Back to Cambodia, January 2024

We spent several weeks in the United States over the holidays so that family, friends, and church could meet Caleb. We also needed to stop by the Washington DC passport agency to renew the girls’ passports. We returned to Cambodia on a 35 hour long journey that included far too long of a layover in…

How the girls are doing

In October 2021, we had a dangerous miscarriage – a complete molar pregnancy. This is when the mother’s chromosomes are missing from the egg and the cells that would normally develop into the placenta develop into a molar growth instead. This can lead to tumors, cysts, a rare form of cancer, and necessitate a hysterectomy….

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…

Kratie Project Visit – April 2022

Late in April 2022, our family was finally – after two long years of COVID travel restrictions – able to make the trip to the remote Northeast and visit the project in Kratie province. When we came to Cambodia in 2019 I had planned to take the girls along on field visits regularly but due…

Visiting Ba Phnom in Prey Veng

Last month during our team visit to Prey Veng province we visited Ba Phnom district. Located in the flat heartlands of the Mekong delta, Ba Phnom holds the only “mountains” in Prey Veng province. Ba Phnom is an ancient cultural center of the Khmer people. The name Ba Phnom actually means [Ancestor] [Mountain]. The first…

The Giving Tree International School

Charlotte and Catherine attend The Giving Tree, a small international school in Phnom Penh that a group of expatriate* parents started as a nursery 14 years ago. The nursery grew into a school with it’s first students and now offers Nursery through to Sixth grade. What’s an Expatriate? Expatriate, often shortened to Expat, is a…

Some photos of Catherine being a big girl

Now we’re looking ahead to Catherine’s birthday in May and realizing that she’s turning the same age that Charlotte was when she moved here. There’s definitely some COVID-19 time dilation going on because it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. In any case, I wanted to share some photos of Catherine’s final months as…

COVID-19 finally got us Two Years and a Month Later

The first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in Cambodia on January 27th, 2020. It’s been a long two years of caution, disruption, and uncertainty. As leaders here, we’ve tried to walk the line between modeling appropriate precautions and being calm and reassuring. This month, for the first time in a over a year, we started…

Shopping with the girls at the local market

During our first few months in Cambodia I was taking the girls to shop at the local market but once COVID-19 broke I started to avoid the market crowds in favor of our local grocery shop (which is run out of a family’s house). This wasn’t a waste as the girls started coming with me…