This month our ministry was in Kampong Spoe, a village approximately an hour from Phnom Penh and the true definition of “boondocks.” It was definitely a roughing it month to say the least. I have to say however, I was expecting to find a little bamboo hut on stilts in the middle of rice fields as our home for the month, instead I found a little concrete house in the middle of empty rice fields (it was the dry season).
The house was completely empty of furniture, so we pulled out our sleeping mats and began to make a home of it. Some if the girls chose to set up their tents inside the house or outside, but I decided to go with a mosquito net, ya, it took more effort in the long run, but it’s probably one of the few times in my life I’ll ever sleep under one.
After we moved in we quickly found that we had roommates and promptly renamed the house “Ant City” because they got into EVERYTHING. And if it was only ants that would have been one thing, but then we found a nest of huge blue lizards living in our back room, and there was an annoying rat we named Templeton that lived in our rafters. The dang rat even went so far as to chew through the ropes holding Lauren and I’s mosquito nets up one night. I woke up at 4 am with the whole thing covering me like a burial shroud, so I pulled it off and just risked dengue filled mosquito bites.
While we were pretty content in our little house it was missing one necessity, a bathroom, so each time we he had to do our business we had to walk across the street to our contact Ra’s house/coffeehouse to use the squatty potty. And the shower? A concrete basin of water aka mosquito breeding ground and a bucket. I was just thankful to wash off the dirt from the dusty streets everyday.
We were blessed this month with not having to cook our own meals, our contact Ra’s wife would cook every meals for us. So promptly at 8am, noon and 5pm we would make our way over to the coffee shop and sit down to enjoy a meal. Breakfast was usually ramen stir fired with cabbage and eggs (so good!) and lunch/dinner could be any number of things partnered with rice and fruit.
(The coffee shop, typically filled with men, watching Khmer music videos on the TV’s)
The water in the village was of course unsafe to drink, so we got all of our drinking water from plastic containers, but one morning we had a wake up call as to how we can’t even always count on that water, because we found worms in it. Yuck.
After lunch everyday we would have our team debrief/feedback time. Because it was usually pushing 100 degrees we would sit under a tree outside so we could try to catch the breeze and soon we found ourselves with two team members, Baba Ganoush and Gloria, two young cows that act strangely more like dogs than bovines.
2pm is when our ministry officially started, teaching English to the village kids in the coffee shop. The first hour we would split up into two different classes based on ability and then the second hour we could combine the two and play games or review simple topics.
Our third hour was relational time or “one-on-one” time. Each of us would be teamed up with 1-3 kids and we could do anything we wanted. That “anything” would sometimes we going on a walk, drawing or playing cards, but it was usually swimming in the muddy rice bog just down the street.
After dinner we had a couple hours to rest and enjoy the amazing sunsets….
and then we would come back together for a Bible lesson at 7, it was easily the favorite time of the day for the kids and us. Despite the loud Cambodian soap operas or music videos blasting from the coffee shop the kids would listen intently and in the end of the month learned so much.
