June/July 2008 - South Africa

We spent last week in Capetown visiting parlament, the cape of good hope, seeing penguins, climbing table mountain and visiting museums. This week we are builing houses with habitat for humanity, our build has students from Capetown, Stelenbosch (another city in SA) Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe and of course Seattle. Our house is a bit behind schedule as it was raining to hard for the ducka (the afrikans word for the cement we use) to set and we had to stop building. wish for good weather for us!

this week has been spent doing some seriously hard work
but we finnaly have four walls and a roof on our house
and more importantly it's still standing *wild cheering*
the place we're building the house is a township called Mfuleni
townships in South Africa are where many of the poor black people live
and many of the people live in houses made of scraps of wood metal and cardboard
the house we are building is made of concrete block and dugga
Today we were doing the finnishing touches and building a roof
I can sucessfuly say i learned some mclkcsa the language spoken by the people in Mfuleni
and know have a whole new understanding of irish boy bands

May 2008 - Brentwood, Canada

This is not really a trip but as I needed a passport I'm including it.
We had a regatta (crew meet) at Brentwood College in Canada.
It was a very fun weekend involving little sleep lots of crew and some sun.

April 2008 - Washington DC

Over Spring Break we went to DC while there we went to more museums that I can count on my fingers and several national monuments. Highlights include seeing National Geographic, our behind the scenes tour of the National History Museum, Mt. Vernon and the grand opening of the Newseum.

March 2008- Mexico

Unfortunatly I have no pictures of this trip but we went to Bucieras a town outside Puerta Vallarta. While there we went Surfing and mostly chilled out on the beach while eating lots of delicious mexican food.

January 2008- Cambodia/Thailand

Mom and I went on a Trip with PATH a Seattle based health organization. We looked at the projects PATH is working on in Thailand and Cambodia. We arrived in Bangkok and saw several of the large Wats (Buddhist temples), museums and the royal palace. On the trip I decided I really like taking pictures of monks. Especially when they do ordinary things in their robes.

After Bangkok we went north to Chang Mai where we saw two PATH projects. The first in the Lampoon Province is a project called teen PATH which focus on better sexual education in Thai schools. I made lots of new friends because everyone was excited by the American who was their age and wanted to practice their English.

After teen Path we went trekking (national geographic style - driving through rivers) to a village of the nationless hill tribes people. When we arrived everyone was dancing and we joined in. PATH is working to provide vaccines and basic medical care to these people. The current projects are clean water and toilets these projects are chosen by the villagers.

Then we flew to Cambodia and spend some time in Siem Reap.

Siem Reap is the location of Angkor Wat (this may look familiar from tomb raiders) The Jungle Wat was spectacular just like the movies and pictures.

Then we went to Phnom Phen and looked at PATH's pharmacist training program and Promban project. The Promban project teaches Cambodian people about the dangers of going into Thailand to work illegally and helps people already in Thailand learn about heath issues they should work to prevent. they also work to diversify ways for people to make a living in Cambodia. They also give prenatal care and immunizations.