In January, I scheduled my backlog of blog posts from 2022 to publish once a day and then traveled out to Kratie province on a monitoring visit to the Rural Livelihoods and Social Cohesion in Interethnic Communities project. This was my third visit to the project villages in Sambour district, Kratie province – the first was in April 2022 and the second in November 2022.

I was suppose to go in December 2021 – along with Visal, Rory, Marcia, Jacksha, and Clivia – but then I got Chikungunya instead. We couldn’t make the trip during the COVID-19 restrictions of 2020 and 2021. I’m very glad that we’re able to be present in the village again, I believe it’s one of Mennonite Central Committee’s remarkable differences.

I wasn’t alone this time. I traveled with Janelle from MCC US, our new MER Coordinator Mok, and our new Finance Officer Thearak. Instead of a massive all inclusive post, this time I’m going to split up the trip into multiple smaller posts that tell a specific story or introduce something specific. But I thought that I’d start by generally introducing the trip.

We visited three of the four villages participating in the MCC/CRDT project and spent the night in one of them. We spent most of our time meeting with individual farmers at their homes but we also joined a village savings group meeting, stop to see the endangered Irrawaddy river dolphins, work on the narrative report with CRDT at their office, and meet up with my old friend Amara (who use to work at MCC during my term).