Every year (when there aren’t COVID-19 gathering restrictions) we host the Cambodian YAMEN and IVEP alumni at our home. This also includes the current SALT and YAMEN participants serving in Cambodia, as well as the outbound Cambodian IVEP/YAMEN participants who will be leaving in July. This isn’t just a social gathering – though it’s wonderful…
Catherine chasing birds
This last week we’ve been hosting the MCC DPRK (North Korea) Program Director, Stacy Nam. She came to join the team conducting the 5-year Program Review of MCC Cambodia & Myanmar and is acting as the Peer Reviewer. I’ll say more about the program review in future post. This post is just about a series…
Visiting Sros’ Farm Two Months Apart
In November 2022, I visited Ros Sros on a remote island upstream on the Mekong river in Kratie province. Sros is a poor farmer who lives in Damrae village who is following the climate resilient agricultural techniques she learned from MCC’s partner Cambodian Rural Development Team (CRDT). She has five children and also supports her…
Three Sisters on an island in Kratie province
In November 2022, I visited one of the MCC/Cambodian Rural Development Team project participants on a remote island in Sambour district, Kratie province. She is a poor farmer named Sopheat. She’s part of the local vegetable producer group and village savings bank. She had started a tremendous vegetable garden and I asked her why she…
Monitoring Visit to Kratie – January 2023
In January, I scheduled my backlog of blog posts from 2022 to publish once a day and then traveled out to Kratie province on a monitoring visit to the Rural Livelihoods and Social Cohesion in Interethnic Communities project. This was my third visit to the project villages in Sambour district, Kratie province – the first…
The Consequences of Fungal Adapation
For a long time – maybe two years already, maybe even longer – I’ve had some sinus issues; congestion, nasal drip, occasional sore threat. It got better, then worse, then better. I thought it might be related to the root canal I had, worried I had allergies, watched the air pollution levels, and fretted that…
Return to Monkey Island
Last month during our team visit to Prey Veng we spent a morning at Toul Baray Andet just outside of Prey Veng town. The last time we visited was in 2021 with that year’s YAMEN class. ‘Toul’ is a river delta word, it means ‘an elevated patch of land that is an island in the…
Cats of Cambodia
One of MCC colleagues in the Middle East has an album on Facebook full of cat photos that he’s taken there. I thought that I’d allow myself to follow suite, in the same vein as my Flowers of Cambodia posts, and upload some cat photos. Okay, there is one cat from Thailand in the photos…
Monitoring Visit to Kratie – November 2022
In November I traveled to Kratie province on a monitoring visit to the Rural Livelihoods and Social Cohesion in Interethnic Communities project. I was on my own this time – unlike our April 2022 visit – and met up with staff from our partner Cambodian Rural Development Team (CRDT). The trip from Phnom Penh to…
Visiting Isaac’s Host Family in Mesang
Last month during our team visit to Prey Veng province we visited Isaac, our SALT participant, who is living with a Khmer host family there and working at ODOV. Isaac is a recent graduate in Environmental Science from Eastern Mennonite University and is supporting ODOV as the Climate Resilience Assistant. Isaac’s host family in Mesang…