In Country

Well, I arrived on the 12th after 26 hours of travelling. As this blog isn't really a place for me to bitch and complain I won't talk about the trip. For those who don't know (as this blog was originally concocted to inform my closest of what I'm doing), I am here to work with a couple of people who have started NGOs here and intend to expand their reach. Chibodia- Friends for Children in Cambodia is the first, and Motomedix is the second. Chibodia was started by my oldest friend Samuel Pehlke about 2 years ago with the goal of helping children in Cambodia. This help comes in many forms, all of which you can read about at chibodia.org. Now, if you don't speak German, you'll have to use google translator or some similar service. But basically they (we, now) fund and run 3 schools and one orphanage (which we call a 'children's home') which will eventually house 30 orphans.
I've been writing a pretty verbose day by day account of what's going on here, but it's a little behind since I've been pretty busy. There's a fair amount of 'down time', but much of that's been spent either drinking or talking about plans and trying to both learn Khmer AND relearn German. There are two volunteers from Germany here, so most conversation is auf Deutsch. They offered to speak Englisch as much as possible, but I said no, as 1. it's rude for me to make4 out of 5 people speak the minority language and 2. I need to brush up anyway and there's nothing like immersion for that. It's going ok. My Khmer is another story...
So, after I clean up my articles a little, I'll throw the first of them up. That should be tomorrow. Hopefully. There are 4 kids coming tomorrow, so we'll see.
Until then.