Earthquake and Protestors

I should probably start this post out with we are all fine. I know some of you saw that Sumatra was hit with another quake. John was the only one that even woke up. The rest of slept right through it. Is it crazy that we are used to them now?

The bigger news today was that our camp was locked down. It is possible it could be in the news so I thought I better give you the heads up. For the last couple weeks there has been protesters outside of our camp who were subcontractors for Chevron. They are protesting a contract dispute. Today while we are school the number of protesters grew significantly and they pushed their way through our security gates. As you can imagine this created some concern. I was quite impressed how smoothly and peacefully things were handled. The school was secured and at noon all the kids that lived on camp were sent home. Off camp kids went to teacher homes to play. I think if you asked the kids and teachers at ISR they would all say how much they appreciated the protesters for giving us the afternoon off. We had a great time at our house. We baked cookies and played games. Overall, it was a really fun day.

It is unclear if tomorrow the protesters will be back. I am sure we will have a security briefing in the morning. I think we are all secretly hoping they are back on camp so we can have another day off. I am used to hoping for a snow day but a protest day is a new one for me.

We will post more pictures from Vietnam tomorrow. Thanks for being patient with my lack of consistent posts. I have been working on an online class and I happy to report I finished up this evening.