Dear loved ones,

Thank you for all the prayers and support. We left Switzerland on January 25th at 10:30 pm, flew to Singapore where our kind friend Joyce Butron picked us up and took us to dinner and tucked us in for the night. The next day we continued our flight to Cambodia, and arrived on schedule with allllll of our baggage. Amazing!

Our good friends Bob and Christal and Sam picked us up at the airport and drove us nearly three hours south to our friends’ bungalow resort at the beach.  We stayed with our friends, Kris and Naomi and their three children for the first two and a half weeks while we got settled and found a house.  They own a charming little resort and hospitality training school, and the first weekend we pretty much just slept and relaxed and recovered from our big move half way around the world.

After a few days of rest and enjoying the beach it was time to start figuring out life here in Asia. The first week of February we sorted out our work visa application, bought some local sim cards for our phones, and bought a second hand motorcycle so that we could get around.

The second week of February was consumed with house hunting, and on Monday, February 13th we signed our lease and got the keys.  It’s a simple home, with two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs plus a lean-to kitchen. It also has an extra work room that we’re turning into a laboratory+office+water filter room.

The last two weeks of the month were full of work getting the house comfortable and functioning. In Switzerland you have to clean and paint and repair everything when you move out, but in Cambodia you have to do it when you move in 🤪. We also needed to build a fence in front of the river, to keep Benjamin from jumping in 😉. It’s an old house, and we still have a lot of repair work to do, but it’s finally liveable. We now have part of the house and the laboratory clean, painted, and with furniture, fans and mosquito nets. We can work on the rest of the house as we have time in the next few months.

On Monday, February 20th Benjamin turned three. We waited until the weekend to celebrate because a group of our good friends were coming down. On Friday we spent the day at the beach, and in the evening we celebrated Benjamin with pizza and a cake that Christal Hollandsworth baked him. The next day everyone came over to our new house and ate a picnic lunch together by the river, then prayed over our home and the property and the Water Project. It’s such a blessing to have a community of friends that is already established here, and that we feel so comfortable with.

On February 27th, exactly one month after arrival our visas and work permits came through. We can now live and work legally in Cambodia for 12 months.

And finally, we have a guest house! Our rental property has two houses, the one that we are living in, and a small traditional wooden house. After some prayer and consideration, we decided to rent the small house too, and to use it as a holiday rental house. Now we always have a place for our friends to stay when they come to visit or to volunteer with us. It has a river view, but the first guests might need to help us fix it up just a bit ;-).

Well, that’s it for February. Here’s the photo link.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/jP6BwDLCQbRQCMYk9

Blessings,

Jenny, Lukas and Benjamin Graf