[At Angkor Wat]
Hey y'all. I know it has been a while since my last blog.
I'll try to catch everyone up on what's been going on this month, I usually don't like to do such long posts, but when it's one blog for the month I can't help it.
I cannot believe we are finishing month five of the Race, here in Cambodia.
Ministry Contact:
We are paired up with Rock Foundation Cambodia, located here in Phnom Penh. Brett is our ministry contact and founder of RFC, but we have spent most of the month with our new friend and translator ThyVenn (pronounced like Steven, without the S). For the first half of the month we had the opportunity to do our visits with Dom, ThyVenn's best friend who is currently in Phnom Phen Bible School.
Living Conditions:
This month Team Siloam is paired up with the Salt Shakers. We live in a small village next to ThyVenn's parents and maybe 30 minutes from the city. Fourteen of us are living in the bottom floor of a house that we rent out with three rooms filled with mosquito nets, sleeping pads, a few electric fans, and two tents inside. There are 2 or 3 tents outside as well, along with ThyVenn under a mosquito net. My tent's poles have snapped in two different places this month, which makes me reluctant to want to haul it around anymore.
Our new best friends this month, other than the electric fans, have been Venus and Serena. They are two tennis racket shaped bug zappers that we use to kill the hundreds of mosquitoes that rest on our packs during the heat of the day.
During the night there are all sorts of fun sounds here in Cambodia. They include geckos, bats, terrible sound systems blaring music, motobikes, barking dogs, cows, rooster, and the sound of mangoes plummeting to the ground. All have made for interesting nights of sleep.
Ministry Overview:
Our basic schedule is this:
Sunday- go to ThyVenn's church in the morning and give a sermon. After the service we have lunch at the church and teach an English lesson after wards.
Monday is our day off of ministry. This is usually when we would scour the city for internet that works. Most of the time, it's quite hard to find reliable wi-fi, especially when 14 World Racers are fighting for bandwidth for Skype and uploading photos and videos. I tend to work on photos before I blog, because I love to use the in my blogs.
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we visit a mix of three different villages. One is the area where we live in. The other two, we visit during the same day. The first is what we have called the flooded village and the second is the dump community. We teach a English class at the church in the evenings.
On Friday we visit the rock village, which is about an hour and a half away from where we live.
Saturday we may visit the surrounding village during the day and help lead a small prayer meeting at the church.
Focus:
This month has been all about relationship building coupled with follow up. It may be easy for us to think that we may be building relationships with people around the villages, but you can only get to know people on such a surface level over the course of a month, especially when it' not just one village we visit. But that doesn't negate the fact that we go in with the desire to meet people where they are in life and love them with the love of Christ.
What I love about this month is knowing that our relationship building is coupled with follow up. Sure you can tell people you love them and even share Christ with them, but if there is no follow up, then the reality is that in a few months, you will probably be forgotten. ThyVenn and Brett are highly dedicated to visiting people repeatedly and consistently, and through the pursuit of getting to know the people they visit can they really get to understanding the villagers and meeting their needs. Though our teams leave at the end of the month, the villages we visit are hopefully more encouraged by our partnership with the people who visit them regularly.
— The Villages, The Stories, The People —
Home Village
ThyVenn has many relationships formed around the village we live in. On our house visits we hang out with families and simply talk to them. It's difficult to try and have good conversation when there are fifteen or sixteen of us at a house, so usually a couple people talk with the family and the rest of us play with the kids. We have learned a couple new skills on home visits, including peeling morning glory for selling in the market and hacking open mango seeds for planting.
The story that sticks out the most from the home village is about a newly widowed woman. We passed by her house and a new of us noticed that her head was shaved, along with her sons. We asked Dom why her head was shaved, and he said it was a sign of mourning a loss, so we turned around and sat with her as she shared her grief with us.
She ended up inviting us to the funeral type service, seven days after her husband's death. So we showed up that morning and served a rice porridge.
Our team visited her another day and ThyVenn got to meet her (he was at a conference the day we met her and for the funeral). I wasn't feeling well the day the team visited her again, but hear that she really opened up with how she didn't know what she was going to do now that she lost her husband.
Though we may be leaving soon, ThyVenn and Dom are still here to continue building on this relationship that we helped form. They can follow up on her and see how she is doing and help meet some needs.
The Flooded Village
This village is located near the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, the site of one of the many killing fields here in Cambodia.
This village consists of maybe a dozen or so houses near a small creek near a bunch of rice fields. During the rainy season, the village homes get flooded and people used to pull their sleeping mats up to the road to sleep. Brett and ThyVenn's dad built them houses raised up off the ground so when the rainy season comes, the people have a dry shelter to live in. They are currently working on the last house to raise up off the ground.
There is a large group of women who have come to know Christ through the relationships ThyVenn and Brett have taken the time to invest in. On our visits here ThyVenn and a member of one of our teams shares something to encourage them. We have enjoyed spending time in this village and praying for them.
One little boy in particular has captured all our hearts. We think he has cerebral palsy. His legs are very frail and crossed. He is probably eight or nine years old and cannot really speak or even crawl around. Though he may not be able to play like the other kids, his smile will melt your heart and his laugh will lift your spirits.
This little boy stole our hearts as well.
The Dump
There's a community of about fifteen families that live near the dump, which is less than ten minutes from the flooded village. It is one of many dump communities and Brett found it one day while riding a dirt bike. He stopped in a decided to invest in the families and form relationships with them.
The people here pay $5 a month for rent here and live in shacks made with assorted pieces of trash. The walk to the garbage dump sometimes having to wade in dirty water just to get there. They then proceed to sort through the trash and collect whatever it is that they can possibly sell for money. One of the things we saw a woman doing was breaking apart old electronics chargers to find the tiniest coil of copper in each one. It must take hundreds and hundreds of these little coils to equal the kilogram that maybe sells for $5.
The people here work so hard, and live in unsanitary conditions just to get by. I don't know that they really know where the next meal comes from everyday.
We have played with the kids here. They still know how to have fun, even in the midst of poverty. They play with all sorts of broken stuff from the trash. One day we played makeshift skip-it with an old flip flop tied to a strip of old tape. Sometimes we kick around the half inflated ball or play catch with a ratty stuffed animal that would make any parent in the States cringe if they saw their child with it.
We got to see a newborn baby that was delivered in the dump community. The baby was delivered by a midwife for $12.
The Rock Village
This village is about 150 km from Phnom Phen and we had the opportunity to visit the community three times this month. Every Friday for over a year, Brett and his wife would visit this village and help prepare a meal for them. There are about 30 working adults there plus their children. Though this community may be just as poor as the dump village, some of the kids are privileged to go to school and the sanitation here is not as dangerous for their health.
The people here are squatters on government land. At any point, someone could come in and kick them out. Some of the people here have been chipping away at this quarry for over 16 years. Brett has greatly invested in the lives of the people here and helped to build them houses. Some of them were literally living underneath a tarp underneath some trees and had no walls to shelter them.
Their source of income here is to pound gravel by hand. They start by chipping away at the rock walls, harnessed by a single rope around the waist. The larger stones are smashed into rocks of varying sizes.
It takes about one week to pound enough stones into a desirable size to fill a truck bed. So thirty people work together to fill a truck bed with gravel, and all for about $25 for their week of collective labor. I don't even know how the community survives on that alone.
Brett and ThyVenn pour into these people lives and share to love of Christ through both words and action. They come back week after week to spend time with the community and share God's word with them. Some of the people have come to believe in Christ and even got baptized in the waters of the quarry.
Brett recently acquired some land with 100 mango trees that will need to be cared for before they start producing fruit. Brett is taking a married couple and their two children out of the quarry and to his property to care for the trees. They will have an income from taking care of the land and better living conditions there. Once the trees start producing fruit, the fruit can be sold and the land will start paying for itself.
Extras
We volnteered a few hours at a place a few houses where we live to help paint some windows. The organization is caled Yodifee and equips people with disabilities with trade skills such as making bags, repairing motorbikes, carving wood, playing music, and learning English.
During one of the Saturday prayer meetings, Ben led us all in a foot washing. It was an awesome symbol of serving one another, just as Christ demonstrated.
We not only washed the community's feet, but they in turn wanted to
serve us as well and wash our feet.
On one of our days off, a few of us decided to go to the wildlife preserve.
This picture sums it up.
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While there is still much to be said about Cambodia, I may have to leave it for another blog or two.
So much has happened, and we only have a few days left before we head off to Vietnam.
Stay Tuned
&
God Bless
