On the morning of April 8, 2006, a pale green, twenty-eight-foot-long, 1976 FireMaster fire truck-Engine 633-drove away from a port in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, after traveling some 8,500 miles from Colorado's Rocky Mountains. It had just cleared customs and was en route to a small fire station six kilometers away.
Just two years before that, Captain Sok, Sihanoukville's fire chief, told author Douglas Mendel that his town was in need of a new fire truck. Mendel made it happen. In Cambodia Fire, Mendel shares the story of how he came to visit Cambodia, how it changed his life and the lives of numerous Cambodian people, and how he began his journey to help them with firetrucks, supplies, and gear to make their lives safer and better.
This memoir tells how the delivery of the fire truck was only one of dozens of projects and years of work in connection with the Douglas Mendel Cambodian Relief Fund. Cambodia Fire narrates how the country of Cambodia and its warm, loving people have shaped the last seventeen years of Mendel's life.