Some background

Michael Hayes and I first met in Mrs. Long's Kindergarden class in Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1957. Even though my family moved to Indiana for a year mid way through 6th grade and then to Darien, CT through high school, Mike and I stayed connected. Coincidentally, we both ended up at Ohio Wesleyan in 1969. Eric Morris was my freshman year roommate. It was when Michael would come over to visit me in my dorm room that he and Eric began their lifelong friendship. Eric married Kim Sweeney (also OWU and, get this, Darien High) in 1978. It was the year before that they had moved from San Francisco, where Eric was getting his master's at Stanford, to White Mountain, Alaska to teach school. WM is an Eskimo village 70 east of Nome - way up there. The village then had a population of 100 of which 30 were school aged children. Kim taught the younger kids and Eric taught the older ones. Eric stayed teaching for 21 years before retiring in 1998. Kim just retired this year. They raised their four daughters in WM and all four went off to college. Two of their daughters are married and one of them has two children and a step daughter. Two of their daughters live in Anchorage. Kim had wanted to move to a larger town, even though WM has doubled in size to 200 - so 8 years ago Eric started building a house for them in Homer, Alaska - population 4,000. Homer is a five hour drive south of Anchorage. It is still a full day of travel from WM to Homer. The house was finally ready to move into this past October. Eric continues to finish off the trim and misc. projects while still keeping a hold on their WM house. Hunting and fishing and preparing their own food from what they catch and hunt is a way of life for them just as is going to McQuades, our local supermarket is for us.


Michael dropped out of OWU after the first term of his junior year. He backpacked around India and Asia for four years doing odd jobs in various places including playing a part in a Japanese equivalent of Columbo. He came back to the states and finished his BA at an experimental international college in Brattleboro, VT. Then he got his masters from Georgetown in US-Soviet relations in 1985. After a short period working for an oil company in Houston in charge of gifting to charities, he took a job with the Asian Foundation in San Francisco. They sent them to Bangkok for two years and then he and his then wife moved to Phnom Penh when his contract was up. They started the Phnom Penh Post in 1992. He sold the paper in 2008 after not missing an issue in 16 years. Michael continues to live in PP working as a consultant for a Finnish company that is working with the Office of Land Management to survey half of the land in Cambodia. Needless to say, he is fluent in Khmer (Cambodian) and we have an incredible tour guide for our 12 days while in Cambodia.





And for those needing some maps - and I am a map guy. Here are maps of PP, Cambodia and Indochina. I'll refer to these maps later.