What now?

I've been reading through some resumes lately, and one of the issues I've had is that Cambodians love to write run-on sentences. I found this gem in a recommendation letter. I normally wouldn't put stuff like this up on here, but here's a good example of why it's difficult to recruit staff who speak Khmer but are applying in English...

"She has been a hardworking, honestly, wholehearted, transparency, accountability, and initiative employee who always carried out her duties in a patient and gentle performance with professionalism knowledge and experiences of Administrative and Financial basically system and skills in strongly of preparation the Financial Reports with the sharply Excel Accounting System to submit to stakeholders."

Enjoy!

Siem Reap with Oma and Opa

Oma and Opa Wieler are here!! We're so excited they came to visit we've gotten behind on our blog writing! They arrived almost a week ago, just in time to cheer us up from the loss of our kitten. This past weekend we went to Siem Reap to visit the temples with them. Here is one of us at Banteay Srei. We also got to Kbal Spean that day, as well as Ta Prohm. More later!

Poor little kitten

We are sad to say that last night Ms. Oroku Saki, Leader of the Ninja Foot Clan, known to most as The Shredder, our kitten, passed away. Shredder will be remembered for her affectionate biting of loved ones hands, feet, ears and exposed skin. She lived a wild and exciting life; after being rescued at the age of 2 weeks, she was slowly nursed back to health, putting on weight (especially her belly) and becoming extremely playful. She adored and was adored by Julia.

Shredder was a great companion and purred loudly if not often. We will miss her.

More training!

Last week I (Julia) was up in Poipet and Battambang with Sithy doing child protection training with our member organisations there. We had almost 50 participants is all and it went really well, but I'm glad to be home! Having completely forgotten what it was like to date Charlie long distance for three years, I missed him so much! And I was only gone for 5 days!
The participants were all really keen to learn and implement child protection plans in their programs. We learned a few surprising things about people's knowledge (or lack thereof) of their organisation's child protection policy and hopefully the training will get them on the right track. Two of the NGOs appointed child protection champions, people who be responsible for keeping staff up to date with training and abuse prevention implementation. So exciting!
Sithy and I had a good time together, it was really fun to get to know her a little better and she was a good travel buddy. Once I get my pictures onto my computer I'll post some! For now, here's a picture of Sithy and me at our colleague, Sok's wedding.

Happy New Year!

Happy 2009! We hope this year bring you joy and hope! It is going to be another busy year for us and we're so excited for what's in store. Two months left in Cambodia and then two months traveling in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Laos; we'll be back in Canada in May where Charlie will work and I will go back to school in September. Looking forward to seeing you again!
Much love!

Merry Belated Christmas!

Well, we've given up on trying to upload our Christmas video, it just won't work! Suffice it to say that we missed our family and friends over the holidays.
We spent Christmas in Ratanakiri, the northeast remote corner of Cambodia and had a fantastic time. It is really beautiful there and we did some hiking, saw amazing waterfalls and spent quite a bit of time at a gorgeous volcanic lake. We got there by dirt bike, which was such a fun, though a little soar after a while, way to travel around the country. We saw a lot of it!
On Christmas day we relaxed and reflected and felt like it was really a holy day. We also found a guesthouse that had a Finnish sauna, so we enjoyed that for a while, too (very random). Christmas dinner was Swedish meatballs and Wiener Schnitzel. A different Christmas, for sure, but it was great.
We miss home now that our adventure is over, but plan on attending a big expat party at a club tonight for New Year's to take our minds off it.
I posted more pictures of our trip on Facebook as well.

On Monday we had our Chab Dai Christmas party on a sunset cruise on the Mekong! We ate and talked and sang much karaoke and danced to the karaoke. It was really fun getting to know the staff even better. We had a great time.