Mission Accomplished!

On August 7th the High Altitude Motorcycle Repair Shop opened in M Village. Villagers celebrated the occasion with fireworks, watermelon, and speeches. Two days before, T Bear arrived with tools and parts for the shop. While the building still doesn’t have any furniture besides a few shelves, the shop is open for business and has already had many customers. In the end, the project took us just under two months to complete, and the overall cost was less than we had anticipated. We plan to leave some of the leftover funds for future mechanic training. In the winter the mechanics will return to X County to complete additional training in engine and electrical wiring problems. The rest of the funds will be used to support future Pentok projects related to girls’ education and community development.

During our last week in Xining, we worked hard to complete the new Pentok website at http://www.pentok.org. Although not all the content has been uploaded yet, we finalized the overall theme and layout. We taught Mama S, T Fishy, and T Bear how to upload content to the website so they can finish and maintain the site after we’ve left.

At KTV

To celebrate the success of our project and the new friends we made, we threw a party at the Pentok office where we introduced beer pong to Qinghai. We also took our friends out to dinner at some of our favorite restaurants. On our last night, we had a group dinner with Pentok staff and interns, before heading to KTV (karaoke). In a small room with disco lighting, a huge TV, and lots of beer and snacks, we all sang English, Chinese, and T songs late into the night. Of course the only song everyone knew was I Want It That Way by the Backstreet Boys!

With Pentok staff and volunteers

On August 14th, we boarded a train for Beijing loaded with two backpacks apiece and a bucket of KFC for the trip. We were sad to leave our adopted home for the last two months, but were looking forward to spending time with Sara’s family and pigging out at our favorite restaurants in Beijing. It’s now August 22nd and Sara leaves for California tomorrow (sniff, sniff). David and Jesse will stay in Beijing for another week preparing for the road ahead. On September 5th, David will begin graduate studies in international affairs at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in China. Sara and Jesse will both return to Portland to enter the workforce!

Prayer flags over Qinghai Lake