Great rice, lousy price. I believe we have some of the best rice in Cambodia, but we were hurt by lack of water control during a critical growth stage. Still we have a much better crop than I have seen elsewhere. But, it does show that the rice farm development program is crucial to our long-term sustainability. The strange thing is that with a generally poor crop in Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, the price is 1/3 less than it was a year ago. Many farmers are protesting, by blocking roads with their equipment, and in danger of losing their farms …  

Always precocious and very curious, Naret found himself running with group of older “gang bangers” on the streets of Phnom Penh in 1997. At age 13 he rarely stayed with his destitute family and desired the things that he could not afford. So, even though he was considered “too young” he took to the streets where his gang would fight turf wars with their rivals to control an area for the distribution of a drug called “Seesha”, a cannabis based narcotic. They would fight with wooden clubs and knives but things were spinning out of control. In 1999 Naret’s future looked pretty dim. People …  

Devils are like rats. You can knock them out, but they still stink! We’ve been working hard to get our “Catechism” (150 pages of basic beliefs) translated into Cambodian and published. We bait for rats every month. In my humble opinion, the only good rat is a dead rat! Just as we were pushing to complete this task of translation, one ‘dirty devil’ rat crawled up into our office attic rafters and died. We had twenty staff members with flashlights trying to find his stinking carcass, but to no avail. All we could do was hold our noses and spay …  

During these times of drought drinking water has been a precious commodity. In some provinces fire trucks were delivering water just to keep people alive. We took water out of ponds and cleaned it up through filtration in several locations. Scummy, smelly swamp water became as clean and clear as Avion. The most sophisticated system was at our rice farm in Balang where both workers and a church depend on water for life, with no wells in the community. The “Booshway Boys” from Lafayette, Colorado installed this system last fall, and we’ve never missed a good drink since then. We …