Dining for Dollars

Community service stems from the desire to give something back. In the case of Christina Chou, a customer service representative for Continental in Los Angeles, the community she gives back to is more than 13,000 miles away.

Chou was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Her father was killed assisting the United States in the war in Vietnam, and Chou’s family was exiled to a Thai refugee camp. A Cambodian church in California eventually sponsored the family, and they moved to the Los Angeles area in 1985.

Chou worked in her uncle’s restaurant in Long Beach before meeting her husband. The couple eventually started their own restaurant, but Chou still wanted to grow and learn new skills, so she applied for a job with Continental Airlines at Los Angeles International Airport.

“I got involved with a local charity because I wanted to give back to my new country,” says Chou, who became a U.S. citizen in 1998. But it was a family trip with her husband and children to Cambodia that turned Chou’s attention to giving back to her home country.

“We were eating at a restaurant and saw kids with no clothes grabbing the stuff we left behind on the table,” she says. “It broke my heart to see how desperate the kids were.”

Chou realized she could have been in that same situation. She and her husband used their own money to buy medical supplies and food to give to the kids and families, and the couple vowed to return and help as much as they could. They decided to tap into their restaurant experience and host a dinner with friends and family to raise money for supplies for the villages of Cambodia.

“The first year, we had 80 people attend our ‘reunion’ and raised $3,000,” Chou says. Chou’s husband has family in Cambodia, so the couple used those contacts to help distribute clothing, medicine, food, and school supplies to the villages. “We make sure that 100 percent of the money we raise at the dinner pays for the supplies. Anything else we need comes from our own pocket.”

The dinner is now an annual event and has grown from 80 friends and family to more than 250 attendees. “It is still all word of mouth, but it is such fun to see so many of our friends, their friends, and their friends want to help out,” Chou says. The dinner now includes a small silent auction as well as a slide show of the work the effort supports in Cambodia. Chou says the biggest accomplishment was being able to hire a local company to build wells for several communities throughout the Kompong Speu province that had no clean running water. Her efforts have also raised money to fund teachers’ salaries.

Chou and her husband hope to someday establish an official nonprofit organization to support similar work not just in Cambodia, but in other parts of the world as well.

Picture Perfect

“Arelis in Her Father’s Hat” captured the grand prize in the 2008 Continental Latin American Photo Contest, sponsored by Amigos de Las Américas (AMIGOS) and Continental Airlines.

Emily Bloch, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, snapped the winning photo of Arelis, the daughter of her host family, while she was in Nicaragua as an AMIGOS volunteer. Bloch won two tickets on Continental to any destination in Latin America.

The photo contest demonstrates the beauty of the six Latin American countries where Continental and AMIGOS have a presence. More than 1,500 votes were cast to select this year’s winner.

AMIGOS is an international nonprofit organization that provides community service opportunities for young people. To learn more about AMIGOS, visit amigoslink.org. — L.O.

Roping and Running

The 22nd annual ConocoPhillips Rodeo Run, a 10K race and 5K fun run/walk, takes place Saturday, February 28. The event raises scholarship funds for Texas youth and kicks off the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo™.

Participants will experience an atmosphere that celebrates Houston’s heritage as they run through downtown. Lone Star State hospitality and a Texas-size post-race party make the event one of the most popular races in the region.

The ConocoPhillips Rodeo Run has raised more than $2 million for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo™ Educational Fund. For more information about the race, visit ConocoPhillipsRodeoRun.com. — L.O.