It's Saturday, this must be Cambodia...

Yes, Cambodia it is.  Phnom Penh, to be exact.  I (Steven) arrived here from Vietnam last night and will be here for about 9 days to serve as a mentor teacher for new teachers from our organization who are going through a training program.  Starting Monday I'll teach a couple of--ahem--"model" lessons for Cambodian students and will spend the next few days observing the new teachers showing off what they've learned during the last 3 weeks of TESL training.  I'm excited for it.

Joelle and Micah are back in Quy Nhon.  We arrived there about a week ago from America and had time to get the house mostly cleaned and get over jetlag before I had to take off.  At the end of next week we'll all be meeting up in Hanoi for some Team Vietnam orientation time before the school year starts.  Craziness.

Since I have a little bit of time, I thought I'd update everyone on how our travels went and what we've been up to.  Our trip from Washington to Quy Nhon was, in a word, sweet.  Micah once again proved that he is a champion traveler and once again garnered praise from someone sitting near us on the 11-hour Seattle-to-Seoul flight.  A lady told Joelle at the end of the flight that Micah was one of the best behaved little ones she'd seen on a flight and that Joelle's parenting skills were top-notch.  I concur on all counts.  Somehow she kept a 23-month old happy and occupied for probably 8 of the 11 hours we were in the air (he slept the other 3 hours).  Not an easy task in a tin can traveling at two-thirds the speed of sound across the Pacific Ocean.



We had a short plane transfer in Seoul and arrived in Saigon late in the evening.  We all got a good sleep at our favorite hotel (the aptly named "Happy Inn") and flew to Quy Nhon the next afternoon.  Our house was in remarkably good shape for having been left to its own devices over the summer, but it still required a good spring (fall?) cleaning.  Joelle once again proved her awesomeness by getting things cleaned up while Micah and I played toys.  Our teammates the Bankstons showed up a few days after us, with their little one Ezra in tow.  We've been enjoying their company and helping them get moved into their new house off-campus--just a couple of blocks down the street from us.  So far things are going very well.  No dog bites or hospital visits like last year.

Here we are in the taxi on our way from Quy Nhon's airport to the city.  Somehow Micah (although he weighs about 1/6 as much as I do) triples the amount of luggage we have to carry.  The massive stack of bags behind us is, embarrasingly, all ours.  Micah is zonked out on our laps, demonstrating his ability (inherited from his mother) to fall asleep just about anywhere.

We've enjoyed getting back to Vietnam for many reasons, not least the food.  Micah loves him some coconut, and in the following shot we're breakfasting on xoi (sweet sticky rice) our first morning back in Quy Nhon.  Both are, in Micah's estimation, "ummy."

After long travels and a couple days of hitting the cleaning hard, we opted to spend an afternoon at our favorite "staycation" spot:  A local hotel with a nice pool and a rooftop cafe overlooking the bay (where we had to wake the waiter up from his afternoon snooze to order a banana split).  We love you, Quy Nhon.

This last shot, I include just because of its sheer awesomeness.  Before Micah was born I told Joelle that I wanted a chubby, happy baby.  She totally delivered (pun intended).  Add some robotron sunglasses, a wolf shirt and a we-are-the-champions-my-friends pose and you've got a pretty good idea of what our little man is all about.  With a baby girl on the way this winter, I'd better figure out what I want to order this time...  :)

Touchdown and TVO

The Shetterlys have landed.

As I write this, we're in the middle of TVO (pronounced like the popular TV-recording hardware, TiVO) which stands for "Team Vietnam Orientation." Currently we're at a hotel perhaps an hour outside of Hanoi, on the banks of the Red River. We're here with a group of great people--individuals and families who are dedicated teaching and serving in Vietnam. For some, it's their first week in Vietnam. Others have been here 5, 10 years or more. It's our fourth year coming back, and it really has begun to feel like home.

Our flight went fine, with Micah proving once again that he's a great traveler. The stewardesses on Korean Air only had to employ their patented baby-calming tactics four or five times on the entire 15-hour journey. Our first few days in-country were spent with our old Quy Nhon teammates, the Fizzards, at their house in Hanoi. The Fizzards' two girls, Ella (4) and Madeline (2) were thrilled to the squeaking point to have a new playmate around. For Micah it was a bit of a transition from the Transformers, trains and trucks of his cousins this summer to the dolls, kitchen set and pretty princess blankets of the Fizzard girls but he handled it well. For a one year old boy, a Barbie is just as fun to throw against a wall as a ball is.

With the tropical summer still in full swing, the backyard inflatable swimming pool at the Fizzards offered some relief from the heat and a good deal of fun as well.

One of the favorite new toys, however, isn't really a toy at all (go figure). It's a baby bed/tent that Joelle's folks got Micah for his birthday just a few days before we returned to Vietnam. The tent folds up into something the size of a kid's bicycle tire but, when expanded, has plenty of room for Micah...and a few friends.

(In the picture you can see the Fizzard girls, Micah, and the newest member of Team Quy Nhon, Ezra.)

Speaking of friends, Micah has around 89 million of them here in Vietnam. Soon he'll need his own tour bus and roadies. Although reaction to him was halfway subdued while we were in big, cosmopolitan Hanoi, we moved an hour outside the city and all stops are removed. Micah is the cat's pajamas and the bee's knees all rolled into one cute little frame.

Joelle and I made the classic blunder of showing up about 10 minutes early to lunch at the hotel's restaurant our first day here. Since the wait staff had nothing else to do, they swarmed on Micah, coo-cooing with cellphone cameras at the ready. Micah--who's grown a little more attached to mom and dad over the summer--wasn't quite sure how to take all the attention. It's something he's going to have to get used to, whether he relishes the attention or not.
Being back in Vietnam has been great and we're enjoying our time together as Team Vietnam, but we're even more excited to get back to Quy Nhon, unpack our bags, meet old friends and students and stay in one place for a while. In the one and a half weeks between leaving the States and settling in Quy Nhon, we will have spent the night in seven different places. We're ready to stop moving for a while.

Our journey south begins tomorrow as we take a bus back into Hanoi. We'll spend one more night in a hotel in Hanoi, then fly out for Quy Nhon with our new teammates, the Bankstons, on the 6:30 flight Sunday morning. Looking forward to it.

More Micah and a trip to Thailand

For those of you who aren't on Facebook (all three of you) I'm posting a link to some sweet recent Micah pictures that I posted to our online album right about...HERE.

Saturday we fly down to Saigon, spend the night and then head out the next day head for Chiang Mai, Thailand where Steven will be taking his TESOL Master's classes and we'll be attending our organization's annual conference. We're looking forward to seeing the rest of the members of Team Vietnam, as we missed being with them at the usual beginning-of-the-year festivities. All told we'll be gone about 3 weeks, so we might not be quite so able to stay in touch in the near future here.

Rest assured we're all well, Steven taught a couple of classes this week (and loved it), Joelle has made banana bread for half the city in celebration of the Lunar New Year and Micah continues to grow. And smile. And look really cute.

Laters.

Home and thankful

It's about time we got this blog thingy started back up again, don't you think?

After six great months back in the States, we've returned to Quy Nhon as a family of three. It's good to be back.

As I type this from the Seagull Hotel, our son Micah (cutest little guy in the WORLD) is snoozing in his travel bed and Joelle is across the street at the university doing some apartment cleaning before we move in. We'll be tag-teaming the apartment today while the other one looks after the little guy.


Micah was a joy to travel with; although we were a bit worried about how much plane-sitting, taxi-riding and hotel-sleeping he could endure it turns out he's just as happy a kid at 35,000 feet as he is at sea level. With the exception of a couple of short cranky spells, he was all smiles and giggles (or snoring) the whole way across the Pacific.

As expected, Micah--being the cute, chubby white baby that he is--has drawn plenty of attention on this side of the world. Everyone from waitresses to hotel workers to flight attendants have wanted to pick him up, squeeze his feet and make funny faces at him. We've been told that for some reason it's not culturally appropriate in Vietnam to call people's babies "cute" or "lovely" or any such thing, but that rule has been broken with impunity when it comes to Micah. The stardom hasn't gotten to his head just yet--he seems to be just going with the flow, for the most part.

Joelle has already received her first unsolicited piece of advice on parenting as well--the kid needs to wear a hat, according to the lady cleaning the floor in the Saigon restaurant where we ate breakfast yesterday. When we explained to her that we had walked all of 30 feet (across the street from our hotel to the restaurant) she seemed to accept that.

Around Quy Nhon the weather has been downright chilly--all the way down into the low 70s, if you can believe it. We were reminded just how different people's perception of temperature here is on the ride into the city from the airport--a little boy was riding his tricycle alongside the road while wearing a full-face ski mask. Winter's icy grip seems to be loosening, though, as the next few days are supposed to be up in the low 80s with sunshine.

All told, we're glad to be back. It was hard to leave family and friends behind in the States, but we both sense that this is where we're supposed to be. And although it's a bit more complicated than before, it's a lot of fun doing it all as a family of three.

You have entered...the Economic Development Twilight Zone

This holiday season has been a full, busy, but great time for us as we've had a chance to share about Christmas and our reasons for celebrating it with hundreds of excited students. It's really quite impressive to look at the holiday from an outsider's perspective--just how much effort and money we as Americans pour into Christmas. No other holiday even comes close. No wonder people around the world are fascinated with it.

In addition to trying to explain Christmas to everyone, we've been doing all our 'normal' stuff--teaching classes, hanging out with students, going to the market, meeting with teammates, etc. etc. etc.

We've been busy, so it was with no small amount of enthusiasm that we woke up last Saturday, saw that it was going to be a relatively cool (less than 85 degree) day, and decided to get on our bikes and flee town. The trip we took was one that we had been planning for a long time--one that would only really be possible in cooler weather, due to the time and distances involved. It was, as it turned out, a trip into Utter Weirdness.

We started by riding across town to the Thi Nai bridge--currently the longest bridge in Vietnam at about two miles. The bridge was built across a big lagoon which lies behind the peninsula that Quy Nhon occupies. It was constructed for the express purpose of connecting Quy Nhon and its port to another, larger peninsula on the other side of the lagoon which is slated to become the Nhon Hoi Economic Zone (take a look at the map below, if that helps).

Since real estate on Quy Nhon's narrow peninsula is in short supply, it made sense in someone's mind (or pocketbook) to encourage industrial development on this other peninsula in an area resembling the Sahara desert, with towering sand dunes and little else. The result was a kind of weirdness which seems unique to East Asian countries with centrally-planned economies.

The best way I can describe it is as a cross between the setting of a 1960s "last man on earth" sci-fi movie and Alice in Wonderland. Roads that go nowhere, creepy deserted warehouses, concrete animal statues--this place has it all. Upon reaching the far side of the bridge we found out that our camera batteries were low, so we weren't able to take very many pictures. But take a look at what we did capture, and I'll try to let the pictures do most of the talking.

Here we see the Thi Nai bridge in the background and a fit young man with a sweet steel-frame bicycle. (No it's NOT a girl's bike. All the bikes in Vietnam have the angled cross-bar like that. They really do.)

Our first discovery when we reached the far side of the bridge was an exciting one. At the base of the bridge, some sort of resort was under construction. And as anyone who's been to Southeast Asia knows, no high class resort is complete without a menagerie of concrete animals to "enhance" the natural landscape. In this case, the animals were dolphins (apparently being launched into the air by an underwater explosion of some sort) and seals...

...harpooned seals...

...with holes in their heads...

...and giant swans.

Leaving our animal friends behind, we moved further into the Nhon Hoi Economic Zone, past a huge (deserted) gas station, and a (deserted) strip mall with billiards tables, a cafe, and a karaoke bar. We entered an area with big roundabouts and massive six- and eight-lane, newly paved roads...

...many of which dead-ended in sand dunes...

...all of which were almost completely deserted and half covered with sand.

In fact, the only economic development we saw in the Economic Development Zone (apart from the deserted gas station, half-constructed resort, and empty strip mall) were some big warehouses that must have taken a beating in the two big storms this year; the majority of their roofs were lying in pieces scattered about on the sand beside them.

After some further biking on deserted six-lane highways through the dunes, we came to the little fishing village of Nhon Ly. To reach the village you have to bike past a massive graveyard that's probably as big as the village itself. Graves stretch across the dunes for perhaps a half mile before you actually come to the village. Kind of creepy.


Nhon Ly village was a friendly little place with narrow, winding streets and some nice-looking (though not-so-clean) beaches. But it's a long ways from nowhere.

All told it was a good, worthwhile trip--if not for its scenic beauty then for its sheer oddness and its glimpses of another side to life in a quickly-changing country.

Ways to know you're back in Vietnam

Should you one day wake up to find yourself in the middle of a hot, humid country and you begin to wonder exactly where you are (Belize? Brazil? Bangladesh?) it may be useful to check the following telltale markers to determine whether you are, in fact, in Vietnam.

Marker 1: Whilst walking on the sidewalk, do you find yourself frequently having to avoid motorbikes that don't fit on the street? If so, you may be in Vietnam.


Marker 2: Are shower sandals provided in your hotel bathroom? Are said sandals much, much too small for your feet? If so, you may be in Vietnam.


Marker 3: Whilst standing in your hotel shower, does the showerhead point directly at your belly button? (See "A") At the same time, are you in immediate danger of giving yourself a concussion on the water heater? (See "B") If you answer "yes" to both of these, chances are quite good that you're in Vietnam.


Marker 4: Do you see people taking advantage of a road flooded by an overflowing lake to wash off their motorbikes? Further evidence that you may indeed be in Vietnam.


Marker 5: Are you astounded and humbled by the beauty of this place--the sky, the rice fields, the ponds, the people? Have you answered "yes" to each of these questions? Then yes, you can safely assume you've found yourself in Vietnam.


We're baaaaaack...

Final adventures and the trip home

To see pictures from this trip, click here.

This is being written from the living room of Joelle's parents' house in Sumas, Washington on a cool, May evening. Getting here from Quy Nhon was a bit of a process, which began with an overnight train ride to Saigon, a short flight to Hong Kong, and then a long hop across the Pacific to Vancouver, BC where we were picked up and whisked back to the States by Joelle's family. Still a little hard to believe that, for the next two and a half months, America is home for us again.

The week before we left was filled with goodbyes, packing, organizing, and at least one fairly sweet adventure. Phuong, a 4th year student who's been a good friend all year, invited Jason and Steven to visit his hometown in a remote part of Dak Lak province. This was not your typical tourist town visit by any stretch of the imagination; Phuong told us that--apart from his foreign English teacher who visited the year previous--we were the first foreigners to set foot in that part of the country in a long, long time.

Our journey started with a bus ride south along the coast from Quy Nhon. We hopped off the bus at a crossroads about 20 miles shy of the tourist hub of Nha Trang and flagged down an overcrowded van on its way up into the highlands. Wedging ourselves into the backseat as best we could, we survived a hair raising trip on windy mountain roads ("some of the most dangerous roads in Vietnam," Phuong assured us) to the sleepy mountain town of M'Drak.

From M'Drak we were picked up on motorbikes by Phuong's brother, brother-in-law and uncle and carried even further into the countryside. After a lengthy check-in procedure by the authorities at a small local police station we were allowed to go all the way to Phuong's commune, a group of about 70 houses in the midst of coffee fields, surrounded by jungle-covered mountains.
The residents of the commune are, by-and-large, transplants from a single town in northern Vietnam. Phuong's family lived in a poor, overpopulated region near Hanoi and moved to Dak Lak when he was a child, drawn by a promsie of free land from the government. The village that we saw--small, simple houses dotting hillsides covered with coffee trees--had been hacked out of the wilderness by the hands of those first settlers. Electricity arrived in the village just five years ago. Trips into town used to take a full day on a muddy trail (rather than 15 minutes on a dirt road).

We were warmly welcomed by Phuong's family and fed all the best meals they could provide (boiled chicken for breakfast, fresh fish hotpot and dog for dinner). Since most of the village was curious about the foreigners, large crowds were common at mealtimes as people tried to figure out what we were up to.

One of the things that most impressed me about the visit--in addition to the sheer remoteness of it all--was just how self-sufficient Phuong's family was. Rather than heading to the market every day, they grew their own vegetables, raised their own chickens and cows, kept enormous fish in a pond next to their house, grew a variety of delicious fruit in abundance, and bought home-grown rice from their neighbors. Were the global food supply to collapse tomorrow, Phuong's family would do just fine.

A highlight of the trip was the hike Phuong took us on through the rolling hills near the village, down a valley to a meandering stream and finally down to the base of a huge waterfall, roaring in wild splendor, surrounded by nothing but mountains and virgin rainforest. We took turns jumping off of rocks into the pool below the falls, shouting for sheer delight.

Among other things, the trip convinced me (Steven) that I really need to study more Vietnamese if I want to communicate with people outside of a university setting. It was also a good glimpse into the lives that many of my students have lived, as the majority of them come from the countryside rather than the city. Overall, though, it was simply a blessing--a fitting finale to 15 months of work and adventure in Vietnam.

May Holiday

On April 30th, 1975 the course of history changed dramatically for Vietnam. Officially called "National Unity Day" here, it's better known in the West as the Fall of Saigon. Without getting too political, it's the day that North and South Vietnam ceased to exist as separate entities and became, instead, the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.

April 30th is now celebrated in Vietnam as a national holiday which--to no one's surprise--is followed by May 1st (another national holiday--known in much of the world as International Workers' Day--which has little or nothing to do with giving bouquets of flowers to people.) This year, these back-to-back holidays fell quite conveniently on a Thursday and Friday, which led to a four day weekend which was further stretched to a five day weekend for us by the fact that Steven doesn't normally teach on Wednesdays anyway. All that to say: We've had some time on our hands this past week.

So, with bus tickets in hand, we left Quy Nhon on Wednesday morning for a 5 hour trip up the coast. Our destination was Hoi An, an ancient Vietnamese port town that's now a major stop on the north-south tourist route. We first visited Hoi An in December with Will and Carissa and, while it doesn't rank as the most "authentic" Vietnamese experience available (tourists outnumber locals about 3 to 1, I think), it's easy to get to and is a good spot to buy reasonably priced souvenirs. Since we'll soon be seeing our families, friends and supporters for the first time in 15 months, we figured we had some shopping to do.

Hoi An was much the same as we remembered it--pretty, rainy, and crawling with foreigners. We did our shopping, had our fill of Western food and were ready to return to Quy Nhon with our loot. As it turned out, our last day held something far different and more authentic in store for us.

Mo, one of Steven's first-year students, happened to be home visiting her parents over the long weekend in a village just a few miles outside Hoi An. Joelle has been getting to know Mo (pronounced like the first syllable of 'mother') over the last few months and she had previously invited us to come visit her hometown. So we took her up on her offer and, around 10:30 in the morning, found ourselves in the quiet village of Dien Ban, walking up to the front door of a small house and being greeted by Mo, her family and several curious neighbor kids.

Mo told us that she's the only person in her village who speaks English, and we believe her. She said that several years ago a couple of foreigners rode their bicycles through town but we were first ones to visit since then. We strolled with her along the narrow streets of the village, past a house with red chili peppers drying on the porch and roof, stepping off the road when cows came trundling along the opposite direction. We visited her uncle's house where the family's most recent rice harvest was spread out evenly all over their living room floor as it dried (they would normally dry it outside, but the weather hadn't been cooperating).

Back at Mo's family's house we sat down to a tasty lunch of duck and taro soup with her parents, her older sister and her sister's boyfriend. We weren't able to communicate a whole lot with the family (we asked some basic family information in Vietnamese, and her father asked how long we'd been married and if we had flies in America like they do in Vietnam). Still, we felt welcomed and honored just to be there. We've been off the beaten track plenty of times before, but never had the chance to sit down to a meal with a family in the countryside.

The family has a total of seven people, with three beds to share among them all. Mo pointed to a pair of queen-bed sized lofts about 10 feet off the concrete floor of the main room and explained that that's where they went when it flooded. One of the bunks was for all of their furniture and possessions, the other was for the people. The floodwaters reach about four or five feet deep inside their house every couple of years. "We used to be very poor," Mo explained, "But we're doing better now." Mo--the youngest of five--is the first in the family to go to university.

The bus trip back to Quy Nhon later that afternoon took us through rice fields and small towns, over swollen rivers under a threatening gray sky. As we went, it was nice to feel like we understood the things we were seeing just a little bit more than we had before.

To see pictures from our trip, click here.

Kontum

To skip all the blah blah blah and just see some pictures of our weekend in the highlands, click here.
The last couple of weeks we've been blessed once again to have a friend visiting us from the States. Kimberly--a friend of Joelle's since their days in New Zealand--came for ten days to see what life is like in Vietnam. After a few days seeing the sights around Quy Nhon, we decided to take a few days and explore somewhere else. Steven had to be around to teach so we couldn't go too far; looking at a map we saw Kontum--a province in the highlands on the Lao border, a bit north and west of Quy Nhon. The guidebooks described Kontum as kind of a remote, end-of-the-road, out-of-the-way sort of place. In other words, just where we wanted to be.

A three and a half hour bus ride took us from Quy Nhon through low plains and rice fields before climbing steeply up winding mountain roads into the hilly plateau of Vietnam's central highlands. A tourist trap Kontum is not, and our first impression of the city was a bit underwhelming. It has the feel of a place that is entirely under construction--roads ripped up, machinery moving to and fro. The surrounding countryside was pretty, but not as striking as the territory further south around Dalat.

However, the big draw to Kontum isn't the tourist amenities (of which there are none) or the scenery but the ease with which you can visit ethnic villages and interact with the people. In other parts of Vietnam where we've seen ethnic minority folks it's always had a bit of an artificial, circus sideshow sort of quality to it--the main purpose of some of the villages we've been in has seemed to be selling souvenirs to foreigners. Not so in Kontum. Just on the edge of town are three or four different villages, and a few kilometers out are many more. The province has around 700 villages, if I remember my numbers correctly. Though some of the villages have modern brick buildings, a lot of the people live in stilt houses with walls made of mud and straw. Their cows camp out downstairs. Everyone was extremely friendly--the kids in particular--and no one tried to sell us anything.

We had a guide for one of our days out in the country and then just walked and biked the rest of the time. I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story...

The Year in Review...

Exactly one year ago today, a plane out of Hong Kong touched down at Noi Bai airport outside of Hanoi and disgorged two very tired, rather disheveled and discombobulated Americans. These travelers' names were Joelle and Steven and they weren't coming to Vietnam to take pictures, buy a few silk scarves and leave. Like a stubborn case of athlete's foot, they were going to be around for a while.


In the twelve months since then, we've seen a fair bit of this here country. We've tasted its food (even some of the stuff that looked gross), swam in its seas, hiked its mountains. We've made friends, embarrased ourselves on numerous occasions, had close calls with pickpockets and purse snatchers, been hit by a speeding motorbike, and somehow gotten a newly-purchased wardrobe stuck in a tight spiral staircase. We've ridden on planes, trains, basket boats, xe oms and elephants. We've watched mold grow on every single piece of clothing and furniture we own, battled hordes of giant cockroaches, sweated more than we ever imagined possible, and witnesed our bus driver getting punched in the eye by a rival bus driver. More than that we've laughed till we cried with our Vietnamese friends, had deep conversations in broken English over strong iced coffee and wondered how on earth a place so different from our home could still be so dang beautiful and sometimes feel so much like...home.


It hasn't all been easy. There have been broken bones (two of them), miserable nights spent in the bathroom, and tears (lots of those) over loved ones so far away. There have been birthdays that we've couldn't make it to (including several literal days of birth, with babies back home popping out like to make Orville Redenbacher throw a fit). There have been hikes we could have gone on, massive snowstorms we missed, foods we have longed for, and people on the other side of the ocean that we really wish we could have just sat down and had a burrito with once or twice.

Has it been worth it? Yes. Absolutely.

Are we excited about coming home for the summer in a few months? Yes. Absolutely. As wonderful as they are, Skype and Facebook are no replacement for a real chat, and we're so looking forward to being able to see many of you this summer. We're also incredibly thankful for the support, encouragement, emails and blog comments y'all have given us over this past year. We miss you guys.

As a parting gift for our one year anniversary, we now present to you the Shetterly timeline--a few key pictures from the past year in Vietnam:

Spring 2008: Encountering the joys of learning a tonal language, our first six months in Hanoi were focused largely on language study. Here we are with one of our tutors.

April 13, 2008: Approximately 8 seconds into his first basketball game in Vietnam, Steven blocks a bullet pass with his right thumb, which promptly breaks. Here he is awaiting medical care at the clinic in Hanoi.

May 2008: The weather grew warm. Uncomfortably so. The logical course of action was to stick a big fan up the back of one's shirt and look like a body builder for a while.

May 2008: 90 degrees in the shade with 70% humidity and somehow she still manages to look good.

June 2008: Ninh Binh, our first escape from Hanoi without the aid of someone who speaks Vietnamese. We survived, and saw a rice harvest in full swing to boot.

Summer 2008: East meets West. The pervasive influence of punk culture extends even to this young, impressionable Vietnamese caterpillar.

July 2008: A scenic shot of the historic battle site of Dien Bien Phu...and Joelle's forehead.

September 2008: A bird's eye view of Quy Nhon, our new home, confirms that yes--this is indeed a dang beautiful place.


October 2008: A class of Vietnamese students goes to the beach for a picnic and invites some foreign teachers along. A good time is had by all.

November 2008: Steven makes a fool out of himself by singing "Stand By Me" with his teammate Jason in front of 500+ students. Joelle continues to look really good. Both receive flowers.

December 2008: Christmas parties and excited students. Fun.

Christmas 2008: Visitors from distant lands arrive to celebrate the day with us. We are blessed.

January 2009: Three Iblings siblings and Steven make their way through southern Vietnam on the way to Thailand for classes, a conference and elephant riding.

Those who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.

He who goes out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with him.

-Ps. 126