Cambodia is kind of magical. Seriously like take the first week I was here, the team and I were walking down to go see the Mekong river and on the way down through all the rice fields we were walking through were three small children holding hands running in front of us laughing with the wind blowing through their hair. Like movie type stuff, I remember laughing because it was just so picturesque.
Then there was the time I was walking down this little dirt path with a bunch of kids who showed me how to grab this certain plant break a piece off, open it up and then blow bubbles with it.
There have been cart rides on ponies through the village, picking mangos off trees to eat, sunsets down at the river, and lots of bicycle rides through rice fields, real simple, beautiful stuff that I would only picture in a national geographic or a movie.
The simplicity of Cambodia makes it so things are pretty black and white, not complicated. It’s easy to fall in love with Cambodia.
Cambodia breaks your heart. There is a community down the road that the church here raised money to build homes for. It’s a community of very poor church members that all live in these homes, pastor has named it Jesus Village. (so cute right haha). We were able to fix up one of these homes the other day for a Widow about to move in. We used Palm leaves for the walls, looks really cool, but as you can guess it requires some maintenance pretty regularly. They would love to build the homes with metal sidings but that cost $3 a side, which they can’t afford.
There’s been many times this past month when I’ve had to work through what it means to walk away from something you can’t fix or help or that has no solution and be ok with it. Walking out each time from the brick kiln and being ok, knowing that pastor needs more help to accomplish his vision for this community and being ok with not being able to stay and help more.
With a corrupt government and laws that don’t mean very much there are hardships here that we ourselves can’t help, or fix, of course. It is easy for your heart to break for Cambodia.
This is the part of being in Gods kingdom when all we can do is just be. There will be work being done after us by people who can do more, which is good, In a goodbye letter Pastor gave us he wrote in prefect broken English “this team make me joy”. (ahh I really wish you all could here his accent it’s the most adorable) What we could do this month is partner with what pastor was already doing and hopefully encourage and help him, and others enough that after we leave even more can get done.
Lots of love. Elaina
