to get it to Phnom Penh. We wanted to rent a van, but this is expensive. Thankfully, collegues from Phnom Penh agreed to share the van and expense with us.

The trip through Thailand was really nice and we arrived at the border in 12 hours. We found a seedy little hotel and stayed the night.

In order to avoid the bus ride in Cambodia, we had agreed to bring chemicals for the school lab across the border. The school would then send a van for us. It was slightly risky, as we did not really have permission to do this, but we hoped that the one box of chemicals would be hidden by all of our other stuff. First we had to find the chemicals. Eric wandered around on the initial directions given for an hour and a half and was unable to find the shipping company where we were supposed to pick up the chemicals. He came back hot and tired from walking around the dusty town and I decided to ask some people about this shipping company. No one knew the company, but we were able to figure out the neighborhood that it was in, and it seemed to be very close to the border. After some discussion, we decided to pick up the chemicals on our way to the border. The van, by this time, was returned to Chiang Mai, so we had to find a truck. In Chiang Mai, as in many other Thai cities there are numerous truck taxis driving around looking for customers. Unfortunately, in the border town of Aranya Prathet there are only little tuk-tuks. So I decided to ask anyone who stopped if they had a truck we could rent.

Many tuk-tuk drivers stopped and insisted that they could carry our very heavy 20 boxes on their canvas roofs and could squeeze six of us into on small bench seat. Finally, one many said his cousin had a truck and could take us to the border. For $10 we go the perfect truck. Once we were loaded up, we headed to the neighborhood of the shipping company. Unfortunately, we didn't really have an address or clear directions to the shipping company, so we were relying on talking to them on our cell phones once we got to the neighborhood. Within two minutes of talking to them, our cell phone minutes ran out. We stopped at a shop to get more minutes, but it just so happened that our phone company could not add new minutes that morning. Here is Eric waiting behind the truck near the shop for me to get new minutes.

So without a cell phone, we had no choice but to wander the streets of the neighborhood looking for shipping company. After about 10 minutes, one of our friends says, "I think I saw a cardboard box on the porch of that house back there." With nothing else to go on, we checked it out. The house looked nothing like a shipping company and the people at the house watched nonchalantly while we tried to get past their attack dogs. Once we actually made it up to the porch, we saw that the box had "Hope International School" written across it. Hallelujah! It was miraculous that we found it.

So, now we were on our way to the border. Another unfortunate fact of the traversing the Thai-Cambodian border is that nothing can be taken across on a motorized vehicle without a special permit. So we had to hire a woman and her daughter to take it across on her giant wheelbarrow. We had to go via a separate route and it took us two hours to get through all of the official channels. Once we were on the other side, an employee of the school was waiting as was some sort of busing union. They told our co-worker that we were not allowed to leave immigration without taking a special bus to a special bus station. Our co-worker, tired of the delays, signalled to his driving partner who squealed around the corner, shoved us in the bus and drove off before the union could report us. I guess it wasn't that big a deal. Though we were stopped by police all the way back to Phnom Penh, no one seemed to be on the look-out for us.

So that's our saga of moving. Now we have to do it again in a few days.

At McDonalds! (in Thailand)

Cheers and boos for living cheap

First the cheers: My first fill-up of the motorbike was $1.50 and I don't really need to fill the moto more than once a month because it uses so little gas. Also, my first motorbike repair for leaking oil, a broken fuel guage and a broken mirror cost $6. Hooray!

Now for the boos: I don't get ice cream sandwiches as much because I'm never at the gas station. Also, our house is built very cheaply and and last night gabe broke the faucet off at the neck with his head. His head doesn't hurt at all, but that's the second faucet that has broken off with a minimum of force.

Noise

When my dad came to visit Phnom Penh, he was fine with the heat, but bugs didn't bother him, I don't think he noticed the dirt, but he really didn't like the noise. Life here is a lot noisier than anywhere we've every lived. Fortunately, none of us seem to be very noise sensitive because there is noise all the time. Our road was one of the first roads in our section to be paved a few years ago. It runs parallel to a big, busy road and runs right into a large temple, so there is constant traffic noise right outside our door. We live in a row house so we can hear the noises of the five houses around us and someone is always doing something. They start cooking early in the morning and so there are pots and pans banging, people talking, laughing, crying, stereos, TVs, people honking to be let into their houses, random banging and all the rest of the noises of life. Every couple of days our neighbor pounds on the adjoining wall to our bedroom at 6:00 am with a hammer (I assume his mosquito net has fallen down). In addition, vendors are continually passing our door. Some of them shout, some of them have bought bullhorns with a recording device so they don't have to shout themselves. The ice cream truck plays the same tune in a 15 second loop and he starts coming around at 8:00 am. They are building a new house a few houses down so there is constant sound of hammers and saws. Dogs and rats get into frequent noisy fights. The noise is such that we cannot hear each other if we are more than 10 feet apart. Watching TV is pretty futile without subtitles because the accoustics in our room make the louder volume difficult to understand and at a lower volume you are sure to miss something every few seconds as a motorbike goes by, a dog barks, someone yells or a vendor goes by. However, the loudest sound of all is the rain. We have tin roof, all of our neighbors have tin roofs and when it rains, it is almost impossible to hear someone speaking in a very loud voice right across the table from you. This all sounds terrible, but I love the sound of the rain on a tin roof. During one rain storm I went up the roof. Most houses here have a roof that you can use as a living space and an open tin roof above it. You can see our space in the pictures I have posted. It's a nice space as it catches all the breezes. Our neighbors usually sleep in our roof space (as you can see by the bed).

Anyway, I was up on the roof and watching this incredible rain storm sweep across the city. The rain was almost horizontal and the noise was incredible is it beat on the our roof and the roofs of houses all around. To me, it's a beautiful thing and fresh air it brings just adds to the pleasure of watching a storm. I took these pictures, but it in no way captured the overpowering nature of the storm. Of course, it's a little sobering to realized that these storms come from the same systems that have been devastating the Philippines, but it's still awe-inspiring. I wish I could better capture it.

A few random pics

Gabe on a boat on the Mekong or Tonle Sap (not sure which) with a friend.

Eric having coffee with students. He is the pastoral care teacher for the year 12/13 students and they have devotions together many mornings.

4 year 3 boys on a trip to the market.

Our new family vehicle

Having decided that a car would be more of a headache than a help in this city, we bought a motorbike. On the streets of Phnom Penh motorbikes outnumber cars and this is probably the most common model-a Dae Lim Citi. I really wish I'd had my camera at the motorbike shop because we bought this bike from a shop with hundreds of identical red Dae Lims. As you can see from the long seat, it is considered a family vehicle. One of the Khmer staff at school helped us to select this bike and encouraged us to buy something boring and unattractive like this one so, as he put it, we "wouldn't get our throat cut." Many of the staff have nicer bikes and are still living, but we decided we'd like to have something that didn't draw attention. Not having ridden a motorbike much, I've mostly ridden around the neighborhood to get used to it. Some of the students from Hope saw me the other day and apparently told their parents, "I saw Mr. Eric's wife on the motorbike and now there's someone who rides even slower than mom!"

Duch's Trial

Today I went to the trial for Duch, director of S-21, more commonly known as Tol Sleng prison. Duch was a member of the Khmer Rouge regime and presided over the facility in which more than 15,000 accused enemies of the party were killed. Only a dozen prisoners survived. Tol Sleng (poison tree hill, in Khmer) is only a few minutes from where we live and trials are taking place about a half an hour away, so we thought it would be a good idea to take some of Eric's older students to see the trial.

The courtroom was already full when we arrived, but they allowed us into the press room. That in itself was interesting. I thought of all the reporters who have written about famous trials and here were reporters reporting on history as it happened. There was nothing exciting about it. The members of the press sat around at tables with laptops. Many copied the trial verbatim. Some seemed to be writing editorial pieces. A few napped and played games. Some had been coming every day since the trial started.

At the recess, many people who had come to watch the trial left to get something to eat. We watched the audience, mostly Cambodians, stream out of the courtroom and noticed that so many were the same age as Duch and almost certainly lived through the Khmer Rouge regime. It left us wondering if they were victims hoping to see justice done or former friends of Duch who have not yet revealed the role they played. Another teacher who went with us met a Cambodian woman in the bathroom. She asked her where she lived. This woman had come with other residents of her village from a town close to the border of Vietnam. When the teacher asked the woman, "Why did you come?" the woman replied, "I came to see his face."

I can identify with that woman. I had seen pictures of Duch, but seeing him in the flesh was surreal. Here was a man who ran a prison where so many were tortured and killed. Visitors to Tol Sleng prison/museum in the first year it opened said that the smell of blood and rotting flesh was overwhelming. Yet he looked gentle, intelligent and peaceful. He states, though, that he is constantly haunted by remorse and has plead guilty. He has also apologized for his crimes against the victims.

An interesting side note to the this story: Duch had been an exemplary mathematics teacher in Cambodia until he became a part of the communist party. He himself was arrested and held without trial for two years for communist activities. The day that the Vietnamese occupied an empty Phnom Penh, Duch walked out of Phnom Penh and established a new life in another area of the country. During the 90's his wife was killed in a burglary and he subsequently became a Christian after contact with a Cambodian-American missionary.

Another interesting side note: Duch's defense lawyer also defended Zacarias Moussaoui.

Most interesting quote of the day-from a witness: "As far as I know, this is the first time someone has been prosecuted for crimes committed against the people in the name of the people."

Moving to a crowded, chaotic Asian city, we were sure to miss the lovely parks and open green spaces in Michigan. Then we discovered a recreation area (vacant lot) just down the road from our new home. Obviously, we worried in vain... This is a picture of the neighborhood volleyball game. They play most days that there aren't too many puddles in the mud. It draws a good crowd.

FCC

My dad took us out to the FCC (Foreign Correspondents' Club). It's a nice restaurant in a pretty spot, but is decorated mostly with arresting photos of the years of war here in Cambodia.

Gabe reading to new friends

Amnesia

It's scary how short Gabe's memory is. Today he was doing some homework. He had to write down the name of a shop. He wrote down "Lucky", the name of the small supermarket where we get some of our groceries here in Cambodia. I asked Gabe, "Where did we get our groceries in America?" "Lucky?" was his guess. "You think we had Lucky in America?" I asked. "I don't know," he answered. Finally, he remembered the name of one store we went to in America.

We have been gone only three weeks and the American environment already seems to be fading from his memory. It's almost as if he never lived there. Of course, he remembers people, for which I'm glad.

Adjusting

This will be brief as our internet connection is very fickle. A week ago I was thinking, "This might be a more difficult adjustment than I bargained for." I knew about many of the difficulties of life before coming, but facing them was another thing. I still miss many of our friends and family in the States, and in many ways our our thoughts are with many of you. Also, we had an attempted break-in, we had food eaten by rats and I felt driven to hide by the bugs. It often seemed like I was spending a lot of time waiting around to accomplish relatively little and was getting lost a lot. In spite of all this, I feel like we're adjusting to the difficulties. The deterring of pests and thieves is becoming part of routine and waiting offers more time to just reflect. We've had some really lovely dinners with new friends this week and have found some cool spots by getting lost. When I think back over the week, it's the good things that have come to mind. We hope you have had just as good a week.

Phnom Penh

Well, we are settled in our new home in Phnom Penh. This has been a very fast adjustment-partly because we've lived in Asia before, partly because Eric was here first and also because I have had no jet lag at all. One of the main benefits to working nights all year long is that I had absolutely no difficultly in moving 12 time zones. It's been GREAT!

I just want to say first off that I have pretty limited internet access, so I will probably not be checking e-mail all that often to start out with, but will try to answer within a week.

So far, things are going well. Eric was able to get things pretty well settled in our house and thankfully, much furniture was left, so there's not too much to do with that. Our house is very different from anything we've lived in before. When I walked in I felt like I was walking into a train station-the ceiling is that high. I think it must be 20 feet high or more. The only window in our bedroom overlooks this space so sometimes I feel like a factory floor supervisor when I look down on Gabe and Eric down there. Our house as a whole is so dark that when the power goes off I would need a headlamp to do any work. But overall, it's a good living situation. We have great neighbors and their kids have been over quite a few times to play.

Eric is enjoying his classes and Gabe has had a great first week. The first day one of his classmates was waiting for him and had drawn him a picture welcoming him to school. The other kids in his little class have been incredibly friendly and nice and overall, that is exactly as we hoped for him. He seems very happy already. It is a little different adjusting to the security issues. Kids up to 5th grade must be collected directly from teacher by a parent and people don't tend to go out as much so kids and parents stay around school for quite a while after school to let kids have a bit more play time together. Gabe's teacher is English, but grew up in Thailand and even taught at Grace before it was Grace, so she knows exactly where he's coming from, which is great since he's switching to the British curriculum.

Overall, we've had a good first couple of days and hope that it's a taste of how things will go during our time here. I'll try to post more pictures soon.

From Taiwan (again)

I last posted more than a year ago, and here I am again in Taiwan. I've never been outside of the airport, but this airport is starting to feel sort of like Gary to me. I've been through both so many times and know all about the amenities. In Gary, I know all the cheap gas stations, all the clean bathrooms, the train stations, the meeting points, and all the fast restaurants. In Taiwan, I know the most comfortable places to rest, the free massage chairs, Hello Kitty Land and the free computers. Yet I've never stayed in either place. Maybe someday. Until then, I'm passing through on my way again. Two flights down and one more to go til we land in Phnom Penh.

I also want to say that we had a good year in the States and it was hard to leave. We missed everyone before we even left.

I'll write soon and hope to post some more pics of life in PP.