This month, Alyssa and I have been working at different ministry sites in Battambang, Cambodia! The month is called “Manistry” month, where the guys on our squad all get together to form a team and spend time living/serving together and calling each other higher into what it means to be men of God. It has been such a great month so far, and I love doing life with the guys on my squad. Alyssa’s ministry is in the same town, so we still get to see each other for dates during the week and on the weekends. I’ll get more into what her ministry has looked like later in this post. As for the guys, the ministry that we have been calling home this month is called Lighthouse.
Lighthouse aims to be a guiding tower of hope for Cambodians in and around Battambang, Cambodia. Lighthouse offers underprivileged and disadvantaged Cambodians a brighter future through individual support, personal assistance, and sustainable projects. The biggest key to being successful at this is to partner with and empower people. They operate under the thinking of, “treating the root of the problems rather than just the symptoms”. Therefore they try their best not to lead people into a dependency, but rather stay alongside them while they go through struggles and coach them to be self-sufficient. By teaching them life and other skills, they are cheering them on to keep going.
We got to Battambang at the best/worst time to kick off our month of ministry, right in the heart of Khmer New Year. This is like everyone’s birthday, Christmas and New Year’s all rolled into one. Because of this, all of the staff and students of Lighthouse, who we will be working with this month, were away celebrating with family and friends for a few days. This absence of official scheduled “ministry” at the start of our month provided the space for our newly formed band of brothers to grow closer to God and one another and establish some habits and rhythms to live out for the month. It also brought us into some impromptu ministry opportunities such as praying over the Lighthouse building, building fellowship through a home cooked Khmer meal with a family down the street, prayer walking around downtown Battambang with a YWAM team that we met here, and by simply sharing God’s love with those we meet around the city. And that’s just everything He has done before the students came back to town!
As for Alyssa, she has the unique opportunity to live and serve alongside 14 other women from our squad this month at Ezra Ministries. Ezra is an English school that uses the relationships they have with their students to share the Gospel with them. As of last week, they opened up a cafe called Ezra Library Cafe, in hopes of sustaining the salaries of their teachers. A few of the girls on Alyssa’s team have spent the past week helping them with getting the cafe up and running smoothly, and Alyssa has spent the past week putting on a Vacation Bible School program for the children in the community. Things here are really kicking off with a Battam-BANG!
