We have finally made it to ASIA!
If you know me at all you know how stoked I am to finally be here! For our first month we are near Poipet, Cambodia working with LightBridge International and Landmine Designs.
LightBridge International is an organization that works to empower and disciple children in villages as well as help with community development such as clean water and teaching adults and children the importance of washing their hands.
Landmine Designs provides women in villages around Poipet with a job through making paper beads and jewelry that are sold on their website landminedesigns.org. These jobs allow these women to work from home instead of traveling two hours by foot to Thailand to work in the rice fields for ten or more hours to then walk to hours home and only make around $6 a day.
What this looks like for us is that we spend many days a week visiting schools as well as working with children at the team center (aka our home for the month) teaching english and building relationships with them. Due to a HUGE language barrier we many times build relationships best through playing games.
We also spend a lot of time with our host to visit the women at LMD and help hand out their new assignments for jewelry making, pray for them, and through this time there is also worship and a devotion provided by our host or other women that work with him. We, as a team, love that their main focus is not on the jewelry, but seeing these women come to know and truly love Christ.
This month has come with its challenges. I got possible food poisoning or something of the sort recently, and have been slowly recovering from that. It is also EXTREMELY hot here. (Think like Waco, Texas at the most humid and hot time of the year.) We do not have air conditioning, but we do have lots of fans which are a blessing beyond words and are slowly getting use to the heat (most of the time.)
BUT even with all of the challenges that have come we are in LOVE with the people here and the students we work with. Each day is new and different and exciting and we are seeing how the Lord is wanting to work in mighty ways here. I can’t wait to see what the rest of this month, as well as the rest of Asia, has to bring!
