We arrived in Cambodia over a week ago after 7 very long days of travel from Bolivia. We made stops in Peru, Miami, Atlanta and South Korea before landing in Penom Penh late on Saturday, January 6th!
So far, Cambodia is everything I could have imagined it to be and so much more. Everyday life here is so simply. We are living in a small village roughly two hours from the border of Thailand and every day I learn something new about what it means to live without the comforts of home and it’s more beautiful with each revelation.
Here is a quick outline:
Each morning, I wake up around 6:00am to take a shower; I fill up a bucket of water and use a scoop to pour the water over my head. Our bathrooms are outhouse like rooms with toilets that are not much more than a hole in the ground that you squat over.
Meals are exceptionally great in Cambodia! We gather on a porch around small children’s desks (that we also use for teaching) that create a table and we eat many different types of Asian dishes! For breakfast, we have bread with sweetened condensed milk and very small bananas off of a tree in the yard. Lunch and dinner usually consist of rice, some kind of vegetable and mea and sometimes we have soup where you can find the occasional chicken foot or heart!
Each day, we spend our mornings walking the dirt roads of the village greeting people and sharing the gospel. People are more than welcoming as they invite us into their homes but many of them have never even heard the name of Jesus. We spend hours introducing people to our Papa and praying over them. As a result, we have also been invited to ceremonies of worship to Buddhist gods and have had many conversations of life in refugee camps and their memories of genocide in their youth.
Though we are staying in a church, we set up our tents inside because of the creatures that have made this building their home. We share a space with many fire ants, crickets, geckos, grasshoppers, beetles and my personal favorite, two large mice who often find themselves in and around our stuff!
It is sometimes unbearably hot and humid here and we often sweat through our clothes before noon and we find ourselves doing laundry more frequently than normal! To wash our clothes, we fill up a bucket of powdered detergent and water we pump from a ground well out back. We soak and scrub our clothes by hand and hang them to dry on a line.
In the afternoon we teach English to the village children on our porch. We practice the ABCs, numbers, common English phrases, bible stories and we play pictionary! On our off time we play with the village kids as they gather flowers to put in our hair and we dance in a sea of laughter.
So far, this month has offered a long list of physical challenges and is absent of many comforts such as western toilets, warm showers, washing machines, kitchen tables, air conditioning and clean feet, but I love the simplicity of this life.
~God is doing HUGE things in Cambodia and I need your help to keep me on the field! I am short $3,400 and need to raise that money by the end of this month!! If you would like to join my journey, you can donate on the top of my page! ANY amount helps!
Thanks for all the love and support thus far, it has been a crazy and wild ride and I can’t wait for what the next 7 months have in store for us!
All my love,
R
