2007 Asia
2006 USA Trip
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May 11th, 2007
Neil, Addie, Jesse, Nicole, Tim, and I along with two new team members rode out of Phnom Penh Saturday morning, May 5. Our two new riders were Vaa – Tim’s host brother from SST– and his friend Ratha, who both gave up their weekend to ride with us as far as Vietnam. The two are no strangers to the route and spent a summer biking around Cambodia talking with people in the rural areas about deforestation and the future of their environment. Their organization is called The Explore Cambodia.
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Posted by Nicholas Loewen | Posted in Asia07 | 1 Comment »
May 8th, 2007
1. Many people on this trip have made me smile.
2. Going to the bathroom 14 times in one day should not become a regular occasion unless you are only going to fix your hair — even then, 12 times is enough.
3. I have determined that the participants in BikeMovement Asia are really cool, and if you don’t know them all yet, you should probably try to meet them sometime!
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Posted by Neil Richter | Posted in Asia07 | No Comments »
May 6th, 2007
Last night we listened to stories. We heard stories of three Christians, relatively young in their faith. We heard the stories from the people who lived them. We gathered with young people from Phnom Penh Mennonite Church and shared some of our experiences with Christianity and the Mennonite Church. We asked them about their experiences. And they told us stories…
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Posted by Tim Showalter | Posted in Asia07 | 1 Comment »
May 4th, 2007
Phnom Penh, finally. After rolling into Detroit, my 747 to Tokyo was grounded by technical difficulties, forcing me to stay a lonely night in one of Michigan’s finer Best Westerns. On my way early the next morning, I was nervous – having missed both my connecting flights and worrying for the safety of my bicycle, which was somewhere in the South-Pacific. In the end I was re-routed through Bangkok, and arrived in Phnom Penh, to find my bicycle – some of it peeking through the packing box, but all in all, no worse for wear.
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Posted by Jesse Bauman | Posted in Asia07 | 1 Comment »
May 3rd, 2007
Nick Loewen, Neil Richer and I, arrived in Phnom Penh exactly 24 hours late on Saturday, April 28th at 10:00 AM. Upon arrival we were thrust into Cambodian culture as we hitched one “tuk-tuk” back to the MCC guest house from the airport (a tuk-tuk being a small carriage attached to a motorcycle). This would have been an exciting first activity without three bike boxes, five people and excess luggage, but the extra challenge of fitting everything made it that much more thrilling. I had to laugh that just 48 hours earlier we found it necessary to have a fifteen passenger van drive us to the bus station because our bike boxes could not possibly fit in anything else. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Adele Liechty | Posted in Asia07 | 1 Comment »
April 26th, 2007
Buddhism is the official state religion in Cambodia. Throughout the first six weeks of our SST stint in Phnom Penh, we had the opportunity to engage a broad spectrum of lecturers, including a professor of philosophy (one of the up and coming philosophy scholars in the nation we were told) who explored with us a “distinctive, contemporary Cambodian philosophy” as it is developing in this Buddhist context. What was perhaps most interesting was his inability to in fact speak to any defining characteristics of this said philosophy - at once surprising and plausible. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Nicole Bauman | Posted in Asia07 | No Comments »
April 26th, 2007
I’ve never sat overlooking the Mekong River before, never seen its people this close, never breathed its heavy wafts of raw sewage before.
Happy Tours motors tourists in lazy loops this side of the Japanese Friendship Bridge. The wake gently jostles the boat people, in their long fishing crafts, strung up with nets, hammocks, small covered areas in the centre where the family cooks, sleeps, rests, cleans their catch, seeks shade. This is home and work and play-space and yard and mode of transportation, docked as they are in the garbage heap that overflows down the concrete banks into the water, the boat people scavenging among the street kids, krama (the ever-present, endlessly versatile, traditional Cambodian scarf) tied around their heads and faces – to keep out the stench, the flies, the dust, the sun that beats even in this, the “cool” season. Debris and garbage drift slowly beside the docked families, among the double-decker tour boats, as children swim and splash and bathe and urinate, as others dip their feet, catch their supper, wash their clothing. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Nicole Bauman | Posted in Asia07 | 1 Comment »
April 26th, 2007
Because my own understandings of church and my deepest hopes for the Christian faith are embedded in a social ethic of transformation and woven into a vision for the development of nurturing and sustainable communities, issues of justice and international development work are inextricable from my own observations, inextricable from any conversation we might begin about who we are as North American Anabaptists in this complex relationship we call the global church. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Nicole Bauman | Posted in Asia07 | 2 Comments »
April 25th, 2007
(The following reflections draw on my experiences pre-Bikemovement Asia, but are relevant nonetheless as they paint a picture of life in Cambodia, as well as glimpses into the church as I’ve encountered it here.)
I spent the second six weeks of my Goshen College Study Service Term (SST) in Cambodia living in a small village in Takeo province, about one hour south of Phnom Penh. The “service” aspect of my time in Prey Kechiay village was thin, fluid, ambiguous; we were affiliated loosely with an organization doing important development work in the area, but because of our language limits and the drawn-out nature of community development work, it was difficult for us to become significantly involved. Much of our time was spent walking – in the experiential sense, but also across the rice paddies, to market, to neighbours, to bring in the cows - with our host families, observing rural Cambodia, beginning to slowly comprehend pieces of life in this one corner of the country. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Nicole Bauman | Posted in Asia07 | 2 Comments »
April 21st, 2007
Ratanakiri is the Northeastern-most Province in the Kingdom of Cambodia. It touches Laos to the north and Vietnam to the east and is rich in mineral and agricultural resources. It is also home to a very diverse group of Cambodia’s many indigenous, ethnic-minority communities. I lived there for six weeks of my last eight weeks here in SE Asia. I was working mostly on a bamboo conservation project that was initiated recently by local, indigenous youth, but I dipped in to a lot of goings-on and wanted to share some of my more ‘churchy’ reflections here. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Tim Showalter | Posted in Asia07 | 7 Comments »
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