Hello everyone! This is Karen reporting! Once again we are on our ‘little’ adventure. But this time we in Africa!

i wonder if this will work?

Africa is amazing! so many things will be flying at us! its crazy!

hmmm…. what should i tell you?

we cant decide if we want puppies or not!

we would bring these 4 puppies back to where we are staying (flack house) and then bring them back to their mommy

after a whole month of doing this we have now decided to wait.

in two weeks we will bring to the flack house the two strongest and most independent!

why are we getting these dogs?

as Guard dogs for the girls house!

puppies are such a handful, espessally when they all have fleas!!!

In the beginning of the trip we ended up finding one pup, who was about 2-3 months old. this dog had so many fleas it looked like he had sat into an anthill!

he was also soooo starving that he would walk into the street, almost get hit by two cars, JUST FOR A LEAF!!!!

when we first got him, he could hardly walk.

now he can play and even runs with jake!

He also has a pot-belly! All of his fungal infections are almost gone.

out of all of the dogs, he is defently my favorite!

this little heros name is Panda Boo, Boo for short.

but im thinking of changing it to Houdini.

we found out that he can also find a way to get into the house even if we didnt even know it was possible! but the reason why jake wants to change it to Houdini, is because he found a way to escape death. he escaped it only by an inch!

 here i go to school at 2:00 pm!i even have to wear a uniform! i look like “a little english girl!”

a long checkered dress, high white knee socks.

i have to go!

bye!

Puppies are a hand full. especially 4.

  i  really think that 2 puppies are better than one. the names of the puppies are Jake, Lola, Benjimen, and Fire. but Jake is a cry baby. lola needs love so fo Kusitawi Village we are choosing Benji and Fire. HAPPY valentines day though im a bit late.

We have been on a 2 month journey. And this is what I have learned.

Vietnam

Americans! Why do I have the right of being an American when we killed thousands of
innocent civilians? How did the U.S. Government suddenly had the bright idea to attack Vietnam?
Starting with napalm Bombs or nail bombs going on to agent orange? Where people 2 generations later
are born with horrible mutations. Where solders cut pregnant women’s bellies, take the baby out and
kill it, and then lie about it for over 30 years. where soldiers blow women and children to pieces,
then laugh about it. Where does anyone get the idea to create a nail bomb? A bomb full of hundreds of
nails dropped from the air then exploding about three feet from the ground and shooting nails in every directions. And even now people will be walking along and get killed by something we dropped or put into the ground that didn’t explode. And when ever did we have a right to bomb a city filled with apartment buildings where people live. But the most horrifying thing was the people that actually lived. Half their body burned or scared or there legs and arms blown off. or little ball from ball barrens that blow up in peoples faces. And the guns, the huge guns that kill tons of people at a time. This was all in one museum. About a hundred pictures tole the story of what we did to an Innocent country. A museum so intense, that people who were for the war walk out against it. where I walked out hating myself, my country, America. To stunned to even speak. A lump in my throat from it all. From a real life ball bearing to seeing what it actually did. The Vietnam war. A horrible war.

Even though the Vietnam war was only 30 years ago,Vietnam is growing and improving at a surprising rate. Though it is a Communist country, it is very successful. you go down its river and you see boats full of coal, wood and supplies. Vietnam’s people are all healthy, slim and hard working though some may seem like work-ahalics. And yet at the same time as all this Vietnam is southeast Asia’s second largest rice growing country! The city’s are full of factories, and the country side is full of rice growing farms. But what is the greatest thing about Vietnam is everyone wants to talk to you to practice their English, no matter where your from! And every morning you go out and people are playing bad mitten and saying “exersize! stay fit!”

Cambodia

Its amazing how 1 person could kill 1 millon people in 1 year. It just doesn’t seem posible. Yet one man named Pol Pot and his evil partners managed to do it. How? I will explan to you later. But he was the start of the Khmer Rouje. The most grusome, most horific thing to ever happen to Cambodia in history. Pol Pot’s main goal was to turn everyone into peasents and relive the glory days of Angkor. And since he took over Cambodia and was the prime minister, he could do anything because he was in power. His first idea was to kill the rest of the old government so no one would suspect he was doing anything. now i will tell you how Pol Pot did it. Useing innocent children and brainwashing them to do horrible things and telling them over and over again that the Khmer Rouge was good until they belived it. then he would use the kids to torture than kill people if the people did something wrong. Even if it was just a small stupid thing. But mostly it was not them slautering people, it was starving everyone to death. they would give them a little cup of grule for that day and that was it. but what ever the way they killed them they killed over 3 millon people in 3 years.

Cambodia is still recovering from its hazerdis war with Pol Pot 20 years ago. But sense Pol Pot killed all the smart people, meaning all the people with education, leaving the people that don’t know anything or only a little educated. So now people who were training to beome a docter, or a lawer are only just fineshing their schooling. But because of Pol Pot Cambodia is way behind on everything. As we went away from Cambodia, I was left wondering how anybody could kill his or her same people like it was a vidio game. Or how you could think you have the right to brain wash innocent children into torchuring and killing people. Even as I went into india it never made any sense to me.

In India there were other things that didn’t make sense to me. It’s amazing how one religion could create such a big wall between the rich and the poor. For instance, The most expensive restaurant in town could be filled with rich people while right outside it there will be a man with no arms or legs sleeping on cold concrete. I noticed as I went to India there was more suffering then all of the other countries we have seen on this trip. But the worst part is the enviorment.The rivers are polluted so much from sewage and trash that when people go swimming it makes them sick. The ground in parks or by the side of the rode are covered in trash. The air is smoged up from all the cars and buses. Some places you go there are dead cows or dogs lieing by the side of the road.

If you compare India to Vietnam, In Vietnam, the people are healthy, fit, eat good,
nutrises foods and die of a old age. In India, the people are dieing young of heart attacks because
of all the oil in the food and because they are so fat from the sweets. Even the really young are a
little fat. Sometimes I wonder how it got this way When you go on a train right next to the train
track at least 5 men are pooing or peeing without digging a hole. Its childish in a way. Like
everyones minds are still 5. For example, We were walking down the road and someone was burning
trash right under a 7 or 8 year old cactus and a bunch of plants, killing the beautiful cactus. But why are cows and monkeys holy and dogs not holy and left to have miserable lives? And the status of the gods are falic symbols or orange blobs? Its like a real life fairy tale that you would find in the stinky cheese man and
other fairly stupid tales. I think it would be much easier to live in America because you have a choice of how you live.

America is a really rich country, many people live in millon doller houses and can eat all the food they want. In other contries people live in shacks and are starving. Its fasinating what americans consider poor, in other countries it would be middle class, or rich. Or how india has more suffering than Cambodia yet India is higher in technology than Cambodia. Or that Americas people are over weight and in Vietnam there is not a single person that is fat. But if India’s enviorment is filthy and falling apart, why is America’s not? Or what about Thailand? How it was at the top for being so modernizd and resently it had a koup that overthrew the government.

How I want to improve the world

Right now I will tell everyone about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. And other parts of the world people have not heard about. When I grow up I want to adopt, stop global warming and help fed and find homes for the people on the street. Otherwise, I want to continue my parents work with aids orphans in Africa and do volentir work at Mother Teresa’s and help the enviorment so its not so miss treated and help dogs with mange and worms.

What I Learned On My Trip: Part 1

By Karen

In Vietnam, our first country, we saw a museum which told the story of the Vietnam war with hundreds of pictures. This museum was so intense that ‘people who were for the war exit the room against it!’ The weapons that were on display were bombs that would explode into smaller bombs which would explode on the people, shooting nails deep into their skin. Out of 100 of these bombs, maybe 5 would not explode. Years after the war, a farmer could be sowing his crops and accidentally step onto one of the unexploded bomb. Within seconds, nails cover his body.

There are more bombs like the Napalm Bomb or Agent Orange. The Napalm Bombs are just bombs filled with gasoline jelly and Agent Orange kills all plants. Sometimes they were used to burn the jungle so that no one could hide in it, other times it would hit people and napalm would burn them alive. Agent Orange is a chemical that can case deformity. Even generations after the war, the children who’s parents had any contact with agent orange would be born deformed or have severe health problems.

The main thing that the museum showed was the soldier massacre. It showed pictures of laughing American soldiers holding ripped apart or burned bodies, high in the air. There was this one American senator who slaughtered a whole family. He and his whole group pulled little children from their hiding places and cut open their stomachs. Thirty years later, he continued to lie and hid the truth. Finally, when he was at the end of his turn of being a senator, he admitted it. Its almost as if the American soldiers are so scared from the war that they turned it into a game! Thousands of innocent women and children were bombed or shot!

The worst cases are of the people who do survive. Some of the pictures showed little children or 20 year old who had their body burned from a napalm bomb or have a body part missing from a land mine! One of the photographs showed a little child with little balls from a bomb shot into the child’s face. Even in today’s Vietnam, many people still have a leg missing from an unexploded land mine or are deformed in some way.

After walking through this small museum, I felt ashamed of my nation. I didn’t want to admit to everyone around me that I was an American! If you ever go into Saigon, Vietnam, you have to go to this museum. Pictures are describe more than words!

Even though the war was 30 years ago, Vietnam’s people are really pushing though! Vietnam is now SE Asia’s second largest rice exporter! I heard from an English banker that “Thailand is falling behind and Vietnam is ‘booming!’ Vietnam which is a communist country, seems to be doing excellent! All of the people that we met are hard-working and really smart! They all work 12 hours a day so they are sort of workaholics! This is the hardest working country we have been in so far! On top of being extremely hard working, they are skinny and fit because they exercise every morning! on the trains and around the cities there is a loud speaker saying in Vietnamese ‘get up early! stay fit!’ Every one is exercising, even the elderly people are playing Badmitten! everywhere is busy! the rivers are full of boats for construction. Outside the cities are full of factories, and tons of rice fields are in the countryside! When we were traveling around, everyone wanted to talk to you and everyone wants to learn English! It’s really a great country!

Even though Cambodia is right next door, it is a very different story. Twenty years ago, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge made the record for creating one of the most gruesome events in history! Their goal was to ‘relive’ the glory days of the Angkor Period! This was a great Cambodian civilization which controlled Southern Vietnam, Laos, and part of Thailand. To Pol Pot, this meant getting rid of the government, everyone who was close to the the old government, everyone who were leaders, and everyone who had an education. (teachers, doctors, lawyers, monks, etc.) What was so amazing is that it was all done in secret with lies! They would find people who had an education by saying ‘we need teachers or lawyers’. these people would go because they wanted their old job back. After they left, they were never seen again! I think the reason why the Khmer Rouge wanted to get rid of anyone with an education is because that way no one could question their authority! No one could even lift a finger against them!

One of the reasons why its so gruesome is that regular Cambodians were killing regular Cambodians! The biggest question we had was how did the Khmer Rouge get regular Cambodians to do this? The answer to this is that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge taught innocent children that everyone is against Angkor and to not trust anyone. In one prison that we visited called S-21, we found out that they would get innocent teenage boys and trained them to torture the prisoners. Pretty soon these boys would execute their friends and even their family members!

In one year, these boys would become viscous killing machines! They became so cruel that the Khmer Rouge would kill the whole group because ‘They knew too much’. Then they would bring in a whole new group and do the same as the last group. So the children were used for the executors and even as soldiers! They were all brainwashed into what the Khmer Rouge thought!

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge evacuated the cities by scaring the people into thinking that ‘the Americans are about to bomb the city!’ (This could have been true since America also dropped thousands of bombs on Cambodia during the Vietnam war because North Vietnam was bringing its supplies through Cambodia.) Just imagine thousands of people all walking, leaving an abandoned city like Phnom Phen! (which had over one million inhabitants) Even the sick and dying were walking! Even the pregnant women! What the Khmer Rouge really wanted to do was to turn Cambodia into a self-sufficient farming country. The Khmer Rouge wanted the guns so much they traded away all their rice to the Chinese for guns.They wanted to trade rice for guns so that they could invade other countries and become as large as the Angkor empire used to be! (the Chinese liked this because they were planning for Cambodia to be part of a Chinese empire. The Chinese would even come in and rape young girls to get them pregnant. This way, the next generation would be part Chinese and leadthe new Chinese power in Southeast Asia). But the Khmer Rough tried to invade Vietnam so many times that Vietnam finally got sick of it and invaded Cambodia which was the downfall of the Khmer Rouge.

Towards the end of the Khmer Rouge, the laborers growing rice who were working 20 hours per day were only given a small bowl of rice and water. More people starved to death then being tortured! Evem if you worked along side Pol Pot, you were never actually safe. A lot of times he would turn against his own men and put them in a prison and torture them to death. I read that Pol Pot put his main general’s wife and child into a prison camp. Later the general was also added.

What i thought was interesting was that Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, was so secretive that even his own family didn’t know who he really was. When his brother saw a picture of Pol Pot, he recognized him as his brother Saloth Sar. Later he commited suicide because he was so depressed his own brother had done all that killing. Even after the whole Khmer Rouge was finished, no one went after Pol Pot because no one knew what he looked like! Eventually, he died from heart failure on April 15 1998, twenty years after the genocide ended. Within 3 years the Khmer Rouge killed more then 3 million people. There are still mass graves left untouched.

Cambodia today seems to be doing fairly well since the genocide wasn’t that long ago. That’s especially impressive since they have had to re-train a whole new generation since all the educated people were killed. There seems to be little trading on the rivers compared to Vietnam, the road we went on were in pretty bad shape, but the people seem fit and hard working.

Where Cambodia succeeds, India fails. Its amazing how a religion could influence a country so much! From holy animals to holy places to the Caste system. Since monkeys and cows are holy, no one can hurt them. I also heard that when a cow dies, it is not eaten, instead it is buried or dumped in a holy river like the Ganges river. But I also that people only say that. A Vetrinarian working with a group that helps suffering animals in India told me that actually, when a cow is done producing milk or is too weak to pull a cart, the cow is just dumped onto the street. In many of the cities, there are cows roaming the cities, digging around in the trash eating a lot of plastic and other things that can kill them.

The monkeys are given offerings and are allowed to roam the temples. The monkeys don’t really bother me. What bothers me is that monkeys and cows are flourishing while dogs are starving and chew themselves raw because of mange which is hundreds of tiny creatures burrowing through their skin and driving them mad. A bath and some special soap could easily relieve their terrible suffering.

I have noticed that the places that are holy seem more damaged then the places that aren’t. One great example is the Ganges river. Every day the Hindu people of Varinassi and beyond, go to the Ganges river to bath and visit the god’s temples. At the same time as this, hundreds of bodies are being cremated right next to the river. After the body becomes ashes, the cremators dump the ashes into the river. The bodies that don’t get burned (pregnant women, children, holy people, holy animals), are tied to heavy rocks and thrown into the river. I also heard that hundreds of tons of sewage is dumped into this holy river every day. Combine all of this together (cremation, dead bodies, sewage) and you have created a disaster for the environment and for the bathing people.

I have noticed that India has the largest spread between the rich and the poor. I feel like the reason for this is based on the caste system. This system sort of allows the rich to not notice the poor. I heard that in the caste system, there are many lives. The life that you live is based in the last life. So every life, depending on how pure you were in the last life, you either increase or decrease in ‘rank’. A lot of times the people who are the poorest are the people who are missing a limb or are deformed in some way. But this isn’t always true many people are totally poor, living in a dirty shack their whole life, just because they were born in a low caste and no one will give them a chance to succeed.

I find that the people who live in the countryside are the people who are the happiest because they have their own life style and money is the least of their worryies. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people from the countryside still go to the city even though they are happier in the country. I guess why they would do that would be for hope of money or a job. I think its interesting how India has more overweight people then Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. The biggest reason for that must be the food. It is so greasy and fattening or it’s really really sweet.

I think its interesting how places could be so close together yet so different. Even though the climate and people look almost identical in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, their history is completely different! This increases or decreases how well off they are. Like for example; even though Vietnam had the war 30 years ago, the people are fit, healthy, happy, and hardworking. The roads are almost brand new and everyone seems equal. Thailand has had nothing happen to it yet it is falling behind Vietnam. In India, there are the most overweight people then anywhere else and out of everywhere we have been so far, India seems to have the worst off people, animal, and environment situations. The people seem not equal, there is a larger spread between the rich and the poor. What i find is interesting is that there is only a small wall dividing the two. The dogs have been run over, driven insane by skin diseases and dead animals seem to be left rotten for days. The rivers and streets are polluted and covered in trash.

Not that America is perfect. There are still homeless people but many of these people have a chance of going to a shelter home or getting help from a special program. The average person is overweight in America for the same reason as in India, because they like eating fast food which is full of grease and oil. Out of all of these places I like Vietnam the best!

on this page are what I learned and my reports.

Goa, The beach!
we are here for five days! seeing dolfins, starfish, hermit crabs… everything! The sand is sqeky so when you walk when you walk its like the ground is alive under you. It vibrates almost!

The beach is just like Hawai!
there are little cots called coco huts with hay roofs and wooden floors. they are really cute!

everyday fisher men bring out a huge net and are pulling it in for almost an hour! we helped the fish get out and the fisher men keept yelling at us saying “no good, no good” or “Hey!”
we went jet skieing and it feels as if you are going to fall off! you can’t help but laugh! -kristen

WATCH OUT!

nah you dint have to..

when i first heard of bombay i thought it was spelled BOMBBAY.

Funny huh..

bombay is awsome. we went out onto Juhu beach last night and just walked around.

for karen this is emareeing but we walked into a croud of strangers and danced abit. then a boy that was about karens age,came up to karen and kissed her on the cheek.

The Taj Mahal is huge!


One really rich maragah built it for his wife out of true love! When you go to the Taj Mahal there are eagles flying around the top of its highest peak!

On the way in the line got so long that people must have to wait at least an hour just to get in! luckly that didn’t happen to us!

Inside there is one main big room and in the middle of the room it looks as if it is the tombs of the king and queen.

there are 4 gate leading to the taj Mahal. one from the north, the south, the east and the west.

Jaipur

this building was named after the founder of jaipur.

the king here wanted to welcome the future King Edward VII when he was a prince (the king).

 to
 he is in his formal outfit.

  
 Sawai Jai Singh, The founder of jaipur. he was the one that painted all of jaipur pink in 1727 increadable huh?

The pushkar camel fair!!!!!!!!!!!!


it is truly magical! i can’t believe we got to have this amazing opportunty!
For three nights we had the whole Pushkar Fort Hotel to ourselves!
we got to run around it late at night, ducking and hidding from the guards!
we had our own gypsy dancing every night!
gypsy dancing is soo cool! every show was different because they make it up on the spot!
one member could “breath and touch fire”!
at the end of every performance they invited us to come up and dance with them!
it was a extreme blast!!!


And thats only the hotel!

The Fair itself is like something from Starwars!
In the early morning or late afternoon, everything is busy!
the camels were bellowing, people are cooking, there is a glow and a mist over the whole land!
people come from miles and miles away just to bring their animals here!
every day the fair gets louder and more crowded!
But by the end of the fair, there are more tourists then animals!

now I know how starwars was created i mean look and hear the similaritys!
a camel

and an animal from starwars

when you ride a camel it is so much harder than it looks!
every moment you feel like you are about to fall off!
when a camel runs…. its scary!
we were so high up and we were leaping up into the air!
the only thing holding us on was a little pole and our feet straps!
by the end of the camel ride, all of our backs and stomachs were extremly sore!
well we got to ride camels in the desert and horses in the fair!
i prefer the horses because they are easier hang on to!

c-ya!
~karen