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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 research, project and curriculum development, project pitching, grant applications and project pitching, we finally made it to Phnom Penh with a couple thousand dollars of grant and award money and one solid test location for the summer. We partnered up with a local orphanage in one of my old areas, Tuk Thlaa, to teach their high school aged youth communication skills to encourage and equip them with the ability to discuss difficult, sensitive, and taboo subjects such as sexual health in a healthy and open way.

On day one, after a nostalgic and extremely happy reuniting (and breakfast) with our beloved mission president and his wife, the Christensens, we happily rode all over those familiar streets in a tuk tuk on our way to our first partner meeting. We scheduled out the six week discussion meetings and met with our newly recruited peer mentors that night! It was amazing to see some passionate youth step up and express a desire to help their friends become better educated, despite the cultural stigmas surrounding it all.

After a very successful day we immediately took a vacation for the weekend and went up to Siem Reap to tour around one of the seven wonders of the world, Angkor Wat, for the second (for me) and fourth (for Braxton) time! It did not disappoint, and neither did the little fish foot massages and the beautiful holy mountain called Phnom Kulen that we explored for the first time. It had waterfalls that we swam in and a beautiful ancient wat, enough said.

Kissing pics?

I totally missed...

That's more like it!

Taa Prom. The site where Tomb Raider was filmed!

Nothing beats a good sunset, no matter how cloudy.

Phnom Kulen ancient wat!

Naturally, there are monks.

The waterfall we swam in :) 

But the true highlight of our first weekend back in our beloved "homeland" was the subtle yet strong reminder of how loving the Khmer people are, and how much we love them.

We stepped off the bus in Siem Reap and immediately made friends with our tuk tuk driver, Sophat.

By the end of the weekend, after having driven us around to all of our destinations for three days, he invited us to come back next year to his house in the farmlands of Siem Reap to eat homegrown mangoes and play with his kids. He sent us on our way back to Phnom Penh with about 3 kilos of those delicious mangoes :) On Sunday, we got to attend one of the branches that Braxton served in at the beginning of his mission, and where he found tremendous success. We walked into the chapel right as Sacrament meeting was starting and Braxton's dazzling white smile didn't leave his face once, especially as we sat down and looked up on the stand to see a man that he baptized sitting as the first councilor to the Branch President. After the meeting Braxton met his brand new baby boy. When Brax taught him and baptized him and his wife, they were unable to have children. After countless prayers and many days of fasting (by this family and Braxton + companion), they now have two children. They thanked Braxton for blessing their family with the gospel and subsequently two children. I also was smiling so big that my face hurt because I got to see one of my favorite mission companions, Sister Y, or I guess I should call her Ratana now! It was like nothing had changed and we were right back in our favorite area Battambang together. (For the record, she was the very first person to predict that I was going to date Brax when we got home, I laughed at her and said she was crazy. That was in my 4th transfer on the mission... So she rightfully pointed her finger at me and said "I told you so!").

After an amazing weekend in Siem Reap, we started our first full week back in Cambodia with some intense peer mentor training to get them ready to begin teaching the following week. We did three trainings that week, met with another partner who is setting up a meeting with the Cambodian Ministry of Education Department of School Health for us to ask permission to enter public schools with our program. It was a pretty big step for our brand new baby organization! We also welcomed two of our very best friends from the mission (and at school at BYU) Jordan and Linda, who arrived in Cambodia (Linda for our project, Jordan for his own internship, but living just upstairs from us in our apartment building) so the party could really begin! We ate many meals with our mission president and his wife and it felt like we were right back in the good ole mission days and it's safe to say all of us were missing it a lot. But we also found a free few days (along with a few of our other mission friends) to head out to the heretofore unexplored province of Kampongsaum, where no missionaries could go because it is the land of beautiful beaches and islands on the coast!!! It was a paradisiacal dream come true. Pictures are worth way more than words, especially in this case.

Have you ever seen anything more beautiful? 

I could have stayed there for a whole week. But alas, we had to hurry back to Phnom Penh to finish training our peer mentors and to crash a wedding of two return missionaries that we served with! Traffic was atrocious, so we were very late to the wedding, but pretty much everyone we ever knew attended so we made quite the scene when we got there, screaming and hugging and people laughing because they couldn't believe Elder Allred and Sister Brown had actually done it and gotten married. Khmer weddings are loud and full of good food and fancy outfits, but when as many foreigners as us walk in, we definitely drew some attention! We stayed long enough to get food, cake, and dancing, all the essentials, and I was again reminded how much I absolutely 100% love the people I met on my mission, from companions to members to tuk tuk drivers. I miss them everyday. We are considering moving to Cambodia (we'd survive a lot longer there than America since everything is so much cheaper...).

 




Another Sunday rolled around and I got to attend my favorite ward in the whole world that I served in for 6 months, Toul Kork! I walked in and was greeted with many hugs and the same old faithful faces that I always saw when I served there. I was looking around for some of my recent converts, and found out that most of them had moved areas and were attending different wards. But I saw my little old white haired toothless grandma walk in, who I found, taught, and saw through baptism, walk in and sit in the same pew as always. When I sat down in the pew in front of her, she looked at me and smiled, and asked me where I was serving now and why I hadn't been visiting her anymore! She is 81 years old now and still faithfully coming to church every Sunday with her deaf and mute daughter. She told me with great pride that her daughter had been baptized 5 months ago, and I started crying.
When I left that area, we were trying to figure out how we could teach her, since she couldn't hear or speak. We knew she wanted to learn, she was very good at communicating through hand motions and you could tell she felt something when she was at church and understood things when we taught, but we never figured out how. A blessed sister after us (who was prepared her entire life for this woman because she has a little brother who cannot speak and is not mentally capable) finally figured out how and taught her using picture books and pamphlets. She got baptized in December. She told me, with her hand motions, that I was still beautiful and how excited she was to be at church. I cried again.


After church we were fed by Ming Chuan, her daughter Vatey, and her husband Bishop Chin. Ming Chuan was my mother in Cambodia, who taught me what it meant to sacrifice everything for the gospel by giving up her chance to earn a master's degree at a prestigious university (at age 40 I might add) to continue attending church because they required she go to school on Sunday for two years. She walked away from the Dean of the University to mocking of her faith and insults, but she is still the Stake Relief Society President and one of the kindest, happiest, strongest women I know. Her daughter is preparing to serve a mission. I'm requesting to be neighbors with them in heaven. 

Bong Davin, another recent convert she's pregnant with her second!

Bong Momo, one of my recent converts in Toul Kork

Mitt Chhlat Peer Mentors! 

Our trip was drawing to a close, we had only three days left at this point, so we had a big kick off party for our discussions at the orphanage and talked about creating a safe environment to feel comfortable talking about uncomfortable topics!
Then we helped the kids poor cement in their outdoor shower area so that they wouldn't get all muddy while bathing anymore. It was a success :)




Braxton and I spent an entire afternoon with President and Sister Christensen, going out to lunch and making Braxton's famous chocolate chip cookies (yummmm). They asked us if we like being married, and we looked at each other almost at a loss for words and said "well duh!" But we talked more about it later and realized that that question is difficult for us to answer because we try not to think about not being married and we can hardly remember what it was like to not be together. We are each other's best friends, and going back to Cambodia just confirmed the fact that we wouldn't want to face this adventure of life with anyone else but each other.

Wherever Braxton is is home to me. So, after a much too quick visit to our Cambodian home, we decided to move our home to India for a few months; our next Allred Adventure!

(I won't stress you out with the horrible details of the all night travel fiasco we had getting from Cambodia to India... it involved Air Asia, officially the worst airline in the world, and almost $1000 in charges for checked bags... we had to buy new tickets on the fly and sprint through several airports... but we're trying to forget about it).