Friday, December 11

We got the day off to an early start with a 9:00am visit to the Education Printing Enterprise (EPE) to see if it would be possible to purchase the textbooks that Ban Viengkham Secondary was lacking. The helpful EPE staff not only quickly filled the order within our budget, but also offered us a van ride back to our hotel to deliver the 340 textbooks covering ten different courses including mathematics, history, geography and science that will be presented at the inauguration. We are grateful for the generosity of the Yap family from Singapore which made it possible to meet this top priority need. We were very pleased to accomplish this task before Ken's flight to Luang Prabang to meet our special guests from Singapore. We spent the rest of the day making a detailed inventory of the package from Richard Van Der Sande and preparing our blog posts.

We enjoyed a delicious lunch of pungaboun today in Vientiane. It was fun experimenting with different combinations of fresh herbs, raw veggies, rice noodles, spring rolls and pork balls all bundled up in lettuce leaf wraps. Yummm!