Dave and Jen For Oxfam

One month left until we leave. We find ourselves sitting around a coffee table drinking Fairtrade tea, reading the Lonely Planet guides to Cambodia and tidying up a pile of notepad notes, text files on laptops and talking at a great pace. The previous week has been both a challenge and exciting and the next four weeks are going to be an extension of that. In more ways than we probably know.

Our participation in Oxfam Australia’s Cambodia Challenge has been an interesting journey so far. The majority of our fundraising push was inclusive of friends and family but incorporated the extended network of our various business associates and colleagues. For the most part everyone, of course, loves the idea of not only supporting Oxfam Australia but being able to see the work they do through Jen and I. Through our stories, writing, photos and video of course. Unfortunately the escalating global financial crisis affected a couple of our major donors in our own networks and we have had some hasty replanning. The good news is that we are still on target, but we don’t just want to achieve it, we want to exceed it. We still do need your help, so please support our fundraising for Oxfam and donate!

Aside from the fundraising side of things, which is a topic that has more exciting news to come next week, we have been training and planning and enjoying ourselves too. I spent the weekend getting ahead on some writing with a new contract starting this week and joined Jen on some riding adventures. We have started to move into planning what things we haven’t focused on yet, such as doctors with needles and dental checkups and travel insurance and luggage weight and availability of shipping parcels from Siem Reap and on and on and on. The method by which we keep organised in the fundraising, sponsorship and planning has remained relatively unchanged over the last few weeks though we haven’t entirely dropped Backpack for the suite of Google applications in current use. That’s the topic for another post to come but for now everything is working nicely and the availability of decentralised planning tools is a boon. Yes, a boon. I actually used the word “boon”.

So what else? Well the previous post about muffins and the Squishy timelapse test is an amusing bit of happenstance. Jen and I were discussing a change of tact with a major donor rescheduling aspects of their support (due to very extensive layoffs of their workforce globally!) so I quipped that she should make a cake stall. Ever able to bounce my poor humour back at me, Jen now seems to have created something of a racket in her office that converts baked goods into money. I will take her word that the pile of coins and notes adds up to the couple of hundred dollars suggested on the spreadsheet prior to reconciling with the main accounts tomorrow night, but seriously… gold coin donations for baked goods. The lesson here is to never underestimate any form of fundraising activity that can work in tangent with, but not distract from, primary fundraising channels. The side benefit here is of course that fact that I get to drop round and eat the “factory seconds”. I’ll let you in on a little secret, it wasn’t Squishy that ate the muffin in that timelapse video….

There is of course the consideration of how Jen and I are feeling about the trip in general. For the most part we are busy and not yet sitting back thinking about the fun parts of the trip. The major focus is still fundraising, with little pockets of fun sneaking through when we catch up to chat about things we have read, places we’ve googled and point out photos on FlickR. You do know we have our own FlickR galleries that feed this site? You do? Just checking. We are also focused on the riding part of the trip and have been pushing ourselves to keep lifting the fitness levels. This weekend we are looking to head across the border for some training at somewhere in NSW we have in mind but we will need to spend more time training off-road soon. I say this mostly because I want to spend more time training off road and have come up with some compelling points to convince Jen, who is exceptionally fit for distance but somewhat, shall we say, unable to bunny hop or throw her bike around.

There are other travel things on our minds at the moment. We have been talking about the history of Cambodia and Vietnam and such diverse tangents from that as how interesting it is that we sit here reading about an endless rotation of empires, kingdoms and populations, yet we know so little about the history of indigenous Australia. For everyone that knows of Neville Bonner, who would know the significance of Myall Creek? Too diverse to rant about here but we have been thinking about this and our regular touching base between our admittedly comfortable lifestyles and our social ideals. The fundraising industry itself likes to argue about the value of “awareness” of causes, but that’s an important thing outside of the how’s and whys of raising support and the fundraising dollar. I’d like to think that the kind of awareness of an issue that encourages someone to put their attention into reading a book or searching online for more information is the best kind, and in that way I’m happy that this trip already has motivated us to do exactly that.

So to end this and get back to work, we are feeling okay at this point even if we are aware that 4 weeks is a month and it’s all speeding up from here. We have this week and possibly next to finalise our fundraising and hopefully the means we smash the target. After that, I guess we start getting more excited about the fun stuff, but for now, we still need your support. Just in closing I’d like to say thank you for all the emails of support and amusing tales! Keep them coming on the email address below and once again, please donate!