Hey friends!
So we lived in Cambodia for a month! I’ve been busy living life in the real world with limited wifi, and it has been incredible, so I’m just getting around to posting for December.
In December, my team and I worked with a young Cambodian pastor named Thyvenn who loves Jesus more than anyone I’ve ever met and has such a heart for Cambodia. We taught English at his church every evening, and during the days we visited neighboring villages. At the villages, we played games, sang songs, did exercises, and taught Bible stories to the kids, while Thyvenn sang songs and ministered to the adults.
Thyvenn’s church, just outside of Phnom Penh, is only two years old. They have about 45 members, mostly young men. It was such a privilege to work with them and spend time hanging out with them this month. Most of the guys at the church are in their early twenties and are studying either IT or Community Development in technical school with the intention of attending either university or Bible School in the future. They are bright, hard workers, and they have such a desire to learn English and to learn the Bible so they can reach more and more people for Christ and work toward making Cambodia a better place.
I don’t know what you know of Cambodia, but I knew almost nothing about it before we came here. Cambodia is pretty war-torn. Throughout its history, different countries have been vying to take Cambodia’s land as their own, and in the 1970s they experienced a devastating civil war in which the Pol Pot Regime killed thousands of Khmer people – including many of the Cambodian intellectual and academic leaders of the time.
Since the fall of the Pol Pot Regime in 1979, Cambodia has been rebuilding. Rebuilding their population, rebuilding their infrastructure, and rebuilding their government. The UN sponsored democratic elections for Cambodia in the early nineties, but the government has remained corrupt and doesn’t take care of the people.
Cambodia has the most NGOs per capita than any other country in the world, and yet some of their biggest needs are not being met, and some of their greatest problems are not being solved. The government doesn’t fix the roads or provide anything for the people to make their day-to-day lives better.
And yet, there’s a tremendous sense of hope in Cambodia. The people here are tenacious, optimistic, forward-thinking, and tough. They are banding together, protesting the political leaders and the low-paying factory jobs. They know the government can do more to help the people, and the people are demanding that their needs be met.
Any time we took prayer requests at Thyvenn’s church and during our visits to the village, the young people always wanted to pray for Cambodia. They pray for the government, for the people, and that the nation would continue to grow and advance for the better.
I grew to love these people so much in such a short amount of time, and I would ask that you join with me in prayer for the people and the nation of Cambodia, that they would continue their march into the future with heads held high, striving to learn and grown, and advance their lives for the better.
