Since my last blog post, a lot has happened, the biggest of which being I’M BACK IN AMERICA! I arrived in Los Angeles on the morning of May 29th, and have been galavanting around the Southwest since then. I have lots of things to share from the two weeks I’ve been home. God has made some incredible things happen! But first, I feel like its important for me to share about the end of my race.
Team Eat Pray Love girls on our final regular day of ministry
After my last blog post, I spent one more week in the village. It was honestly a really hard week due to things like power outages. We had a lot of those, which meant we had zero relief from the incredibly hot weather. My time in the Cambodian village is the hottest I’ve ever been before. We had one night with no electricity, and, unsurprisingly, none of us really slept much that night.
Mealtime in the village
However, along with the hard parts came some really fun things. We went swamp jumping a couple of times, watched the sunset, watched Monsters Inc with our little friend who we called Boo (she even says “Mike Wazowski!”) and just made the best out of our last week of ministry. My team was amazing and we had a lot of fun times together, just doing the best we could in the middle of nowhere.
Team Eat Pray Love with our favorite little girl, Boo
After our final week in the village, we spent our weekend in Phnom Penh before taking a bus to Siem Reap, our final city for the World Race. We got to participate in an amazing program that Adventures is starting called Unsung Heroes. Basically, our task was to find a new contact for the World Race. After a crazy series of events involving a chance meeting in Malaysia with a woman I met in Thailand, we were connected with a couple that ministers and disciples to young adults in Siem Reap. We were to spend our two extra days in the city partnering with this organization and seeing what it would look like for future teams to work with them.
Balloons in our Cambodian village.
After a great meeting the first afternoon, we were asked by a brand new believer (he had accepted Christ about 15 minutes before we met him) if we would come to his village the next day to share the Gospel. So off we went! We brought out balloons for the kids and bread for everyone to eat. I played my guitar and everyone else shared the Gospel and parts of their own testimonies. This was a village that had never heard about Jesus before, and we got to spend our last day of World Race ministry sharing Him with them. It was a pretty incredible way to end eleven months of ministry!
3 am worship in a hotel room during the burn
We then entered our final week of the World Race: final debrief! Our squad coaches Deon and Rynette flew out for the last time to spend one final week with us. We started off the week with a 24 hour worship burn. It was a pretty incredible way to start of the week. I was asked to pray about if I should play guitar for part of it, and God told me to play from 3-4 am that night (morning?). So I stayed up real late and had the honor of spending a precious hour worshipping with my dear friends Carmen, Ashley and Bryan.
Receiving a prophetic blessing from Deon and Rynette
Throughout the rest of final debrief, we had quite a few amazing worship sessions. Deon shared some different messages with us that were wonderful. We had lots of time to just spend with each other which was fantastic. We also got to visit the historic site of Angkor Wat, an ancient Buddhist and Hindu temple, also a filming location for the movie Tomb Raider. We did a flash mob in the middle of Pub Street, the most popular tourist street in Siem Reap. That was a blast! Basically, we had an incredible final week together as a squad.
Some of our group in front of Angkor Wat
Our final travel day involved a 4 hour flight from Siem Reap to Seoul, South Korea. We had a 9 hour layover there, so of course I went through immigration and bought McDonalds breakfast. haha Then we had an 11 hour flight to Los Angeles, where I was greeted by my big sister Jen. I spent my first day in America doing a tour of Hollywood with my squadmates Lizzie, Susan and Chuck.
H Squad flash mob on Pub Street in Siem Reap!
That should catch you up to my return to America! In my next blog, I’ll update you on what the last two weeks has looked like.
Our final squad picture
To everyone who has supported me in the last year and a half, through prayer, words of encouragement, financial donation, help with fundraising, a smile, a blog comment, whatever, I want to sincerely thank you. There were moments this year that your encouragement was what kept me going. I honestly could not have finished eleven months off without an incredible support team back in America. THANK YOU!
