For Mom and Dad

I. What's on the old site

When you sit down with twenty-two years of writing and look at it as a single body of work, things become visible that aren't obvious post by post. Here's what's there:

• 325 essays, peaking in 2010 with seventy posts during Project Phongsali
• More than 1,000 photographs documenting fieldwork, cultural life, recovery, victims
• A 293-image catalog of Lao cultural artifacts — crossbows, spirit knives, whiskey stills, fishing traps, fortune cards, water vessels, a wooden leg — that reads like a small museum
• Six PDF newsletters from 2010–2011

The arc is clear. The early posts (2004–2007) read like field journals from a curious newcomer learning Laos. By 2010, during Project Phongsali, the writing tightens into operational reporting: daily diaries, with characters who recur — Yai, Kham, Om, Mr. Magnet, the blacksmith who turns bomb fragments into farming tools. The phrase "in the spirit of swords into plowshares" appears more than once.

By 2013–2014 a different mode emerges: longer journalistic portraits of individual victims. The Sunsamay piece from February 2015 — about the twelve-year-old killed by a 20mm shell in her family's coffee garden — reconstructs the moment with forensic care and is the strongest writing on the site.

What's distinctive about Dad's voice

Reading the posts in sequence, several signatures appear:

• Parenthetical asides that ground the reader in lived reality. "(In Laos, that is the best guarantee that the vehicle is in good driving condition.)" These show up everywhere.
• Self-aware humor that humanizes the work.
• Naming people. Yai, Sunsamay, Kham, Om, Mr. Magnet. This is rare — most accounts of nonprofit work in faraway places dissolve into "the villagers." Dad writes about specific people with agency.
• Restraint around tragedy. When a child dies, the writing doesn't reach for emotional language. It reconstructs what happened, names the people, and lets the moment carry its own weight.
• Biblical echoes. "Swords into plowshares." The cadence of someone who taught for thirty years and read carefully.

The pieces that anchor the new site

Seven pieces in particular get featured prominently in the rebuild — the strongest writing, the most affecting moments, the work that captures the mission:

1. "Twelve-year-old dies in the family garden" — Sunsamay's story (February 2015)
2. "Diary, Week One" — start of the 40-post Project Phongsali series (February 2010)
3. "Attack of the Ants" — the curious-newcomer voice in its first form (April 2006)
4. "Mr. Magnet was a rarity" — portrait of a self-trained village bomb expert (March 2016)
5. "I get bit by a scorpion and need help fast" — early Dad, with a wedding ring problem (August 2007)
6. "Half of our annual budget is funded by selling Lao coffee" — the coffee model in his own words (October 2021)
7. The Cultural Artifact Collection — the 278-image gallery

II. What hasn't been working

Honest observations from looking at the old site fresh in 2026:

• The security warning. The SSL certificate expired November 2, 2022. Every visitor for three-and-a-half years has been seeing "your connection is not private" before they ever read a word. This silently suppresses donations.
• The donate button is from 2010. A single PayPal redirect with no suggested amounts, no monthly option, and no automatic receipts beyond what PayPal sends. Today's donors expect "give monthly," tiered amounts ($50 / $100 / $250), and a tax receipt by morning.
• The coffee isn't really sold. It's described in posts but there's no dedicated page, no add-to-cart, no shipping option. Customers email and prices get quoted manually. Coffee funds half the annual budget — the site doesn't reflect that importance.
• "How You Can Help" doesn't mention coffee. It lists the projects donations support but not the way most readers can actually help.
• The artifact gallery deserves a museum interface. All 278 images live in a gallery plugin from 2012. They're powerful enough to anchor the entire site — they should look it.
• The site is locked at 800 pixels wide. It's not readable on a phone. That was fine in 2009; in 2026 most visitors arrive on mobile and bounce immediately.
• The underlying software is twelve years old. The site runs WordPress 3.9 from April 2014 on PHP 5.6 (a programming language version that was officially retired in 2018). GoDaddy charges an extra $2.99/month just to keep PHP 5.6 alive past its end-of-life.

III. What's being built

The new site preserves every essay, every photograph, the entire artifact collection, the mission language, the board roster, and the mailing address — all of it, intact. What changes is the surface around the content. Specifically:

• A modern reading experience. Long-form essays render with proper typography, generous margins, and a measure that reads well on phones, tablets, laptops, anything. Photographs breathe. Captions sit in italic.
• A donation flow that doesn't fight donors. Suggested amounts, monthly recurring option, donor-covers-fees toggle, automatic tax receipts emailed within minutes. Powered by Donorbox, which is built specifically for nonprofits.
• A coffee page that lets people actually buy coffee. Naga Blend, Elephant Blend, and the combo pack as distinct products with one-click checkout. Stripe handles the payment, shipping calculation, and order email to Dad.
• A museum-grade gallery. The 278 cultural artifact photographs get a clean grid layout with the dignity they deserve. Click any thumbnail to see the full-resolution image.
• Mobile-friendly everything. The new site reflows cleanly for phones, tablets, and laptops. (Try resizing the window if you're on a computer — the layout adapts.)
• Faster. The new site is roughly ten times faster to load than the old WordPress install. Pages render almost instantly.
• Secure by default. Automatic HTTPS — no more "connection is not private" warning, ever. Re-issued automatically every 90 days at no cost.
• The same voice, the same archive. Dad's writing is the soul of the site. The redesign steps out of its way.

You can click around any of this right now. The menu at the top has Stories (all 325 essays, browsable by year), Galleries (the artifact collection and the donations-at-work photographs), Jim's Story (a long-form chapter-divided piece about Dad's two lives, Wisconsin and Laos, told largely in his own words), Mission, Coffee, and Donate.

IV. The hosting transition

Two separate things to think about: where the site runs, and who owns the name. They're different services and they get handled differently.

Where the site runs (this we change)

Today the site runs on a GoDaddy "Web Hosting Deluxe" plan in Andrew's account. This is the part that has been costing money every month for seventeen years and that recently developed the SSL problem and the 12-year-old PHP problem.

The new site will run on Cloudflare Pages, which is free for sites of this size, gives the site automatic HTTPS forever, and loads fast all over the world (Cloudflare has data centers everywhere). This is where the site you're looking at right now will live publicly.

Who owns the name (this stays where it is)

The domain name wehelpwarvictims.org is registered in Dad's GoDaddy account, separate from the hosting. That doesn't have to change. It costs around $15–20 a year and stays where it is.

The cutover

When everyone is ready to go live, there is one small change Dad needs to make in his GoDaddy account: updating the DNS records (the addressing rules that point the name wehelpwarvictims.org at the new home). It's three lines in a settings panel and takes about five minutes. Andrew can be on the phone or video for it.

The old site stays up for thirty days after that, untouched, as a safety net. Once everyone is comfortable, the old GoDaddy hosting plan gets cancelled.

V. The cost picture

The old setup has three recurring costs. The new setup has one. The savings work out to about $150–$200 a year, every year, going forward.

Plus eliminating the security warning that's been suppressing donations for three and a half years, and removing the malware risk that comes with running a 17-year-old WordPress install on an obsolete version of PHP.

VI. What's next

This page exists so we can all look at the new site together. The plan from here is roughly:

1. Now. You're reading this. Click around the rest of the site (use the menu at the top), tell Andrew what's working, what's missing, what should change. Anything is fixable.
2. Soon. When Dad and Mom are comfortable, Dad and Andrew get on the phone for ten minutes to set up two accounts that need to live in the nonprofit's name: a Donorbox account (to take donations with proper receipts) and a Stripe account (to take coffee orders with shipping). Both are free. The Donorbox account requires the nonprofit's EIN (26-1918222); the Stripe account requires the same plus a bank routing number for deposits.
3. Cutover day. Five minutes in Dad's GoDaddy account to update the domain settings. The new site goes live at wehelpwarvictims.org. Old site stays up for thirty days as a backup.
4. Thirty days later. Cancel the old GoDaddy hosting plan. Savings begin. The new site continues running for free, forever.