“Oh, so you’ll actually have to cook for yourselves this month – our cook here left after the recent flood when the kitchen fell into the river.”
And so began Month 7 in Cambodia.
Coming out of an encouraging and inspiring debrief in Bangkok last week, my team entered into our next month on the Race, determined to push through the upcoming challenges of the World Race with vigor. We knew Cambodia was typically a country that challenged the comforts of most Racers, so we set our minds on the fact that this would be a good month no matter what happens.
My team took the long way to our ministry site. Our squad left Bangkok in the early morning, and made our way on one big bus to each team’s various ministry sites in Cambodia. Our team had the last stop, as our ministry site was the farthest away – a village in Kandal, just outside Phnom Penh (Cambodia’s capital city). When we arrived, it was past dark, and we had clocked in our travel time for the day at almost twenty hours. Exhausted but exhilarated, we were ready to see our new home for the month, especially knowing that we would finally get lay down and sleep.
When we arrived in Phnom Penh, our host met us on the street with one large truck. “Welcome to Cambodia”, he said, introducing us to his ministry partner who would be taking us to our ministry site. As we hopped into the truck with our bags, we saw our host peek into the truck saying “I will see you in a couple of days!” before walking back to his car to drive away. This was the first surprise that registered with us as we drove out of the city into the darkness.
After traveling for about thirty minutes, we arrived at our new ministry home – an International School in the middle of a village. It was dark, and from the initial looks of it, I wondered if anyone actually lived around where we were. Our host showed us to our rooms – the principal’s office for the girls, and the library for the boys. We would be sleeping on the floor with our sleeping pads this month, which would be a first for me as my last six ministries provided us with beds. Outside and around the corner was a bathroom with three dirty “squatty potties” and one shower head beside a row of urinals. We set our bags down, unrolled our mattresses, turned the overhead fans on to cool down the room, closed the windows to keep the flying beetles out, and laid down to sleep.
We probably didn’t say it, but most of us thought it.
“Well, now this feels like the World Race.”
I was pretty hungry that night, seeing as I had only really eaten a couple of bags of chips while on the bus the day before. So the next morning, my team was eagerly awaiting the home-cooked meals we had been told would be provided for us this month. And sure enough, we walked out to see bananas, coffee, and donuts for us to consume. But, after breakfast, I went outside to get a better look at our new home in the daylight, and was surprised to find that most of the school was under construction. Because of the recent floods, significant chunks of the school were in need of repair. Walking around the buildings, I realized that our bedrooms were actually dangerously close to breaking off and falling into a ditch. And it was when I came back inside that I received the news that our kitchen had indeed fallen into the river, and we would be cooking the rest of our meals using one small gas burner and a few pots and pans.
Exhausted from the day before, with an early rise and long travels, my team was assuming our first day of ministry would be a rest day to adjust to our new location. But classes at our new school ministry started at 7:30am. And we were expected to be teaching.
So, in our first 12 hours, a couple of surprises had come up – but it wasn’t anything too dramatic that our team couldn’t handle! After all, this is the World Race, right?? We’re basically prepared to live on the side of the road if we had to!
I guess I thought that. But then Month 7 happened. Where the depths of disillusionment, fatigue, and homesickness all came crashing into each other like a major pileup on a freeway.
When we began our ministry that Monday morning, I heard the Lord speak to me. Most months on the Race, He gives me a theme to dwell on for the time I’m in each ministry. This month, I heard it loud and clear.
“Joy.”
“I can choose joy,” I thought, “even if it’s hard, I can still choose joy. I’ve been expecting this kind of month to happen, so I’m ready for it.” Our team quickly found a nearby market, bought some really basic grocery items for our meals, and began to teach classes. But as the first day progressed, and my clothes started to cling tightly to me from the hot Cambodian sun, I felt my spirits start to deflate. Classes soon ended, and my teammate Julia and I were assigned to cook the team meal. As we dug through the outside shed for pots and pans, cut vegetables to cook on our one little gas burner, and put some rice in the rice cooker, I felt myself growing anxious. I couldn’t figure out why, but by the time the sun had gone down and I was cooking vegetables under the light of my iPhone, I felt my chest get tight and my stomach churn. And then it hit me.
“I don’t want to be here.”
I didn’t know if I heard it or said it internally. But I felt it. And suddenly, it was like everything in me wanted to escape.
We sat down to dinner in our hot little teacher’s lounge, and I asked the Holy Spirit for peace despite what I was feeling. But as I tried to eat, I couldn’t find myself want to take the next bite as the nausea persisted. Regardless, I attempted to shake it off and stay positive. After all, these feelings of negativity were not getting me any closer to leaving. And my team was still staying remarkably positive and chipper, so I figured I needed to as well.
The next day, as we were playing with our students at recess, the dusty air began to kick up and some got caught in my left eye. After class, I tried to clean my contact and wash out my eye with eye drops, but nothing seemed to make it feel better. It started hurting more and more as the night progressed, though I hoped it was just a small issue that would be resolved as I slept. But when I woke up the next morning, my eye barely able to stay open, I realized that it was infected.
I went to the doctor that morning, got a couple of disinfectant eye drops, and came home. My eye began to feel a little better throughout the day, but it still made it hard to teach that afternoon because I couldn’t wear my contacts, and therefore couldn’t really see. But still, I decided to persist in staying joyful, knowing that God wanted me to be so despite the enemy’s attacks attempts to take me down.
Late that afternoon, a thunderstorm rolled in. It was dark, and the rain started coming down in torrents. Julia and I moved our cooking table under the awning and prepared our usual team dinner in what had now become a fluid routine. As the sun went down and the rain continued to pour, I felt the anxiety start to set in once again. “What is going on with me?” I wondered. I didn’t know what was so hard about this. It had now been three days in our new home in Cambodia, and I already felt like this was starting to feel normal. But still, as we sat down to dinner, my anxiety took over and I could only eat a couple of bites of my rice and vegetables before pushing my plate away. The hot and humid teacher’s lounge was starting to feel stifling, so I stepped outside.
And then, just like the rain that was crashing down around me, I stood in the dark and let the weight of everything I was trying to ignore come crashing down.
I was tired of this life. I didn’t want to do a month of cooking in the dark and eating the same meal every day. I didn’t want to do another month of sweating through every shirt I own and constantly being attacked by bugs. I didn’t want to live in a rural village, or walk through mud to get to the bathroom, or feel penned into this tiny village with no idea how to communicate. I was tired of the World Race.
But I hated that I feeling all of this when I knew that I signed up for the Race wanting this kind of lifestyle. I hated that my teammates were able to say they loved some of the things that I couldn’t stand. I hated that I thought I was adaptable and didn’t care about having all the comforts I’m used to at home.
And why was I really going through all of this? What purpose was it all serving? I didn’t feel very passionate about this ministry or this lifestyle anymore, so why was I really here?
And so, in the dark, in the middle of a thunderstorm, I had my first World Race breakdown.
I told the Lord I was tired. I told Him that I just didn’t want to be here anymore. I told Him that I so wished I could just quit here.
But yet, I also knew I couldn’t quit. As much as I wanted to, I knew that I couldn’t just give up this easily. And so, I felt trapped. Four months more of these kinds of conditions sounded IMPOSSIBLE. I couldn’t believe I signed up for this thing.
So, I gave up. I told the Lord I couldn’t do this month without Him. That I needed peace. That I needed Him.
And through all the struggles I’ve gone through this past week, the Holy Spirit kept bringing one verse to mind over and over from James 1:
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4)
In the midst of my trials, God has been telling me that I can consider them pure joy. Why? Because there’s a greater purpose in our trials. Through enduring a Race as rigorous and bumpy as this one, the Lord is telling me to keep going, because by the end of this I will have learned how to persevere. And learning how to persevere is something that He is going to use in me countlessly for the rest of my life. So, even if I want to escape my present circumstances, I can take joy in the fact that I know that God has a greater purpose for it all!
God has given me a new perspective from this week. As I’m writing this, I’m still struggling against my battle to stay present, to love the person in front of me, and to stay positive when my situation sucks. But I know that there’s a reason God made this journey 11 months and not 6. He’s got SO much more ahead than there was behind. And typically, right where I start to feel the burn, that’s where the stretching begins.
Oh, and speaking of joy – can I talk about my students for a moment?
The children here in Cambodia are THE most joy-filled humans I’ve ever met. From the moment they showed up at our school, I saw them beaming at my team, waving and yelling “hello” incessantly. Even walking down the street to the market, children come running out of nowhere just to greet us. Wherever we go, there are kids with the widest grins trying to find ways to connect with us (sometimes to the point of them finding our hiding spaces when we’re trying to escape them…). Each class we teach, the children are all giggles, ready to learn and play and laugh with us. Each and every child has a love for life and a love for fun, and their explosive joy has overflowed onto us.
It’s interesting to see these children with so much joy. I learned later this week that many of these children come from very poor homes, where the families often have very little to support their large families. A lot of these children are also being raised in broken homes, where their parents are drinking and sleeping around, or their father abandoned the family, or the children are being pushed aside to the schools so that the parents can gamble and spend their money on their own things. And coming from a nation that endured such a tragic event as the mass genocide that happened a couple of decades ago in the Killing Fields, these people should be carrying a lot of grief. It’s a wonder that children with so many weights of the world on their shoulders can find so much joy, even more so than the one missionary from America who has an emotional breakdown because of the heat.
These children are teaching me how to find joy every day. Even though they have reason to be sad, or discouraged, or hopeless, they choose to play and to laugh and to connect and to see the beauty in simple things. They are teaching me that joy is not something that happens to you, but something that you can find, embrace, and wear proudly.
My hope is that this month, I don’t look at the things that make life hard. I hope that I find comfort in the simple blessings, like random food gifts from the teachers (they gave us a small container of Nutella yesterday and I almost started weeping). I hope that I find humor in the moments where we wake up to weird bugs in our bedroom – especially when there’s crabs from who-knows-where who are crawling on your back (shoutout to that day when THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED). I hope that I find joy in the simple moments of connection with these darling kids. I hope that I find Jesus in the hardship, knowing that there is joy in the process of growing perseverance.
Cambodia might be a tough month. It might get hotter, or dirtier, or I might have more encounters with bugs than I can currently imagine. But at the end of it, I hope I come out smiling.
“…And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. For the joy set before Him He endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:1-2
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Check out picture highlights from our first week here in Kandal, Cambodia!
