In three days my squad will be heading to Siem Reap for our first debrief. After that, we’ll only have one month left in Cambodia! The past couple of weeks have been pretty crazy- full of emotions, organization, and settling in. My first week and a half of being here, I was put on the kitchen crew to serve our squad by cleaning and serving meals. My next blog will go into detail about that a little bit more, but I wanted to give a little information about the different ministries here. My team specifically started outreach on Monday, which we will be doing each morning. This entails meeting the locals here in Battambang, and building relationships. We’ve been buying fruit at the market and going to slums or night markets during the day where people are just hanging out. We pass out fruit and play with kids or talk to the people if they know English. There have already been opportunities for prayer- people here are genuine and open and love to love and be loved. They aren’t prideful in the sense that if they feel they need a little encouragement or prayer, they say so- it’s so so so beautiful.
A couple of the guys on my team had the opportunity to go into a Pagoda and meet with the monks there. Women aren’t allowed to touch monks or approach them because they’re seen as unclean, so a conversation must be initiated by a man (or a monk) for a woman to engage in conversation with a monk. Gracie was unable to attend because she would have been the only girl (I had a fever during these two days), which wouldn’t have been ideal for that type of environment. However, the guys had a lengthy conversation with them and went back the next day to talk to the same monks. Their English is usually pretty good & they’re open about Buddhism and conversation regarding religion, so that’s probably something we’ll continue to do throughout the next month.
In the afternoons, I get to help paint the walls of an elementary school that teaches English called Dewey. We’ve painted flowers, suns, skies, words of encouragement, etc. And we pray over every wall/room we paint. It’s been laid back, but rewarding!
I haven’t been taking pictures because my squad is doing a phone detox, but I look forward to sharing some of those later on! 🙂
