My last week at our ministry in Cambodia has been a week to remember. We have gotten pretty good at coming up with ways to fill our free time: lots of long walks, climbing the same mountain four times (every time at a different time of day…so the sky would be different), card games, hand washing clothes, lap top movie nights, competitions to see how many times we could make a volleyball bounce (wasn’t in on that one but it was entertaining to watch), guitar lessons, lots of hammock swinging and book reading, cows having babies, pigs being slaughtered, late night talks, and star gazing.
OH THE STARS IN CAMBODIA… That is definitely what I will miss the most. They are so close and so bright. I feel like I can’t go to sleep while they’re still out…which has made me quite the night owl this month.
The last two days with the boys at teen challenge were definitely the highlight of my time with them. Bonnie and I went to teach our last English class but decided to take them swimming instead (there is this swimming hole across from the center they go to). The director came up and asked me if we really wanted to take them swimming (at least that’s what I think he asked) and I said yes. He said a bunch of other things I did not understand and the next thing I knew we were all piled in a van for a field trip. Surprise! We had no idea where we were going. They took us to a sweet bridge you can jump off of into the water. The guys were so excited. Bonnie and I were just going to take pictures and hang out (Everyone told us to be careful about getting in the water…..because well its brown and they don’t want us to get any infections). But it was a really high jump and they were making it look ridiculously fun so we caved and decided to take the risk and I’m so glad we did. It was even more fun than it looked! I loved getting to see them just hanging out. The communication barrier didn’t matter so much when we were just counting to three to jump, laughing, pushing each other off, and helping each other out. Their personalities were coming out more than ever. I wish we could have spent more time like that with them.
The next day Ryan and I went to do our last devotion with the boys. We have not had an interpreter for the last week so our teachings have been kind of rough. We decided to get creative and come up with a way to act out what we were teaching. We successfully got them all to participate in our illustration. It seemed like they were all really engaged and understood what we were trying to teach. So praise God for working through the language barrier!
I hope our time with them will be something they remember. Communicating was definitely a challenge for us but we did the best we could (I think we will learn to get more creative as we go). I was sad to say goodbye to them…they were a fun group. There is so much potential in all them, pray that God will help them work through their addictions and stay focused on Him. Their eagerness to learn amazes me…if they continue to channel that in the right direction they will do great things!
So our CamBOREDia adventure almost ended very smoothly…..until we decided to take a last day trip on the motor bikes to see a temple. We managed to decide on three people who could drive (or so we thought) and put two people on two of the bikes and three on the other (this is the one I was on). After careful instructions on how to drive and a few stall outs we were on the road. Not even two minutes into the trip it started raining. About five minutes into it, it started pouring. But being the world racers we are…. We were not going to let a little rain stop us. We turned onto the dirt road (which was a mud road at this point), hit a rock…started swerving… tried to turn the wheel… lost control…. had about three seconds to brace ourselves for what was about to happen… and we were down! Fortunately, we were all ok. I ended up with a muffler burn and some pretty intense bruising but other than that we were just a little shaken up. We got the bike up and found out by someone passing by that we weren’t allowed to tour the temple when it was raining (REALLY?). We were covered in mud pushing the bikes back down the dirt road in the rain, saying “Get us out of here!” It was kind of the last straw for everyone… but we managed to get the bikes off the dirt road and slowly ride them back to the tree house. And we even managed to laugh about all of it as we were packing our bags to leave.
