Archive for the ‘Southeast Asia’ Category
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
For the last three weeks, I’ve been in kind of a daze. We raised the 13k we needed to build a school in Cambodia in the first week of Passports with Purpose. Working with bloggers, sponsors, PR folks, and a whole network of people that love to travel, we raised enough money to build a school in seven days! Then, in the two weeks that followed, we raised enough to give the kids that will attend the school a kitchen garden, a school nurse, and a clean water supply.
Every now and then it would hit me. “Holy cats, we’re building a school!” I’d email Beth and Debbie and Michelle (the Passports with Purpose cofounders) and they’d say, in reply, something like, “OH MY GOD, I KNOW! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?”
Sometime this summer, the Passports school opens in Preah Vihear, Cambodia. I hope that we can be there to see the opening, not just so we can see it with our own eyes and meet the kids who are going to attend, but because I really want to share the reality of what we did with everyone who helped make it happen. I would like to be be able to share photos and stories and say to everyone who gave money — the bloggers and sponsors and organizations that gave prizes — I would like to be able to say to them, “LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID! LOOK AT THE GOOD YOU MADE IN THE WORLD!”
Taking a break from selling knock off guidebooks at Angkor Wat.
This little guy should have been in school.
We used a tagline in our efforts: We believe in the power of travel to create change. And everyone who participated in Passports with Purpose this year made that true. You believe in the power of travel to create change, too, we have seen it made real. Our school, where kids in recovering war ravaged Cambodia, will learn and eat and get their scrapes bandaged and grow up with hope for something better is real because of you.
So, thank you. Thank you to everyone that pitched in. As we come to the end of 2009, I hope you all feel as amazed and excited and optimistic about the future as I do. What better way to end the year than to do something that builds a better future? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
- Platinum Sponsor: Virtuoso
- Silver Sponsors: Got Passport: Will Travel, We’ll Serve, Best Travel Deals, BootsnAll, HomeAway, Raveable, Travelfish, Traveller’s Point, Uptake, and Hostel Bookers.
- Supporting Cast: Meg Paynor, PR, Anna Brones, Undersolen Media, Matt Knannlein, Intergalactic Design Studio
- Bloggers, far and wide — the complete list is here.
Posted in Administrivia, Southeast Asia | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
When we think about Asia, it’s really easy to romanticize the life, the people there — I think. It’s easy to be aggravated by the Starbucks even while we’re heading there to get Frappucino because good lord, it’s hot and I’m jet lagged and there is nothing that would be more reassuring right now than caffeine and air conditioning and yes, I am speaking from experience, this means YOU, Singapore.
I think it’s also nearly impossible to create any kind of real picture of the young woman who’s making your coffee, to imagine where her family is from and how maybe, this is a really good job for her or hey, maybe not. And maybe a little too much cable TV has made it possible for people who have no idea what California looks like to aspire to a life that has no rice paddies or water buffalo or arranged marriages. I think it’s easy to be annoyed by the culture clash we perceive as outsiders, but there’s no way we can get inside the head of the guy who built my Nikon so he could send a kid to college, for example.
This rambling mess of thoughts is what I took away from reading Tea and Other Ayama Na Tales
by Eleanor Bluestein. Yup, I got a review copy and I really enjoyed it. It’s a collection of short stories about the people of Ayama Na, an imaginary country that’s maybe Cambodia, maybe somewhere else, maybe cobbled together out of bits of Southeast Asia. Though I had the opportunity to ask the author about this imaginary place, I passed on that intentionally, I didn’t want reality to color my vision of what Ayama Na looks like, though I did patch it together in my own head, using pieces of Vietnam and Cambodia.
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Posted in Southeast Asia, Travel Reads | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
Photo: Cambodian land mine victims making music to raise money outside Angkor Wat
Nothing has quite cracked me open the way our trip to Cambodia earlier this year did. It wasn’t just the history, it was the present, too – the combination of such intense damage and such warm spirits.
Imagine this. We walk into a shop selling beautiful hand beaded crafts and are greeting with a hello that’s like singing and radiant smiles. But the song and the light aren’t at eye level. It’s from the women who sit on the floor surrounded by glowing piles of glass beads. They’re all missing limbs, a foot, part of a leg, both legs from the knees down… and their work, making these pretty little souvenirs, keeps them alive. You are acutely aware, as you stand there from your towering height of 5 feet and change, that they are not standing because they CAN’T. They are delighted to see us, and not in that pushy “buy something” way – they seem genuinely happy to show off their work and to have us in the shop. My heart breaks again for the thousandth time.
I could write more about Cambodia for Blog Action Day and with this year’s theme being poverty, it seems fitting. But instead of writing something new, I’m going to send you to a few other places that cover this topic better than I can – though I am also going to include to older NEV posts.
You should go to Cambodia. It will fill you with wonder and break your heart.
Posted in Southeast Asia | 7 Comments »
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
I somehow ended up in Metblogs Seattle‘s “Blarch Bladness Tournament of Blogs” and though I was crushed in the first round, I pretended there were no hard feelings and went to the awards ceremony at Skylark, a place just off the West Seattle Bridge on Delridge. The nice folks from Metblogs provided snacks and conversation, we bought beer and ate some adequate bar food. To Monica@ The Big Blog, Mona @ Kirida, Tracy @ the unstoppable West Seattle Blog, Beth @ Glacier Holder (?), Carolyn @ Poke the Kitty, Dylan @ The Client and Server, and anyone else whose name I’ve forgotten, hey, it was nice to meet you all in person. Metblogs, thanks for hosting! (Exit, shaking fist. “I coulda been a contenda!”)
(Sidenote about the Skylark: Many years back I went to Skylark to see some live music, a friend of Mindy‘s was playing, I remember a fantastic acoustic version of Little Red Corvette. The opening act was a willowy blond with a guitar and an Angry History That Required Release in Song. When she launched into her first phrase, the very first one, Mindy and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. It wasn’t very nice of us, but we couldn’t help it. This woman was like an SNL version of an angry folk singer.)
A bunch of my posts about our trip to Southeast Asia are featured in Travel on a Shoestring’s Carnival of Asia. Don’t go there to read my stuff, go there to read travel writings by other bloggers about places that are on the opposite side of the planet from Seattle.
To my stunned (redundant. ed.) surprise, I made the Saturday Uke Tube – a collection of uke related video links posted by Woodshed on the indispensable-to-the-uke-crazed site, Uke Hunt. Don’t say it out loud. You can see my video here, but there are much better and more interesting things to see in Woodshed’s collection. I rather liked “Road Trip” but I had network issues before I got all the way through it. To everyone who watched my performance, I apologize.
Whoa, that’s a lotta outbound links. I’ll get out of your way now.
Posted in Seattle, Southeast Asia, Uketopia | 4 Comments »
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Early morning traffic, Angkor gate
In 1993, after Angkor was added to Unesco’s World Heritage List, just 7,650 intrepid visitors ventured to the site. Last year Sokimex, the oil company controversially granted the entrance concession on behalf of the government’s Apsara Angkor management, sold almost 900,000 tickets worth $25m (£12.8m), with British travellers making up the fourth biggest contingent behind South Koreans, Japanese and North Americans. Three million visitors are expected in 2010. –Guardian
Three million visitors! Imagine three million visitors tromping through your home. It’s not built for three million visitors to start with, right, there’s no plumbing for that, and the couch can’t take it, plus, everyone’s going to be touching stuff they’re not supposed to be touching, and standing on that one step that you know is rickety but no one else does, and dropping stuff accidentally and leaning on things and just generally exerting massive wear and tear on the place.
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Posted in Southeast Asia | 5 Comments »
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
They’re everywhere, all day long. They’ve got plastic baskets of bracelets, strings of origami fish folded out of silk scraps, little handbags, cheap photocopies of guidebooks, postcards, postcards, postcards. You see them at 6 in the morning and at 11 at night. You think they should be in bed, at school, on the playground… at an early morning breakfast in the Angkor Complex, I watched an 11(ish) year old boy go back and forth between taking orders and selling souvenirs while his much smaller brother focused on moving the postcard inventory. “You buy. Ten for one dollar. 1..2..3..4..”
I asked our guide why they weren’t in school. “Later,” he said. “They work in the early morning, then they go to school.” This might have been true of these particular kids, but everywhere we went, all day long, we saw children working the streets. (more…)
Posted in Southeast Asia | 3 Comments »
