From left to right Douglas Eads (Board Member), Navin Saigal (Financial Planning Director), Eli Shirk, Sadi Thann (Spokeswoman), Rudi Shirk, Paula Shirk (Founder), Tiffany Caton (Fundraising Director)

Sadi is the first Cambodian woman to compete for and win the title Miss Massachusetts 2011 Princess America. Sadi, a UMass – Amherst graduate, is passionate about using her title to promote support for Cambodian causes. She shares a similar history with us: BB2C evolved from the adoption of a child from Cambodia, Rudi the son of our founder.  Sadi, too, is adopted — she was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after her biological parents fled Cambodia on foot. In foster care from the age of six, Sadi was adopted at age ten by an American couple.

BB2C and Sadi are deeply committed to helping Cambodian women. Eighty percent of Cambodians are farmers, of which 65 percent are women. By helping Cambodian farmers obtain water pumps to raise their crop yields, BB2C directly and profoundly influences the lives of women. Sadi aspires to be a face and a voice for Cambodians — especially the women and children who need her advocacy.

BB2C Featured in Christian Science Monitor

Craig Tooman, a BB2C board member, traveled to Cambodia last year and took a few amazing photos. Here’s a snippet of some of his memories from that time:

I traveled to Cambodia in December 2009 and January 2010 to take a vacation with my wife and two sons. We spent time in Angkor and then took a boat down the Mekong to Saigon. On January 5th we boarded a rented van and drove out to Chhouk Kranhas and Andaung Tramoung to see the pump project villages and to get a sense of the place.

First we visited Chhouk Kranhas where we met Lep Los, a village resident who is a teacher in the Muslim school adjacent to the mosque and our local pump distributor. Lep showed us the pump he had in his backyard where we were able to pump water out of the well in the yard. After coffee at Lep’s house, we headed out to the fields. The photos below are of women returning from the fields outside of the village, I assume that they are Cham. The boy in the photo above is one of Lep’s sons, who shyly watched us from inside his house.

It’s all about “The DIY Foreign-Aid Revolution.” As Ufei, one of our grant writers, points out, “This is so us! Loved learning about other people’s work and am wondering about the collective power of all of our incremental progress.”

On his blog today, Kristof also added an unassumingly titled post, “How to Save the World,” that includes material cut from the magazine addressing the question, “What can I do?” Thanks to the internet, he was able to salvage tips from that sidebar and share them with the world.