Leaving Thailand and heading into month 9 in Cambodia, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Was the culture going to be similar, would teaching English look the same? What food would I be eating? Would there be evidence of the brutality the country faced nearly 40 years ago?
I knew very little about what the month was going to look like. To my surprise almost everything about it was different.
I was on a brand new team with Becca, Hamilton, Cindy, Rose, Hannah, Christian and our Squad leader, Jill. The new team turned out to be one of the best parts of the month. Something about our personalities just seemed to mesh. We connected instantly and everybody felt like they could be themselves.
The food we were served everyday was some variation of rice or noodles, pineapple, green vegetables, eggs, and some type of meat that I never are. The food was good but to eat the same thing everyday started making me sick. So buying crackers for $.75 across the street became essential.
I lived at the ministry site with my team. I would wake up at 7am to use grab some breakfast and to my shocking bed headed surprised, some students from my 8am class would be sitting at the tables right outside my bedroom door waiting for Miss Becca and I. So there was never the feeling of getting a break from ministry. It was 24/7.
It was 100+ degrees everyday with little to no wind and no rain. It got so hot my teammate, Cindy, and I decided to buy a $12 fan to get some sort of breeze. During the hottest hours of the day I would just sit with a bag of ice on my head in front of the fan. The heat particularly took a tool on me when I was sick with a bacterial infection. My body was unable to fight the infection in the heat.
The culture of Cambodia (and possibly all of south east Asia?) is to not directly confront somebody when you have a problem with them. So my team and I went the whole month offending our contact without knowing it. This was particularly frustrating because we sat down with our contact and asked specifically what we could be doing better and if we were doing anything wrong. They gave some suggestions but did give much constructive feedback.
One thing the contact said at the end of the month, after we had left, was that we did not respect the community… This was a total bummer to hear after I connected so deeply with a specific family in the community. Getting to know this family became the highlight of my entire month.
I’ll explain why the relationship I built was so meaningful below.
Everyday my teammate, Rose, and I along with other teammates would take a 5-10 minute walk to a neighbors house to visit a very sick mother. She had some infection or cancer (we were told multiple diagnoses) in her liver that caused her whole stomach to swell to the point where she looked 9 months pregnant. Her stomach was so swollen she had to lie on her side in order to breath. Her legs were also very swollen but her arms and face where just skin and bones. I had never seen anyone in such poor health conditions before. The family was also very poor and by the time they realized how sick she was it was too late to have surgery.
Rose and I would visit her everyday and sing songs and pray for her and her family. Eventually we met her daughter who visits once or twice a month. The daughter spends most of her time working two jobs to support her two young sons, and her mother. She told her father not to work and just to care for mom. On a good week the daughter makes $20.
One day Rose and I pulled some cash together to help buy pain medication and vitamins for the mother for a week (which only cost $5 a day!).
While the daughter was there she translated for us as we prayed and sang songs. After we prayed the mother said she felt peace when ever we would pray. She also expressed she no longer had a fear of dying. The daughter couldn’t stop smiling at the hope her mother now had.
Rose and I quickly became attached to the family and made friends with the sweet grandma who would speak to us in Khmer and just laugh when we spoke in English. Grandma would also always give us a kiss on the cheek when we would leave.
The final week of March came. Rose and I again went to go visit Mom and Grandma.
When we arrived and sat next to Mom we could tell her condition had worsened. The side of her face she was lying on had become swollen and she could barely open her eyes. Her breath was very shallow and she kept faintly calling out to Grandma or her husband and saying “it’s hard to breath, it’s hard to breath.” It was scary. Rose and I continued to sing and pray and eventually handed Mom a painting that our teammate, Hamilton, made. We told her it was to look at and be reminded that we love her and God loves her.
The next morning Rose and I received news that Mom had passed away in the night. I felt horrible and sick to my stomach. This woman who I prayed healing over everyday just died. I really had believed God was going to heal her. I reminded my self that God’s plans are greater and more complex than my plans.
I went with some teammates to the funeral and cremation ceremony later in the day. My whole team was such a large part of this family that Christian and Hamilton were even asked to carry the casket.
After visiting the daughter in hopes to comfort her, I sat and had a conversation with the husband. He was so sweet and told me “my wife would always look forward to the team coming. She would say, ‘make sure you clean up, the team is coming soon.'” It was then I had the thought of perhaps Rose and I came here daily so this woman wouldn’t be lonely at the end of her life, so she could receive peace through our prayers before passing on. Maybe the entire reason I came to Cambodia was to visit this woman.
What ever the reason God placed me in Cambodia in the tiny village of Kampot, my heart experienced something powerful.
So despite the misunderstandings my team had with the contact and other difficult things, I had one of the greatest experiences of my life mixed in with the hardest months of my life.
