Throughout our travels, we’ve discovered a handful of villages (complete with schools, stores and hospitals) floating in the middle of vast bodies of water throughout Southeast Asia. The first was in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam. The second was a fishing village in Thailand. But we didn’t get to know either of these villages as intimately […]
HARD LESSONS: THE KHMER ROUGE
Nowhere has history come alive for us more than Cambodia. Just forty years ago, the Khmer Rouge swept in, ostensibly as the “Peace Party,” after the wars of Southeast Asia, and proceeded to exterminate two million of their own people. A generation was literally wiped out. The Khmer Rouge regime executed almost the entire professional […]
THE STORY OF RUBBER
Back in the 70’s, we grew up loving “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” especially the regularly featured short films showing, say, the process of how peanut butter gets manufactured or how blankets are woven and stitched. So drawing significant inspiration from the late great Fred Rogers (who left this mortal coil in 2003), we decided to make […]
THE SMALL GUIDES
As soon as we arrived at Odong, an ornate temple dedicated to the past kings and queens of Cambodia built high atop a mountain about forty kilometers from Phnom Penh, a handful of local schoolboys approached us. We didn’t realize it at that time but we were about to have one of the most unexpected and significant […]
SIX HOUR BUS RIDE
We could have flown from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh. The flight is less than an hour, but by the time you get to the airport, check in, wait, fly, land, collect your luggage, go through immigrations, customs, it’s much more than an hour. And we’d already flown 27 times. Besides the flight […]
A THANKSGIVING MESSAGE FROM FRANNY: ANGKOR HOSPITAL FOR CHILDREN
We have spent the last seven days in Cambodia, which is a remarkable country with an amazing and also horrifying history. In my parents’ lifetime, two million people were exterminated by the Khmer Rouge. Many of the people we met had family members who were killed. The people we met were all kind and generous […]