On Staying in Touch

We've been Workamping now for one month...and we're surviving well enough. Work is not all it's cracked up to be, of course. But that, as they say, is why they call it work. We have done everything from weeding (ugh!) to cleaning bathrooms (hate it!) to vacuuming, painting, planting, sweeping up goose poop. Now we have started work at the marina store (the reason we were hired), things are looking up. We open the store tomorrow and folks will be able to come in by car or boat to get food, groceries, fishing gear and even gasoline. We're pretty excited about the possibilities.
We don't have to cook because the owners have hired a cook and he and we will make it happen after the first few days.
Now while all this is on-going, there have been lots of other interesting diversions. We've made the 320-mile trip north and east to get the boat uncovered and readied for sale. Now it's in the hands of a broker so we wait.
I also have been editing online the work of a wonderfully bright reporter in Namibia. Luqman Cloete has a good story he's working on about a handicrafts center in his town being told they will lose their funding and will have to make the crafts, market them and sustain themselves without outside help. I love the concept that Luqman can simply email me the story with a request that I edit it and come up with suggestions for improvements. All of this happens as though he is in the next office. Time and distance simply has no meaning because of the Internet.
And equally exciting, as I was reading the New York Times on Tuesday, I discovered that Hla Hla Htay, a brilliant, bright young woman who passed through the Southeast Asia Media Center training school while I was there in Phnom Penh, popped up with two pictures in The New York Times from Myanmar.
Hla Hla got her job as a reporter for Agence France-Presse when the Bangkok bureau chief called us in Cambodia one day back in 2004. She asked if we had trained any good Burmese journalists who might be candidates for the bureau position in Yangon (Rangoon). Hla Hla was in training with us at that time. She is a tiny woman but I felt she had the heart of a lion. She is smart, thoughtful, inquisitive. She was honest but she was oh-so-shy and self-effacing.
After I recommended her and the bureau chief in Bangkok said she would meet with her for an interview in Thailand on Hla Hla's journey back home, I sat down with her and coached her on the art of the job interview. She got the job and we kept in touch for a year. But then her emails bounced back as the junta in Burma cracked down on Internet use. I kept trying to reach her but without success.
So you might imagine my delight at finding her credit line on two pictures played across half a page in The Times on Tuesday. She clearly has established herself. I remember that Hla Hla made $50 a month as a reporter before coming to our media center. When she returned to Yangon, she was employed at $1,000 a month - an astonishing increase in pay.