Update

This week is my last week of teaching at Lamplaimat and interning with PDA. It has been a relaxed but rewarding experience. Yesterday I asked the 6th grade class (which I have spent the most time with) what they learned in the past two weeks and they listed off about 100 words - I was impressed and proud of the improvement that I have seen.

I forgot to mention that at the Pickering Fellowship orientation I had the opportunity to meet and briefly speak with Ambassador Thomas Pickering. I also had the great opportunity to speak with Paul Jones, the Deputy to Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke. I really cherished the opportunity to speak with someone at such a high level about the current situation of Afghanistan and Pakistan, what I consider to be the most challenging current foreign policy issue.

On my trip back to Lamplaimat I was in the bus with the founder of the Somaly Mom Foundation, an organization that works in Cambodia to rescue sex slaves. I thought that the founder looked familiar - sure enough, she actually was on a panel at the Clinton Global Initiatives University meeting that I attended in Austin, Texas. It was pretty cool to meet her again half way around the world.

Along the way we stopped at a local family that was harnessing the PDA microcredit program. It was really impressive to see the real effects of microfinance on a small scale. The woman was on her second loan and used the first $800 loan to expand her farm, giving her a yearly profit of over $1200 (talk about cost effectiveness).

Next Tuesday, Kathleen is flying in to Bangkok and we will spend the next three weeks traveling to Chiang Mai (Mountainous region in Northern Thailand), Krabi (Southeast Asia's best beaches in Southern Thailand on the Andaman Coast), and Angkor Wat, Cambodia (a large area of ancient Khmer Temples).

I have enjoyed a couple more great books since I have been here. I have read two books by Thomas Ricks (The Gamble and Fiasco), a Washington Post reporter who writes particularly well about the strategic and tactical challenges and mistakes of the War in Iraq and the surge. I highly recommend Fiasco to anyone who wants to learn more about the massive mistakes that the Bush Administration made in the planning and during the war. I am also reading Steven Coll's Ghost Wars, a book that highlights the influence of intelligence agencies in Afghanistan and the roots of Al Qaeda and the Taliban until September 10, 2001. It also is a fascinating read. I also have occasionally looked at American Lion, Jon Meacham's biography of Andrew Jackson.

Another book that I am thoroughly enjoying is Blood and Politics, the History of the White Nationalist Movement by Leonard Zeskind. It is a fascinating, compelling, and intricate historical narrative about the roots of the White Nationalist Movement (including the KKK, Neo-Nazis, and the radical Christian right wing). I highly recommend it. One of the most interesting insights that the book highlights how politicians from both parties (some mainstream and some not) utilized apparent ambiguous language to clandestinely recruit White Nationalists to their campaign.

That's it for now - I hope to take some time to be able to compare my experiences in Kenya to my experiences in Thailand, but that deserves another post.