Howdy Ya'll! ;) (to be as Texan as possible)

This post is going to be a huge picture party! Getting ready for ALLLLL the pictures! We decided the most efficient way to let ya'll know what we have been up to when we aren't at work is to give ya'll a snapshot of the highlights! (Fair warning they may be out of order time wise! Don't let it confuse you ;))

SOME WORK PICS!

This is (from top right to bottom left) Seyha, Sarith, Ratha, and Cheyya! Just a few of the kids I (Lindsey) get to play with, try to help, and love on everyday. Each one is so unique in personality and disability but they are each still so precious and although it is sometimes challenging, I continue to learn everyday and I get to see little steps of improvement everyday!

Children at the community school CVCD (Amy's NGO) created!
They are the cutest and happiest children!

Grade 2 children at another Community school

ELEPHANT WEEKEND

We had the BEST weekend riding elephants in Mondulkiri Cambodia!

We couldn't resist kissing this beautiful creature!
He was the only boy with 5 girlfriends so we named him Hugh Hefner, real name Meh.

Amy about to go down into river on Hugh Hefner!

Beans riding bare neck elephant riding!

To give the elephants a break we got to play in waterfalls!
Some gorgeous volunteer girls!

BATTAMBANG & THAILAND

Finally kissed the monkey! Bucket list #3 accomplished. Interesting story goes with this.

Bamboo Train! feels like a magic carpet ride through the countryside

Cheeky monkey that jumped on my pants and started playing with my hair around the temples and caves.

and exploring all the caves!

Major culture shock landing in Bangkok vs. Cambodia!
It looked like NYC!

Round 2 of Elephant riding! (this may become a new hobby!)

And ELEPHANT BATHING! Such a surreal experience!!

Learned about Thai education system(much better than Cambodia's)
& watched Daniel teach the Thai children English!

Leaving will be so hard!

 (we have made some great friends who we are already planning a reunion trip with them in NYC next year!)

Its hard to say goodbye to all our volunteer friends when their time of serving comes to an end :(
We love you guys! Johnny (CA), Andrew (CA), Chase (South Africa) (who came back this week bc he missed us!), Francis (Singapore) & Emma (England)

We have made it a semi tradition to sign this guest book your last night!
We miss you Eric (NY) & Randa (Lebanon)
There are many others who have left but we don't have pictures with them :(

THE LAST WEEKEND TRIP! :( & :)

The amazing sunset on the beach of our last weekend trip!

Our friend Stevie (from NYC) toured around with us!

The second day we went to Rabbit Island! (straight out of LOST type island!)

It was the most relaxing weekend we had since we've been here :)

S'MORE WORK PICS! ;)

The 3rd floor meeting room

At work we can get coconuts!

There is nothing better than a coconut with work!

Outside of CVCD with my coworker Kasol

Chen & Thavy! On their way back from their standing date at the gate to look at the cars together.

 

The physio room!

Somkham, the biggest ball of joy autism, HIV and blind working on standing and loving the trampoline!

HUSTLE TIME!

Lastly we have to get our HUSTLE on
if we are going to finish everything from our BOTTOMS UP LIST!
Wish us luck as we run around our last couple of days!

Since we signed off the last post heading to Jazzercise heres a lil jazzercise nugget! Beanses fav thang to do after work! True Cambodian style!

Until next time!

Keep it Shaked & Baked!

PS

I love TEXANS (aka Amy and Lindsey TayTay). love, from, Corina...and Stephen 

6 DAYS LEFT!!! NNOOOOOOOOO...

As our time here in Cambodia begins to wind down I realized we have not been very good bloggers! So lets play catch you up! Beans posted about her work last week and I haven't been able to get around to that! It is hard to sum up everything I am getting to do at work, there is sooo much going on! (if you aren't into business I won't mind if you skip the next couple of paragraphs :p just know work is fabulous and way more than I ever expected and way more fulfilling!)

I have been working on 6 projects simultaneously for the past 3 weeks and have finally started to finish most of them. One of the projects I was assisting Francis (the volunteer from Singapore!) in writing CVCD's business plan projection for the next 5 years. This included stuff I had learned in my non-accounting business classes but had never expected to use in real life thank goodness the internet can tell you anything! We successfully wrapped up the business plan on Francis's last day Friday just in time! The plan ended up 36 pages long! Working on the plan ended up being such a blessing it gave me an in depth look at the NGO and the programs unfortunately it also gave me a closer look at the government, the economic environment, and the inefficient education system in Cambodia. Cambodia still has a very long way to come before they can be self sustainable (If you are interested in chatting more about it feel free to email me because I could write several blog posts on my findings).

Francis and the Directors setting up to discuss the Business plan

I wrote about my work on CVCD's Annual Report in my last bit about work and good news! I was able to present it to my supervisor and I am thrilled at the prospect of getting to help her in December put together the 2012 Annual Report using the new template! I am currently assisting her with the 2nd Quarter Report also, but I am afraid that will have to be finished via email when I return to the states. Business pace is much more laid back over here than our western "GO GO GO" culture. I have had to pray for constant patience some days and that I can learn from the business culture even if at time it is frustrating. They do not take the work as seriously as we do, in a good way! They have a "It'll get done eventually" attitude to most things, very counterintuitive to my western training, but also very freeing and less stressful once I let myself accept the fact that this or that project will get finished eventually!

I have also been working on compiling a massive database of the people and families who receive Micro Loans from CVCD. This has been a longggggg process to say the least we have interviews with each member before they received their loans and after. The goal is to compare the families quality of life and change in income and other key figures, however all of these interviews are in the Cambodian language (Khmer) and need to be translated before I can input the data. It took 2.5 days to finally communicate with my friend translating what would be the most time efficient POA(plan of action) luckily we are kicked into high gear now, but just in time for her to be out of the office for 3 days. Again just another when we get there we get there :)

One of the interviews 

I am so torn up about having to leave my Cambodian coworkers here! They have been some of the sweetest & funnest people I have met! They are always cracking jokes and making me feel right at home in a land so foreign! Being in this office has taught me so many lessons not only about the western & S.E Asian business culture, but also about myself as a person and as a worker(I am an efficiency natzi) I am so grateful for the lessons I have learned and the ones that I will still be learning in the months to come from this experience!

Thida & me at karaoke! (Our coworkers took us to Cambodian Karaoke a couple weeks ago! They are so sweet!)

I could go on & on about work but will leave it at that! We will have to post some pic updates from some of our recent weekend adventures later because we are about to run out the door to go to Jazzercise with the Cambodians at the Olympic Stadium!

Catching up on that Bakin' after the Shakin' last week! ;)

Animal Adventures in Cambodia

Oh my goodness a blog post is way past do! Our apologies, Amy is stuck in Thailand an extra night so it will just be me updating on loads and loads of adventuring!

Alright so during the weekdays we are still working and loving our jobs and still learning lots and getting so much great experience that will have to be a separate blog post altogether when Amy can inform you a little better on her half.

Last weekend we ventured to the beautiful town of Mondul Kiri which is all country side and not many people. We stayed at the best lodge yet which had cows and tiny horses roaming around everywhere, it had great food and even better staff! But that wasn't the best part, the best part was we got to go on an elephant for a better part of a day! It was so incredible! We rode through the jungles with two people per elephant in a bamboo basket on top of them with an elephant guide sitting on their neck for 2 hours! The elephants stopped often to grab some leaves and other goodies to eat and it was just an absolutely amazing view and it took us a while to comprehend that we were actually on top of an elephant! Then we stopped for lunch at a waterfall where the elephants were unloaded and let free to roam around for 2 hours while we jumped off the water fall, swam, ate lunch, hammocked and talked to our guides (one looked like an asian version of Jacob Black for sure). Then they brought the elephants to the water fall and we got to help bathe them! Which was awesome and kind of scary because the one I got on was the young playful one that liked to go all the way underwater to make us fall off like a game but it was definitely an amazing and unique experience! And then we were given the opportunity to take turns riding on the elephants neck which was beyond the most amazing thing I feel like I have ever gotten to do! They were such majestic and incredible creations and it was so amazing getting to ride through the jungle basically attached to another part of God's creation in such a natural and untouched environment. All in all this quite possibly could have been the best weekend of my life so far, it is really indescribable but everyone should get a chance to experience God's love through his creation in this way!

This weekend Amy went to Thailand and I went with a group to Battambang, which is definitely the type of town I would live in if I were to live in Cambodia long term. It was a shockingly peaceful town with the nicest folks and the cutest kids that were always ecstatic to see our tuk-tuk driving by. We got to see so many things as soon as we jumped off of our sketchy midnight bus, we hopped in a tuk-tuk and let him take us everywhere he knew to take us for the whole day! So we saw the river side and beautiful government buildings as well as a Cambodian wedding, then we hopped on the bamboo train which literally was like a raft of bamboo on track poles with an engine attached and went much faster than i ever expected and felt like a magic carpet ride through the country side! Then we tuk-tuked to Wat Banan which is similar to the temples at Angkor Wat but had what felt like half a million steps to climb up to the top; and then we finally made our way to Phnom Sampeau which is a pretty historical mountain outside of Battambang which holds the Killing Cave (similar to the Killing Fields), 2 other caves to explore, tons of friendly monkeys to feed as well as monks walking around all the other temples and large Buddha statues on the mountain. And as we came down from the top millions of bats were flying from one of the caves out into the country side for feeding time, there are so many of them they continually fly out in groups for at least an hour! And then we were dropped back off at the guest house showered and took on the town to find dinner where we found MEXICAN FOOD! I hadn't had it in so long it was soooo good! We split all sorts of main dishes and it really was a great break from Cambodian food, absolutely fabulous! Then we called it a pretty early night in our air conditioned rooms! A wonderful nights sleep, followed by our friendly tuk tuk driver taking us to more places, many of them to try local foods and unique places like where rice paper is made and the fish factory, then we drove by more monuments and temples and then made it to the crocodile farm that had over 1200 crocodiles, ages ranging from just born that morning that we got to hold to 70 years old, terribly frightening but awesome!

And then today I got to visit the wildlife sanctuary that Amy visited a few weekends ago and I got to get very friendly with a few of the monkeys and learned why you don't kiss the monkeys, saw slow loris' and every sort of jungle book animal, pumba off the lion king and even a dancing elephant! It was so lovely! Sorry this was so long but lots of updates and the post was way over due!

We love ya'll! Lehi!
-Just Shakin' out for now

Helllllllooooooo and Sous'day beautiful people out there!

We have been running around like crazy trying to do allll the things so we will give ya'll a quik recap!
So last weekend Beans went to Sihanoukville Friday and hung out on the beach all weekend! Amy made a very rainy trek to a wildlife preserve/zoo Randa our amazing Lebanese friend in Phnom Penh and then joined everyone on the beach Saturday!

The beach was seriously the best thing ever! The water was clear blue and warm and the beaches were fairly clean with beautiful sand and restaurants all along beach side so you can sit in chairs on the sand and eat and hang out! We also went on a boat tour of several islands on Saturday which included snorkeling in a coral reef and a fresh grilled chicken sand which on one of the islands which was maybe one of my favorite meals so far (yes western food!!!)

Overall it was a very relaxing weekend full of sun, water, rain, yummy food and good company! I (Amy) had off Monday and went to shoot allll the guns with this amazing guy Daniel.  I met him in College Station right before we both happened to be heading off to South East Asia! He is teaching in Thailand til October and got to come visit for the weekend and of course being a former Corp guy at Texas A&M he HAD to shoot all the ridiculous guns!

As for this coming weekend we are hoping to go on an elephant trek in Mondul Kiri which we are so pumped about!!! Here is the place we are looking at booking it through just to give you an idea http://www.naturelodgecambodia.com/ .

Okay enough with the funsy things lets get down to business! Heres a quick update on what we have been up to with the majority of our time here!

Amy- I have had an amazing couple of days working with my supervisor on revising and editing their Annual Report. This is a huge deal for any company but especially for non-profits like CVCD this is basically advertising to their donors and potential donors. The hard part about having an office full of Cambodians is translating and creating documents and communications that effectively convey in English what they want to say. This is where I have had a blast researching CVCD's different partner organizations and other non-profits annual reports and digging into what messages they are trying to convey to their donors and pulling the best of all these reports into CVCD's so we can better appeal and communicate the amazing accomplishments for the year. So deets aside it has been an amazing opportunity and growing experience to learn how to create this report and effectively show our donors who and what their money has helped!

Beansses- I am in love with my precious kids and have been looking forward to going to work every day and working with them! I've seen little bits of improvements and I'm remembering most of their names now and have a decent idea of where they are all at and what they need to be working! It also helped that I found all their papers and documentation from past therapists of their diagnoses and what they enjoy and were capable of back around November. Also several of the kids are getting new wheel chairs so I've gotten to go with them to get fitted and figure out what they need in a chair which is fun and is giving me a chance to see the prosthetics clinic a little farther down the street from the orphanage. I think the kids are definitely getting more comfortable around me and I am around them so we've settled into a good routine and I get to see the kids smile all the time which is the best site in the world!! I could go on and on with specific stories with some of the kids but maybe we'll way til I'm able to get some good pictures of them up since their faces are the loveliest!

Randa, & our deer friend who followed us around!

The gorgeous beach at Sihankville

Boat tour to all the islands with some of our other volunteer friends! ( Jennifer (only half of her),Corina, Chase, Emma, and Emily) 

Our girl friends Emma & Corina with us on the beach after dinner!

Amy and Daniel with the ridiculous big guns!

Feel free to throw us some emails! Let us know what you want to see!

Until next time.... :)

Shakin' & Bakin'

Howdy Y'all! 

We decided we should post some pics from last weekends adventures and slowly catch up on the rest of our adventures! Last weekend we went to Siem Reap and ventured to Angkor Wat the largest Hindu Temple complex in the world!It was originally designed in the first half of the 12th century so this thing is ANCIENT! 

This is our crew at the very highest temple!

Beans curiously exploring the temple walls!

These temples are amazing! We got to climb all over them!

The outside of Angkor Wat

Some regal statues

Seriously! This just looks like its straight out of a movie! But this is what the movies are made from! INSANE



We have tons more pics to upload! And many more updates and exciting things happening at work to let ya'll know about! But it is getting late over here and we'll try our hardest to squeeze a legit post out soon!


SHAKE & BAKE ALL THE THINGS!

First full week in Cambodia dominated!

Last week we finished our training and began working at our placements! We are having an absolute blast exploring the city, hanging out with the other volunteers, chilling with Cambodian buddies, and eating alllllll the food! Goods news in regards to our last post our brother Benji is home! His surgery went great and he has been able to start walking and eating. We are so thankful for all ya'lls prayers and thoughts for him and our family this week!


Beans:
I am working in a government owned orphanage with about 115 kids, where majority of them are disabled. I get to work in the physiotherapy (physical therapy) room with several other volunteers from Scotland, Ireland and Australia as well as a Cambodian physio (Physical Therapist) who speaks very little English. I could not have asked for a better job! Although there is not much instruction and communication can be a challenge the kids are brought in a few at a time and we can work with them doing therapy and just playing. Most of the time since I can't just ask the physio what to do, what the kid likes or even what exactly their disability is I have to play with them for a little bit to try and figure out what they need to work on. The other volunteers are students too and are farther along in their programs so I also ask them for advice and ideas often! It's a lot of fun and although some of the kids are in pretty sad shape I'm excited to help them and see them improve, hopefully in the short time I'm here. The job definitely has it's challenges but the kids are so precious and in need of love and prayer I look forward to going in everyday!
Hebrews 12:12 
Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. "Make level paths for your feet," so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.


Amy:
I am working at an AMAZING organization called CVCD- Cambodian Volunteers for Community Developement ( http://cvcd.org.kh/ ). They have so many incredible projects that are helping to equip, train, and enable Cambodians to become self sufficient! I am here because I was interested in their Micro Finance programs, but they also have tons of other amazing programs that are worth looking at if ya'll have time to surf their site (note that these are not native English speakers who created the site & for it is phenomenal from that perspective).

I am having a blast in the office I worked closely with 3 Cambodian women last week. They are so sweet and so much fun! They love practicing their English with me and teaching me Khmer (the language they speak here in Cambodia), which always produces tons of giggles! Their accents are funny to me and mine is hilarious for them! I was able to help them with a ton of the accounting and book keeping. All stuff that I am very familiar with and love to do! Today was my first day working on a microfinance I almost peed my pants! I worked with my supervisor to create a pretty kick butt spreadsheet to track the progress of the families and small businesses of the Cambodians who received a group loan with CVCD! It was so great to be able to apply skills I have learned and actually apply them and finally seeing my passion for enabling people through microfinance come to life!

I couldn't ask for a better organization or placement to work at! One of my favorite things is our TWO HOUR LUNCH BREAK, at first I was very concerned but I soon learned we get to NAP in the office after we eat! Why do we not do this in the states it is genius! 

We have more exciting things to share about our weekend! But we are running to go get a massage from Blind therapists! They are supposed to be the best in the world! 

Shake & Bake it!

Sous 'day!

*URGENT*
We heard news from the states of a terrible accident our brothers had been in. Trevor (17) and Benji (13) were in an accident Sunday night. They are both okay now! Thank God! Benji is still in the hospital he is beat up pretty bad but nothing that will not heal. Trev is doing great he had a few cuts and bruises. Please be praying for our family and especially Benji he will be having surgery on Wednesday for a pretty bad gash in his arm and for his speedy recovery.

It was the worst feeling in the world getting news that your brothers are hurt and there is absolutely nothing you can do when you are half way across the world! God was planning when he sent us together over here! Either of us by ourselves woud have been completely destroyed but we have been able to lean on each other through this.
We had already written a post but had not yet uploaded it when we found out about the accident so here is the post updated a bit:
**


We forgot to tell yall that we made it safely to Phnom Penh, Cambodia a few days ago!!!!!!!!!
 We have been having lots of fun exploring the city!

We slept for the first 12 hours after we hopped off the plan and arrived at the guest house. The guest house we will be staying at is called Tattoo!  After catching up on our Z's we hit the ground running! We went and visited the Killing Fields, S-21(more on these later), the river front (the westerner hang out), Russian market, and we found the perfect swimming pool! If you want to go to a pool here you can just walk into a random hotel and most the time for a small cover or purchasing drinks you have free reign over the pool!
In between all of that we enjoy eating meals and hanging out with all the other volunteers! Every gathering seems like we are having UN meetings, there are fellow Americans from New York, California, Washington, and Hawaii, but Mexico, Malaysia, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, England, France and Lebanon are all also present! It is so much fun learning about all the similarities and differences from our different backgrounds.

We have also been able to try many different cooked bugs like crickets, cockroaches, beetles, and some sort of sick worm! We will try to post those pics as soon as we can! We are aiming for a tarantula next!

We had orientation yesterday where we learned more of the language here (Khmer), their culture, Westerner Do's and Don'ts, and they let us loose in a market to with a scavenger hunt where we used our new language skills!  Today we will be taken on a tour of the city! Wednesday will be THE DAY we finally get to start working and also the day that Benji will be having surgery. Please keep all of us in your prayers on that day!

We are trying to upload photos as soon as we can, but the internet forces seem to be against us! As soon as we can we will get pics up!
We are loving getting your emails and updates feel free to email us anytime about anything!
And please keep our brother and family in your prayers, or send Benji good vibes!

Shake & Bake over and out!