After a two-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with modern sky scrapers and six-story malls filled with high-end luxury name brand stores (stores that I couldn’t afford back home, let alone on the Race), I find myself in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Once we get through customs, we board a 6-hour bus ride to Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia.
As the humid air makes my sweaty shirt stick to my skin, I realized how blessed I have been the past 6 weeks or so to be countries at ministries that have air conditioning. But all those blessings also set me back a little bit to where I once again have to adjust to living in the heat for the next month. Cambodia is starting to enter its rainy season. It is hot in the mornings, and when it downpours in the afternoon almost every single day, and the ground floods. The rain cool down the heat from the day, but when the sun comes back out, it immediately warms back up again and humidity radiates up from the ground.
Once we arrived at our ministry site in Kampong Speu (about an hour and 20 minute tuk-tuk drive outside of Phnom Penh), we were greeted with a dozen or so little Cambodian children. They love to play on the bamboo platform outside of our little house. We are surrounded by rice fields and palm trees, cows, chickens, lizards, frogs, snakes, geckoes, pigs, a puppy and a kitten, a turtle (who lives in the basin of water we use to wash our dishes), and mosquitoes and flies galore. I am glad to be back in a rural village again! I love the slow, communal pace of the rural lifestyle in this Southeast Asian country.
Being here in Cambodia and seeing all the Cambodian children reminds me of a little girl that I used to know who was adopted from Cambodia.
Every week day we teach English to children, youth, and adults–anyone who comes to our contacts housean open air bamboo house with a palm branch roof. There are 4 families that live there with 20 people, one squatty potty, and several basins of water all around that collect rain waterused for bucket showers, washing clothes, doing dishes, etc. This open house also serves as the local YWAM facility with a few white boards in some places to create different classrooms. In the day we teach English (six 1-hour classes, and an hour for 1-on-1s), and at night we have a Bible study with the kids.
Some of the kids that come for class are Christian, but many are Buddhists. While having one-on-ones with the kids, I’ve been able to tell some about Jesus–some even for the first t
ime!
The first night we were here for Bible study, I told the story of Joseph. I didn’t just read it out of the Bible, but I told the whole story the way it used to be told in ancient times–as an oral tradition. With two little light bulbs hanging from the palm tree branch roof, bugs flying around the lights, and the breeze cooling off the sweat dripping off my brow, I tell the story of Joseph–these are the times that World Race memories are made of!
