Good morning everyone!!! It’s about 5pm where I am in Illinois posting this right now… and that means that if I was in the bodes still, I would jus now be waking up to start my day! It was around 5am when I started to be woken up by dogs continuing to bark and the birds beginning to chirp a little louder. The sound of distant weddings along with the sound of the near by temples gave me no choice than to start waking up. (For some reason waking up in Cambodia just hit different, it wasn’t like at home when you roll over when your alarm goes off and say “five more minutes”, I was actually, genuinely excited to start my day and eagerly waiting to see what the Lord had in store for yet another beautiful day in Cambodia) I typically woke up pretty cold because the mornings were always slightly cooler and my sweat would dry from the night before. So I would reach for my sweatshirt or a t-shirt I had left somewhere in my hammock for that exact situation and throw that bad boy on.
Depending on the day, if I woke up a lil later around 5:50 or so, I would jus hop straight outta bed and head downstairs (Ashlyn and I put our hammocks on the second floor of our church), saying good morning to whoever’s already up doing their quiet time and then head straight into my room to grab probably the same clothes I wore the day before butttt if I woke up literally at 5 or around 5 I would have some more time to jus relax before rushing out of bed.
Cambodians have a super chill way of living. Don’t get me wrong, they’re quite the go-getters but culturally it just naturally has more of a chill vibe than our busy, timely, schedules we live by in the States. Soooo it was nice to jus be able to be still in the morning. Theres something really special about waking up and the first thing you do is just breath in the fresh air and give thanks rather than jumping on social media or into your daily tasks right away. I would start my day usually by sitting prayerfully and expectedly for a little bit, just listening and allowing the Lord to speak. If anything was pressing on my heart i’d definitely make sure to talk to him about it, and if the Lord puts any specific scripture or ideas in my head… i’d look them up or write them down… (I kept my bible/ journal on the chair below me that I used to prop myself up onto my hammock) When the sun begins to rise, around 5:45, I typically remained sitting in my hammock although a couple other girls were up at this point watching the sun rise from our field. Even though the sun rises in the other direction, behind the church, I think there is something peaceful and unconventional about jus seeing the sky slowly start to light up and not needed to see where it comes from… cause I already know :b. Finally I would make my way down stairs, throw some clothes on, and pop a squat at our table and wait until Mr. V. shows up to take the first group to school around 6am. (I would try to explain who Mr. V is to us, but quite honestly I don’t even know. He was just someone who always showed up, he typically was the one to bring up food and water, and if our light bulbs weren’t working he’d be the one to help us fix them)
Someone will usually yell:
MR. V. IS COMING!!! “Is everyone fully clothed???”, when they see Mr. V. pulling up. Everyone rushed to get situated, because a lot of the time we will be in sports bras or non dress code shorts, since its jus us 10 girls. Depending on the day of the week, decided on who goes in the tuk tuk with him to school now, and who stayed back and waited for someone else to show up with breakfast and to walk around village with us. (we made groups when we first got to Cambodia and every other day of the week we would switch off if that makes sense)
This is what an average day at school looks like:
Alrighty so we took a second to try to all squeeze all 5 of us on the tuk tuk. We made sure we have everything we needed… for me that meant the volleyball Arielle bought and my water bottle…. Once everyone was “comfortable” I hopped on someones lap and we were on our way. We head out onto this main road which was under construction so crossing over it to get to the “right side of the road” was a challenge and we’d normally have to take some people off so the tuk tuk didn’t tip over. It was about a 30 minute drive i’d say but eventually we’d make it to the primary school. (sometimes we questioned if we were going to haha cause it can be a scary ride, but spoiler, we always did) Two kids normally open the gates so Mr. V. could drive through. Everyday the kids would all rush over not to say hi, but instead, just to stare. So we would sit down and make ourself comfy on the swings or a bench. After a minute or two things would go back to normal and all the kids would go back to playing in the school yard before they rang the bell for their pledge. After the pledge they would line up for their first part of the day and we would eat our breakfast… every time it was straight up, bread and condensed milk, yummy right! We would hang out for a bit till another kid would ring the bell yet again for recess. All the kids would come running out and Arielle and I (and whoever else wanted to play) would play volleyball with them. The older boys always took over and it would end up getting pretty competitive. We would get all nice and sweaty when they rung the next bell to go back to class. At this time we would split into a group of 2 and a group of 3 and enter one of the classrooms. The kids were all staring at us once again and we just had to act like we knew what we were doing. Even though they couldn’t understand a lick of what we’re saying, and we had no idea if they understood what we’re saying! So we all just embarrassed ourselves while we tried to have fun/ dance around and teach these kids hopefully something…. head shoulders knees and toes is a go to because it’s all pointing and they don’t have to know what were saying… they can jus repeat us (which they are good at). With no instruction/ help at all we did our best to make things go as smooth as possible for about an hour or longer… than when the bell rings for one final time that day, the students were free to go home. Sometimes we would play some more games with them like jump rope or tag but other days we would just go home. They were really shy at first but when they warmed up to you… they were crayzzzzzzzzz. Weirdly enough, my favorite part of the day was saying goodbye. Strange, I know.. but when a goodbye is hard and you don’t wanna leave… that means y’all care about each other and its freakin awesome. All the kiddos followed us on our tuk tuk and waved bye with a bigggg smile on their faces, riding their bikes or just running after us. It was adorable.
We then began our drive home to meet the rest of the gang, who was normally already back at the “house” at that point. (Its funny cause no matter where we were living on the race, long term or short term, we always referred to it as home cause it was haha I talked about the term “home” a brief amount in one of my last blogs)
Now I’m gonna do my best to show you what our village ministry looked like:
Picking up where we left off in the morning… if we were going out in the village that day we would watch the 5 school kids load on the tuk tuk and head off to school while the rest of us continued to wait for breaky and for someone to show up and take us to ministry. Eventually after maybe like 30 minutes or so of waiting… someone new, that usually we’ve never seen before would roll up on their moto and give us some packaged cake lookin things… they were almost like a twinkie or something. Some days they were good but on other days like the durian flavor days, we would normally hand them out as we are walking through the village. ALSO, can’t forget that they would literally b.l.e.s.s. us with a large ah ice coffee in the morning!! (how refreshing!!) We would eat up and sit for a little while longer while our new friend would jus kinda look at us while we ate. When we finished he asked us to follow him. So there we went, we literally just walked through our neighborhood. As we passed people our new friend would typically say something to them that would couldn’t understand but we would just smile and say “joom reap sua” (which means hi- formally in khmer) while placing our hands at our chest in a prayer position. Eventually our friend would find a family/ a house and tell us to sit down. I think these were families that people from our church had already started building relationships with prior to us being there. Our pastor told us translators were very expensive so, we just used a phone to try and communicate with them. (who knows how well that worked though…). Somedays we would visit 1 family and some days we would visit 2 we would just talk endlessly with no time limit and no place to be. Honestly a lot of the time it was our “translator/ new friend” preaching, and us just sitting and smiling. I mean at this point in the race my team and I knew it wasn’t about us. It wasn’t about us inviting people to church, or increasing the number of “christians in Cambodia”… but it was the Lords job and so our translators would do a lot of the preaching (since you know they speak khmer) A good amount of time people would gather to hear what he was saying just because WE were there, lol a couple of white girls. Eventually we would say bye and ask if we could pray for them before we left. Then we would walk home. (or if it was farther 2 of us would get on the back of our new friend/ translators moto and he took us home)
We all get home around lunch time like 1ish and wait till pastor swings by with lunch. At our church they would bring us individually boxed white rice with a runny egg and some sort of mystery meat which we called bacon for our well being (typically it was the same thing we get for dinner too… sometimes dinner would have like a tough leafy green in it too though). So we would eat that together and talk about our days, who we met, what happened during class today, what we taught, etc. Meanwhile pastor or Mr. V. watched us the whole time. They would make us put the sauces on because they think it makes it taste better haha. So us not wanting to offend them we would put the sauces on and continue eating. Eventually they left and were typically alone for the rest of the evening unless they swung by again randomly which happened all the time. So during that time we would workout, walk to the smoothie place, watercolor, take a nap, watch Netflix, do quiet time, listen to music, etc.
Around the time they brought us dinner our field at our church filled up with adult men playing volleyball. So Arielle and I do what we do best, we would finish eating real quick, and would go over and play with them. That was always a good time. We would play till the sun goes down and then we would sit and talk or go do some worship in the field/ whatever we’re feeling. Nights typically ended early though, we normally went to bed around 8:30/9. Also it was still real steamy at night so I would take a shower in our “luxury showers” (which was actually a lot nicer than one might think, despite it being pretty warm and mosquito/ spider infested)
but honestly thats about it…
It’s kinda hard to write a day in the life Cambodia style… because every day is different and a fun mystery at that…. from the American eye it could look super boring. Honestly its not much different from this whole quarantine thing… we weren’t really aloud to leave our house… we didn’t have internet… and there wasn’t much to do… we got pretty bored hahah. But we did have each other and something funny ALWAYS came outta that.
RIP the bodes… wish we coulda had more time together but i know you’re doing jus fine without me. Don’t y’all worry though, ill will be back soon.
(also i’ve been out of school for a year now… so don’t mind my grammar hehe thnx)
