Jamie and Anna's Trip

Hiking West

2009-06-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the late post, but we thought we should finish it up, as we are actually home...

On May 22nd, we packed our bags and headed off to the Pyrenees with our friend Ben and began our hike to Guethary, a beach town on the Atlantic coast of France where Ben's family has an apartment. Our plan was to find a high mountain town where the snow had mostly melted and to head West from there along the final portion of the GR10, a major French trail that covers the 866 km stretch of Pyrenees from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic coast. The trail is set up to go through towns every 20 km or so, equipped with gites (similar to youth hostels but for all ages) and occasional grocery stores, so we always had the option of sleeping in a town. We brought camping equipment anyway, though, because our bags weren't heavy enough without it.
We started in a mountain town called Etsaut and began the 10 day, 210km trek to the coast. Between the weight on our backs, the storms, and the monotonous grind of endless walking, the hike wasn't easy. But the views, the helpful strangers, and the irreplaceable experience of being out in nature made it completely worth it.

Unfortunately the photos couldn't quite capture the magnitude of the landscape, but here's what we got:

Day 1

Getting to Guethary on June 1st, after 239 hours of walking (we made it in just under 10 days), was a great accomplishment. We spent 9 days surfing, swimming and eating lots of fish at the local restaurants, before heading to N. Ireland and then home.

Vive La France!

2009-05-09T13:17:00.001-07:00

We've now been in France at Anna's family's house in the beautiful countryside near Limoges for two weeks so this blog is a bit overdue. The house was an old stone shell when Anna's family found it 9 years ago and now has all the amenities while keeping its original old-farm-house feel. We've basically been leading the life of retired people: cleaning, cooking, eating, reading, going into town, and working on things around the house.

Last weekend Jamie's brother Caleb came to visit us here, and then the three of us headed to Paris for a few days of museums and awesome restaurants.

It is nice to finally have a base in one country that feels like home. Check out the pictures.

The French Countryside

Anna's house.

An old pig-house that has yet to be converted into a cottage.

Hike to Mont-Ciex

Cherry tree.

Limousin cows.

Our 1st dinner.

Bread baking in the stone oven house.

Caleb and Jamie make pizza.

Lumberjack Jamie.

Nightly fire.

The view from our bedroom window.

A few days in Paris

Around the corner from Jamie's place.

Anna at the Centre Pompidou.

L'art moderne.

Goodbye Asia

2009-04-08T21:57:00.000-07:00

We write this blog from Incheon International Airport in South Korea. Our last week and a half we spent most of our time lounging on beautiful beaches, snorkeling, seeing Muay Thai fights, and watching bootleg DVDs at the coolest hotel in Bangkok. It's been a difficult two weeks of perpetual vacationing, but we survived. We're sad to be leaving this great place, but looking forward to getting back home (no more squat toilets!).

Snorkeling near Ko Phi Phi Island.

Tide out (Railay Beach).

Tide in.

Cliffs at Railay Beach.

Koh Phi Phi from viewpoint.

Muay Thai!

Girls fighting - Costa Rica vs. Thailand.

Karon Beach, Phuket.

Our room door at the amazing Reflections Hotel, Bangkok.

Room 202: you can graffiti and paint on the walls.

Our addition to the walls.

Hotel's DVD library.

The Grand Palace, Bangkok.

We've taken away so much from these past three months. If nothing else, we now know how to say "hello" and "thank you" in 3 different languages. Our trip was a fun and challenging one and we would recommend Southeast Asia to anyone who has the itch to travel and the desire for a wonderful culture shock.

After a week of recovering in Berkeley, we're heading to Europe and will continue blogging from there. Thanks for following us on our adventure this far.

Signs and Food

2009-03-27T03:34:00.000-07:00

Southeast Asia is full of bizarre signs and exotic (usually delicious) food so over the past three months we've compiled a photo collection of both:

Signs:

Turns out, candel = rainbow sprinkles.

"Spaghetti: You eat your fingers!"

??????!

Food:

Shark!

Sandwich stand (breakfast, lunch and dinner).

Tamarind, Anna's new favorite fruit.

Yellow watermelon.

Dragonfruit.

Banana roti.

At the market

Shake stand.

Dessert.

The insides of a chicken.

Dinner to go.

All you can fit on one plate for 50 cents.

Noodle soups.

Tiny banana.

Giant carrot.

Jelly dessert.

Where we are now:

Railay Beach, Krabi.

Savong and the Lost Boys

2009-03-10T04:47:00.000-07:00

While teaching English in Thailand for a month was rewarding and fun, we left Thailand hoping to find a more fulfilling (and less expensive) volunteer experience. After emailing a few organizations and getting the sense that such an opportunity didn't exist, we heard back from a man in Cambodia named Savong who offered us a free place to stay at his school in exchange for teaching English. So, we hopped on the next bus to Siem Reap and have been teaching there for the past two weeks.

Since arriving, we've seen for ourselves why Cambodia is more eager for all the volunteer work it can get. Unlike Thailand, with no war or colonization in it's recent history, Cambodia has had a very difficult past. Within the lifetime of the older generation of Khmer (Cambodian people), the country has experienced the harm done by the US-Vietnam war, the great atrocities of the genocide carried out by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and the Vietnamese invasion that followed. Sadly, almost everyone over 30 can tell stories of at least one family member lost to the genocide of the Khmer Rouge or the nationwide starvation that followed. And yet, the Khmer's resilience and overwhelming "living in the present" mentality is almost more incredible than the stories they have to tell. Although Cambodia is in much better shape today, it still suffers from corrupt government, which pays teachers so little that they must charge students to attend school. It is for this reason that Savong (the man we emailed) established the free language school that we were to teach at.

After a ride to the beautiful countryside outside of Siem Reap to meet Savong, we were surprised to find him in a deep pit of dirt, wearing a faded tank top and shorts, his smiling face peering up at us. He jumped out of the pit and sat down with us to tell us about the school, his life, and his new project, the orphanage, which he was currently building a toilet for. We were told of his hard past, growing up in poverty with 11 siblings and finally being sent to live in an orphanage at age 9 after his parents could no longer afford to feed him or send him to school. In his early twenties, following in the footsteps of his avidly Buddhist father, he became a monk for three years. Savong's ideas and life are greatly affected by his Buddhist beliefs - especially karma - which greatly contribute to his genuine belief that a man who does good in the world will be successful and well liked. It was clear to us after living with him for two weeks that this belief what motivates him to do the work that he does.

It turned out that we weren't the only ones sleeping at the school. We were accompanied by Savong, his wife Aneed, two daughters, and two orphans who help Aneed look after the children, all of whom live there permanently. About 7 other orphans would join us for Aneed's delicious meals at the school, but they slept at the developing orphanage.

The school itself ran from 5am to 7am and 2pm to 7pm as the students who could afford it were at public school the rest of the day. Our job was to be there to help (often take over for) the permanent teachers there. To our amazement, the classrooms were packed full, with desks flowing out the door, all filled with kids who chose to be there and had to bicycle to get there before the sun even rose! While we found teaching in the 90 degree heat for 7 hours a day to be too exhausting to do anything else, Savong used his time between classes to get work done on the orphanage during the heat of the day.

Despite Savong's lack of formal knowledge of teaching, construction, or business, he's built and now runs a better school than some we've attended at home. Since its establishment in 2005, he has managed to find sponsors from abroad to completely fund the school's needs for teachers, librarian, school supplies, and electricity (run by a generator). Everything else, from its original construction to its management, Savong has organized and taken care of himself.

Now that the school is running well, Savong has a new project in his orphanage. Hoping to find similar funding, Savong has already begun taking on orphans from nearby towns. One boy named Gdang was found by Savong because his single mother, with no money to feed him, was going to sell him (all too likely into labor or even sexual slavery). When Savong heard of this, he bought the boy himself and took him in, to eat with his family and get money for school. Another boy (who looks 10 years old but is actually 16) was his family's bread-winner at age 7, working in a rice paddy for a wage. Similarly, with the consent of his mother, Savong took him in as well. All the rest of the boys have similar stories, incredibly tragic yet hopeful. Like most of the Khmer we have met, they are suprisingly resilient and happy.

Although we are excited for the final four weeks of our trip (vacationing through Laos and the beaches of Southern Thailand) we've discovered that volunteering is the way to travel. From eating with Savong's family and the orphans to going out to bars with the permanent teachers, we've met real Khmer (and Thai) people in a context that we never would have on a normal vacation. Besides saving heaps of money, we've also had the opportunity to help out a very worthy cause and feel useful in a country far from home.

Unfortunately, Savong's orphanage is a work in progress and isn't yet funded the wayhis school is. If you find, at any time in your life, that you would like to donate money or volunteer abroad, we strongly encourage and recommend Savong's school and orphanage. If you're interested in volunteering or learning more, check out Savong's website: www.savong.com
If you're interested in donating money, contact us: jirvine89@gmail.com

Just a note of how far your dollar can go...
Feeding all the orphans for one day = $15
Sponsoring one student to go to school every day = $20 per month

The School:

Students' shoes outside the classroom (6am).

In the classroom.

Our last day teaching.

Outside the school:

"Hey...Same shoes!"

Daily volleyball match.

The orphan's first American breakfast (made with love by Anna and Jamie).

The market in Siem Reap.

Frisbee.

Our last day (at the beach):

Apparently, bikinis aren't worn in Cambodia.

Cambodia

2009-02-24T19:37:00.000-08:00

After a day at "Willow's farm," we heard of a great opportunity to volunteer at a school in Cambodia and decided to go right away. Two days and about 30 hours of tight-squeezed buses, here we are!

We quickly learned that, despite their similarities (at least from our perspective), Cambodians and Thais hate each other, so we've decided to save our comparisons of the two for the privacy of internet cafes (our code word for Thailand is Denmark).

Immediately after crossing the border, we could feel that we were in a new country. The main highway was mostly dirt and gravel, the streets were cluttered with begging children, and wherever we went people followed, persistently wanting something from us. The harsh contrast between the expensive mega-hotels for tourists and the poverty on the streets in front of them was shocking. Even more surprising, though, was the friendliness and hospitality the people still have, even after the great atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge only 30 years ago.

At 5am on our first morning in Siem Riep, we jumped in a tuk-tuk (a 2-wheeled carriage connected to a moped) and headed off to watch the sun rise over the famous Angkor Wat. After 8 hours of ancient ruin hopping, we went back to our guesthouse to collapse from the heat.

We're now at Savong School where we're teaching English 6 hours a day. Will post about that soon...

Note the wise sage at the top.

This temple (Ta Prohm) looked like something out of Pan's Labrynth.

Monkey butt!

Bayon - check out the faces in the rocks.

Anna destroying ancient ruins.

Cambodian tuk-tuk.

Gas station.

Monk-mobile in Siem Reap.

Girl at internet cafe playing a hyper-gory computer game with the sound up.

What We've Been Up To

2009-02-15T03:41:00.000-08:00

Since we've last posted we've finished our volunteer stay at Mirror and are now in Pai (a hippy town in the mountains near Chiang Mai) where we will begin a week-long farm-stay tomorrow. Here's what we've been up to in between...

The White Temple:

Our favorite temple so far.

The scooter we rented and drove to the White Temple (sorry mom...)

Whiskey = bad.

Check out the depictions of gender on these sculptures.

The fence surrounding the temple.

Volunteer work:

Building a road at a school in Mae Sai.

Thailand grows lots of rice.

Bricks made by children for new building at the school.

Our last day teaching English at Mirror.

Weekend in Chiang Mai:

Our first Thai iced tea in Thailand.

Mmmmmm.

Mango and sticky rice is amazing.

Anna's serious face.

We have friends!

Anna drinks Drano.

Leopard at Chiang Mai Zoo.

Anna and giraffe having a moment.

Spider!

This spider (at Mirror) was the size of Shaq's hand.

A Hill Tribe Homestay

2009-02-04T01:25:00.000-08:00

(sorry for technical difficulties, will fix)
On Thursday morning we left for our two night home-stay in the hill tribes, a weekend trip that all volunteers get to do at some point during their stay at Mirror. The 20 of us all piled into a couple of sawngtheaws and headed off. On our way up, we stopped in a town presumably for a snack, but soon found out that we were there for an elephant ride. Elephants are surprisingly big. Even more surprising are their poops, which are the size of small boulders (they thud on the ground accordingly). It was an unbelievable experience to be on top of an elephant, but we couldn't help but think at each jolt: "If we fall from this, there is no way we will make it out alive!" Nonetheless, Anna has decided that the elephant is her new favorite animal.

After the elephant ride we were dropped off at a nearby waterfall and enjoyed our Thai version of bag lunches; instead of peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches there was sticky rice and fried chicken, instead of yogurt there was chili sauce and instead of a brown paper bag, it was all wrapped in banana leaves. From there we began our 3 km hike up the only road to the first village where we were to stay, which doesn't sound long but, because of the heat and the incredible incline, felt like a serious trek.

There are about 7 major hill tribes in Northern Thailand and surrounding countries (as they tend to have more of a sense of tribal allegiance than nationalism). Each tribe has its own language, completely different from Thai, and unique dress and culture. A major goal of Mirror is to preserve these self-sustaining cultures while helping them to survive globalization. One of the ways they do this is with hill tribe home-stays, which gives more income to the hill tribe families (who sell their hand-made goods to their guests) and gives them an incentive to preserve their way of life.

Our first night of home-stay was in a Lahu village and happened to coincide with Lahu New Year, a 10 day festival of dancing and sacrifices. The Lahu believe that every new year they must make sure to give the gods many good things in order to secure a good year - in the center of the village was a sacrifice of different meats and a pig's head! The festival didn't start until the night so we spent the day hanging out in the village, trying to communicate with our host, and admiring the houses. Completely made of bamboo, the houses we stayed in were elevated on stilts and we could see (and hear all night long!) the animals, which live below the house, through the floor slats. Each house is made up of one big kitchen/living room/dining room (which is just an empty room with a fire pit inside) and another sleeping room, and the entire thing is rebuilt every 7 years.

At night, the festival got started and we all danced around the sacrifice to the pounding of symbols and drums. We went to bed at 10pm with the hope that the party would die down soon but, the Lahu villagers continued partying, blasting karaoke and shooting off fire crackers until 6am!

The next morning (2 hours after finally falling asleep) we woke up, had breakfast with our host (a shy woman but a great cook) and hiked about 5km to an Akha village, which looked similar, but was slightly more developed than the Lahu village (a few houses were made of cement and some of the younger women wore jeans and t-shirts in place of sarongs or the customary Akha outfit). Before we were placed in different houses (men and women were completely separate), we were taken to a field where we helped (really observed) a few men from the village make a meal of rice, soup, chili and tea for all of us using nothing but nature and their machetes; they cooked all our food in large bamboo shoots over a fire, laid out banana leaves for all of us to sit on, and offered us tea in cups cut from bamboo.

That night, we all got the opportunity to dress up in the traditional Akha uniforms and follow along in their dances around the fire (of which they have many). In return, we taught them the closest thing we have in our culture: the Hokey Pokey.

Despite the stomach aches and unpleasant (and mysterious - is it a spider bite?) bug bites that came with the experience, it was really an amazing opportunity.

Jamie helps make dinner.

View from our hike to the Lahu village.

Handmade Lahu bags and scarves.

A Lahu sacrifice.

More hiking...

Dinner at the Lahu home-stay.

A precarious bridge.

The pink meat is pork (sitting in the sun...mmmm).

Bamboo-cooked lunch.

Elephant (this one is 30 years old)!

Lahu village.

Stilts under the hill tribe houses.

The floors of the hill tribe houses.

Piggies (Anna saw a baby pig killed as a sacrifice at the Akha village).

Our Akha outfits.

All of us volunteers and the women of the Akha village.

Jamie and his host mother.

P.S. Thanks for all the comments! We really love hearing from all of you.

A Typical Day at the Mirror Foundation

2009-01-30T21:11:00.001-08:00

There are currently 20 volunteers working at Mirror (mostly all farang - foreigners, or to put it more accurately: "whiteys"). This large group makes for lots of free time (less work than we may have expected) as the work has to be divided between all 20 of us. We all have the weekends offto wander around Thailand together, which makes for a much less isolated travel experience

(this weekend we are heading to Bangkok to renew Jamie's passport - woops!)

Each day is roughly the same...
7:00-8:00 Wake up time, Anna attempts her morning cold shower.

8:00-9:00 Breakfast, which like all meals, is spicy, savory and served with white rice (but usually quite delicious. This is followed by Morning Meeting with all of the Mirror staff (all in Thai) and then the volunteer meeting, where the work is divided between the 20 of us.

9:00-12:00 Sometimes we teach, such as ICT (speaking English with the Thai IT workers for an hour or so), Top Kids (after school English classes with kids who speak English good. hehe), teaching the special needs classes, or teaching at the big school in town. Other times we create lesson plans (On Monday, we wrote our first lesson plan for two 5th grade classes and taught on Tuesday afternoon: our first really rewarding teaching experience so far. The children had surprisingly advanced English skills and were very excited to participate. They seemed to take education more seriously than kids at home, or at least respect the teachers much more.)

12:00 Lunch and ice cream from the ice cream man. Yay!

12:00-6:00 Afternoon teaching (if we have classes to teach) or lesson plan preparations in the office. Before dinner, Jamie attempts to play soccer with boys from the local village (who all started calling him Beckham, until they saw him play) and then sprints off to take a cold bucket shower (this is exactly what it sounds like: dumping buckets of icy cold water over himself).

6:00 Dinner

7:00-10:00 We usually hang out with other volunteers and Thai interns (young Thai university students who work at Mirror for 3 months at a time). A couple of nights we have had bonfires with the Thai interns, who bring out all kinds of Thai food to share (spicy papaya salad, sweet coconut sticky rice, etc.) and lots of Thai beer.

10:00 We head to bed (we rarely stay up past 10:00) .

On Wednesday night we had a huge going away party for many of the Thai interns. Each group of workers at Mirror (the volunteers, the interns, the student teachers) had to do a performance for everyone (will post ours soon) following our feast of a dinner.

It's a lot of fun here and we've decided to stay an extra week. Check back again, because we plan on adding more to this post in the next couple of weeks...

Volunteer dance performance (based on a popular Thai music video)

Jamie's bathroom (shower is the pink bucket)

We hand wash our laundry!

Jamie's stone bed

Dinner

Everybody at the office

008 (an intern) playing guitar at bonfire

Anna's house (along with 30 other girls)

Goodbye party

Mirror!

Our wonderful cook

Matching Tevas

2009-01-24T02:22:00.000-08:00

We've begun our first week of volunteering...though it wasn't a typical week. All of the Mirror Foundation staff were away for an annual staff meeting in Southern Thailand meaning we, the volunteers, were sent to "work" somewhere else. After our 1st two days of orientation (sitting around) at Mirror, we all headed off to a small village outside of Mae Chan and stayed with Mr. Van, who could sleep and feed all 25 of us (the richest man in the village - his house is built above all the other houses symbolizing his status in the community).

Day 1 We were told, much to our disappointment, that we had the whole day off to relax. We were given a tour of Mr. Van's unbelievable house (which he built and wired himself!), discovered his mom lives in Oakland, and enjoyed the first of many of his delicious home-cooked meals. Anna spent the week sleeping on a dentist chair, as the only other option was the cold stone floor, while Jamie slept on a soft mattress.

Days 2-3 The work finally started. Our task was to build cement bases for the school playground (don't ask us why). We got to chop down bamboo trees with machetes, which were sliced down to strips and used as tensile support for the concrete. Next we mixed cement with rocks and sand and water (with changing proportions each time) and finally we poured it. We're not sure what this does for the playground but it was satisfying work for us.

Day 4 It was our group's day to teach the childcare down the street (basically a preschool ages 2 to 6). While we were only scheduled to teach in the morning, the regular teacher decided to take the week off so we taught the full day. The day started off calm, with structured art projects and "the Meditation Song" (don't get it stuck in your head!), but ended in chaos, with children clinging to every limb and a boy crying because he pooped his pants.

Days 5-6 For whatever reasons, all work was canceled so we sat around, read books, took walks, and watched crap-amazing movies (Mr Van owned DVDs purchased at the border which each included 36 different films under genres such as "Beauty Action Spy Movies" or "Mel Gibson v.s. Colin Farrel").

Night 6 Anna gets sick. Natural detox for 2 days (gross)

Day 7 While Anna lays on her dentist chair, Jamie (and everyone else) goes to the "zoo" (really a breeding facility for rare animals in the region). The zoo was nothing special, but the hike and its accompanying views were amazing. We caught a noon sawngthaew that left at 1:30 (Thai Time) and headed back to Chiang Rai for our weekend off.

Will post sooner, we promise.

Where Jamie slept at Mr. Van's.

The girl on the right is carrying her baby brother.

Meditation at Mae Chan winery.

Can you find Anna? (on a hike near Mr. Van's)

Adorable.

Chickens everywhere.

Chopping down bamboo.

Those are our sunglasses!

Kids sliding outside the school (sorry about the hand in the picture).

Mae Salong

2009-01-24T02:05:00.000-08:00

Our first adventure outside of smoggy Chiang Rai was to Mae Salong, a tiny hilltribe town about an hour and a half north west by public bus and crammed sawngtheaw, which is basically the back of a covered truck with loose metal benches (our max so far has been twenty in one sawngtheaw). We met six young volunteers on the way, ate dinner with them and rode their rented motorbikes. We stayed in our own little bungalow for only 300 baht ($9.oo) and enjoyed the beautiful town for a night. Check out these pictures...

Happy!

Anna eats a grasshopper.

Bottles kissing at a "Lebanese" restaurant in Chiang Rai

Chiang Rai bus station

An empty sawngtheaw

Our bungalow at Shin Sane Guesthouse

Thai 40

View of Mae Salong

Mr. Sane saying goodbye

Weee!

Our First Day

2009-01-10T19:56:00.000-08:00

Today is our second day in Chiang Rai. Yesterday was our first day in Chiang Rai...yes.

Anyway,
We somehow made it to Bangkok Friday night after a 13 hour flight to Seoul (sweet airport) and a 6 hour flight to Bangkok. We were too exhausted and disoriented to do anything but collapse at our hotel.

When we woke up yesterday, we were in a different world: stray dogs, families of 4 riding through the skinny streets on single mopeds, street vendors and all the smells that go with a new city (barbecued meats, sewage, animals, a nearby river).

At 11:40 we jumped on a flight to Chiang Rai where we planned to brush up on our Thai - the boy sitting next to us laughed and corrected us. We were greeted in Chiang Rai by a festival on the air strip which we soon discovered (after wandering around wondering what people were staring at) was a military air show. Everywhere we looked people were staring and we were quickly struck with the realization of being foreign. After discovering that we had written down the wrong address to the guesthouse, we attempted to call Thellie (our only contact in Thailand) and failed on all of 5 pay phones in a row. A group of ten or so Thai cab drivers (all just hanging out at the empty airport) sat and laughed at us (a reccuring theme of our trip so far).

We decided to get a ride downtown and assumed we could find our way to the guesthouse 1 km away. With Lonely Planet in hand and 50 lbs of baggage on our backs we headed NE with the help of a newly purchased compass/whistle (78 Baht! - how much is a Baht?). Trucks with at least 10 children in the back passed and all the heads turned toward us. Walking around we found that with a little smile or wave or a timid "Sawat dee" (hello) everyone we passed would beam back at us. We've already discovered why this country is known as the Land of Smiles.

The supposed fifteen minute walk from downtown continued for an hour along the highway heading back to the airport and we soon realized we were terribly lost. It was time to ask for help (ah!). We stopped at a small moped mechanics shop where four or five mechanics sat staring at us with dropped jaws. As we timidly approached with our massive backpacks, tevas, sweaty T-shirts and map in hand, their awed expressions turned to fits of laughter. The head mechanic and his wife grabbed the map from us and began to pass it around and looked just as confused as we were. We finally mimed "telephone, please" and were able to reach Thellie on our second try who spoke to the mechanic for us. Before we knew what was happening, we were each on the back of a moped, speeding through the streets of Chiang Rai and were finally dropped at the guest house - which actually was just a fifteen minute walk from downtown. The mechanics' act of kindness seemed to be an expected gesture in this culture - not an inconvenience at all.

After a nap we headed to the night market, a bustling 5 lantern-lit blocks of vendors selling everything from hand-sewn pants to maggot covered sushi (intentionally). Today we take it easy, soaking up the living-in-the-present mentality of Chiang Rai. Tomorrow... trekking?

World's Most Unusual Musical Instrument

Our view for 19 hours.

Dinner in South Korea (spicy!).

Lots of herbs.

Cows in the city?!

The Chiang Rai Clock Tower.

Volunteer Work

2009-01-04T15:37:00.000-08:00

We will be spending our first month in Chiang Rai (northern Thailand) where we will volunteer with the Mirror Foundation.