Come On, Drink for the Children

By posting this, we have automatically offset 350 pounds of carbon!

And this isn't the only thing we've been doing to make the world a better place . . .

We have now made it to Laos. The mountains are really beautiful and the children are refreshingly unjaded. We are staying in a city called Vang Vieng that sits next to the Namsong river. We spent a few days helping out at an organic farm. You would be surprised to know that what they really needed help with was selling mojitos! Of course, we happily rose to the challenge. It seems that the city's main attraction is a wild inner-tubing drink-a-thon designed especially for foreigners (imagine rope swings, zip lines, mud pits, slides, and free shots). The organic farm is situation at the inner-tubing starting point so they wisely set up a bar to raise money for their local education projects. They specialize in organic mulberry mojitos (they're good, trust us) and all the proceeds go towards education. One of their main projects is a bus to get rural children to school. Since no one can resist a slogan like "Drink for the Children," we spent two days convincing passing foreigners into getting drunk for the sake of making the world a better place. Apparently the farm can raise as much as 5 times the profit when a foreigner works the bar. We are proud to say that on our first day we raised 1.5 million kip for the farm (never mind the conversion rates, just think about how big the number 1.5 million is! It's huge!).

While on the farm we also sat in on a Lao children's hip hop class, helped milk goats, learned how to make goat cheese, and ate mulberry pancakes, mulberry fruitshakes, mulberry tea, deep-fried mulberry leaves, and, of course, mulberry mojitos. So far Laos is treating us pretty well.