February 15

Feb. 15. Went to TB and gave them pix of boy scout and Sras trip, that I had downloaded on my thumb drive. I need to have Steve do a picture of Nak and me and bring it to her.. Initiated Rattana to set up visit to Sras on March 9-10, as March 8 is Women’s Independence Holiday. It seems that the number of three day weekends rivals that of the USA. Nuong, my unsuccessful house broker who also touts herself as a fixer and nature tour guide, broke her lunch meeting with me and rescheduled for later in the day at 5:30 pm. So I did some errands. I needed to extend my visa as I was not able to get a business visa at the airport and ended up with a 20 day visa which expired on February 17th. Guess that means I have been in Cambodia for a month without Lauren, as I re-entered the day Lauren left for home on the 17th of January. I will be fined $5 a day upon leaving the Country if I do not extend. The strange part of it is to get an extension, other than paying the fee of $45, I needed to surrender my passport so it could be sent to Phnom Penh for processing which takes a week when the 3 day holiday for the Chinese New Year is accounted for. I am trusting this process !!! I have a copy of it so that when I travel to Battambang I can use the copy when checking into the hotel, which always wants to copy it. You go to a travel agent to do the extension, so while I was there I bought all of the tickets that Lyman and I need to return to Siem Reap from Phnom Penh after a week of filming there and the tickets for all three of us to leave on March 19th, with Lyman catching his flight home from Phnom Penh and us from Bangkok. I met Nuong for a beer and to hire her as a fixer to arrange for us to be able to film a traditional dance ( Aspara dance)., a shadow puppet performance and a trip to Phnom Kulan ( Mount Kulan) where there is a waterfall and a pagoda to arrange for a blessing by Monks to be filmed at the waterfall. We shall go the waterfall on Saturday and I need to figure out if we should try and film it now with Steve and save a day from our shooting schedule with L and L. I had dinner at home and ate a home made dish of pasta and Bolognese sauce that I had cooked earlier in the day. This is the first real dinner I had made for myself and I froze most of it for another night.

Friday, January 1, 2010

January 1, 2010

This is from Lauren

It is the first day of the new year, and we are back to a normal sleep schedule. We spent the morning in Siem Reap looking for accommodations forn Paul. We looked at: guest houses, an entire house, and the second floor of a private house that looked incredible, but were not able to see inside until late today. In the afternoon, we met Chris and Scott Coats who are the founders of Trailblazers. http://www.thetrailblazerfoundation.org/about_history.html.


Chris and Scott are passionate about their commitment to Cambodia and believe in the bottoms up approach to giving. They believe that working with the government is the way to go, and this is the first time that we have met NGOs who are working directly with the leaders and future leaders of the Country. We will be going on a field trip with them on Monday at 8 am to the village of Sras, pop. 1300. This is their pilot village which sounds as if it has been transformed: schools, wells, micro loans, irrigation projects. We are very excited to spend the day with them on Monday.

We had dinner with Andrea and Brandon Ross from Journeys Within Our Community discussing the village that we are giving $5000 to. We will going out first thing tomrrow to observe and photograph the survey of this village. It appears that we have arrived during the coolest part of the year here...mid 80s. Lee Hi..goodbye in Khmer. Lauren
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