Because of scheduling conflicts with our local contact, we haven’t been able to start teaching English at New Life Fellowship quite yet; we’ve found ourselves without any official ministry these last few days. Colleen and Danny from Team LESS (the September team that our team is partnered with this month) have formed a relationship with a tuk-tuk driver named Mao. On Sunday, he took their team around Phnom Penh, showing them all of the fun sites. He wanted to meet them again on Monday and told them that he would take them to a swimming pool.
On Monday, several of us heard of this promising grand adventure and decided to join in the fun. As we were walking out the door to meet Mao at the end of our street, I got word that swimming in Cambodia is done in a t-shirt and shorts; they are incredibly modest people. Awesome. I wasn’t going to let this spoil my fun, though.
Five of us climbed in the tuk-tuk and Mao began to sing his signature ditty involving quasi-understandable English. I’m not exactly sure what he was singing about, but it was evident that he was very excited to take us swimming. After about 15 minutes of weaving in an out of lawless motorcycle driving, our tuk-tuk successfully arrived at the Phnom Penh Water Park. This was going to be better than we thought!
We hurried up to the ticket counter and got tickets for all of us, including Mao. He was going to wait for us, but we thought it would be more fun if he came inside and played. When we walked through the gates, we were amazed to see twisting water slides, a wave pool, and a lazy river (although it looked as if the water was so lazy that it had become stagnant… we avoided that). We spent a few hours sliding down the slides in creative positions, splashing in the wave pool, and doing flips underwater, all while building a relationship with our new Cambodian friend. God has a crazy way of putting people in our paths to minister to. Please pray for Mao, that we could continue our relationship with him, and he would see Christ in us.
