An Allred's Adventure

If I could describe India in one word... Braxton asked me this question on our third day here, and I couldn't even think of a word large enough, colorful enough, and wonderful enough to describe Hyderabad, India. But Braxton thought of the perfect word: saturated. Everything is saturated in color, in spices and flavor, in smells (good and bad), and in expression of feelings. Traffic is thicker and less enjoyable than saturated fat. We are permanently saturated (maybe soaked is a more appropriate word here) in sweat. IT ROCKS! (I will be inserting random pictures to break up the big blocks of text but may or may not have anything to do with what I'm writing.) This is the Charminar, meaning "four minerets", the center piece of Hyderabad! An active mosque built a loooong time ago. Since it is Ramadan (or Ramazan as they call it here) this month, this place is HOPPING all the time!  We got stopped LITERALLY every 5 minutes by random people asking to take ...

Most adventures start with the adventurer leaving "home". The best adventurers find their home in the midst of their adventuring. Braxton and I started our summer adventures by coming home first. Cambodia. A place we never expected to call home, but a place that felt more like home within two minutes of being enveloped by oven-like heat than Provo has in the past two semesters. It almost felt like we had never left, except for the fact that we are married now (a minor change I know)! We came to Cambodia to start something new, to try our hand at educational development and non-profit management. It's safe to say we pretty much had no idea what we were supposed to do, but we jumped in with both feet, or in the true spirit of Cambodia, we crossed the road without looking both ways. Mitt Chhlat, meaning Smart Friend in Khmer, is our very own creation; a peer mentored discussion program about public health awareness and sexual health education. After 8 months of res...