I’m sitting here, in an empty airport, at 3:30 in the morning, looking back at the month I just had and wondering how I got so lucky. God has truly blessed me this month with trials that have grown me as a person, friend, and leader.
At the beginning of the month, my squad went through team changes. This means that my previous team and I were split up and we each got 5 new sisters to learn and grow from. I also was promoted to a team leader position! I get the privilege of serving the woman on my new team and loving them in the individual ways God calls me to love them.
Throughout the month, my new team and I worked together to teach English in a village about an hour outside of Siem Reap. Every day we piled into two tuctucs (small carriages pulled behind motorcycles) and drove down miles of dirt road to reach our students.
We started our mornings off with quiet time, team time, and lesson planning for the day. Our ministry days usually started at 2:00 p.m. and lasted until roughly 7:00 p.m. Once we made it to our ministry site in the village, we began children’s ministry. This looked a little different each day depending on what we wanted to do. Some days, we would play games such as red light, green light (their favorite) limbo, and freeze dance. Other days, we taught life lessons such as how to set boundaries and personal hygiene. Our favorite lessons, however, were those about creation, fall, and redemption. As a team, we were able to lead 15 young kids to Christ using a simple visual lesson about the cross!!
After children’s ministry, we would teach four separate age groups English lessons that we prepared earlier in the day. Our ages ranged from 4 – 21 so we had to split up who taught what. The younger kids were taught how to pronounce the sounds of the alphabet and the differences between lower and upper case letters. The middle age group was taught simple sentence structure and how to properly use “a”, “an”, and “the”. The oldest group worked on the same lessons as the middle group but with bigger words and more explanation.
It was so fun to watch how much these kids learned in just two short weeks. It also taught us how little we actually know about our native language and that it is much harder to teach than most would imagine!
