Hey! Guess what? I made to Cambodia!… Alive! After traveling for 48 hours, skipping a day (we never actually had Thursday the 6th), seeing Seoul, South Korea on a layover, eating a hot dog covered in fried hash browns on a stick (it was good!), and getting to our hostel/hotel at 1am, we made it to Cambodia!
Once we got into Cambodia, we crammed 27 of us, plus backpacks, into a van, then headed to the hostel that we would be staying at for the night. The next morning, we were picked up by our ministry host to head to our first site. This month, we are working and living at a school in rural Cambodia that teaches English. The school is run by Christians who have the goal of spreading the Gospel through the English they teach. All of the teachers are from Cambodia and speak English at least well enough to get by in basic conversations.
The school has roughly 200 students from the surrounding community. They are 4 to 14 years old. The children pile off the vans that pick them up and come up to us, bow slightly with hands together and say, “Good morning teacher,” in their accented English. At first, they would only wave to us or just stare. My team has joked that it feels like the scene from the movie Madagascar where the penguins say, “Smile and wave, boys. Just smile and wave,” because that is what we did for the first few days and still do at some level. Most of them now come up and say hello and do their best to ask every question they have learned in their classes. High fives and fist bumps are also a hit we have learned. (Pun intended!)
The school is a small compound that has two main buildings and a shelter that houses a swing set with a slide and merry-go-round that get lots of use. The Carolina blue buildings and shelter surround a patio that looks out over a large river. One building has the office, a very small library, and one more room. We sleep in the library and the extra room. Between the other building and a few rooms attached to the main building, there are seven classrooms that fit between fifteen and 20 students each. They are very small. The students are crammed in, but the teachers love teaching, and the students love learning, so it works out well.
Our main jobs while here are to teach English while the teachers translate and to communicate the Gospel during breaks. Both of these have been a struggle because of the language barrier, but we have already made some breakthroughs with both of these things. The day that I am writing this (we don’t have internet access, so this is posted after the fact), we got to share the Gospel with the whole school through a translator. It was a really cool experience. No one came running to the front to be saved, but a lot of kids were soaking up every bit of what we said. I can’t wait to see what God has in store for next week.
There have been a few adjustments since I got here that have been interesting. The first is the pit toilets. ‘Nuf said. Another is the fact that we cannot drink the tap water here. Everything we drink must come from a bottle. This is even true for the locals. It is a habit adjustment that has been a little hard. The other adjustment has been the weather. It is the rainy season here, so it pours every day. The evening that I am writing this, we had our largest storm yet. The building we are in is a nice building with very clean tile floors and doors, but it flooded tonight. We laughed as we grabbed any dirty laundry we could find to mop up and block the water. It was a fun Friday night activity! The rainy season also means it is HOT. Even the locals are complaining that it is very cold and then very hot in the afternoons. We are all dripping in the open air classrooms by the time class is over.
It has overall been a lot smoother transition than I thought it was going to be. We have an amazing lady, Chantal, who cooks and translates for us. We are watching Tangled with her and her 2 ½-year-old daughter for the first time right now. She is a HUGE blessing to us and has made this transition so much easier. We have often prayed for the other teams wishing for them to have as much comfort as we do.
Overall, Cambodia is an adjustment, but not a bad one. We are getting to share the Gospel, pour into the locals, and pour into each other. Oh, and it’s only week one!
Here is to week one! Let’s continue!
