This update is one of five I hope to write in the next week or so, to get caught up on both Cambodia and Botswana before we head out to South Africa! I will likely only send out subscriber alerts for one or two of those, so poke around the site a bit if you’d like to read more about the last month.
Month 4 Overview
Country: Cambodia
Ministry: Lighthouse Battambang
This month stands out as a clear favorite so far. I went into the month in a hard place. I’d faced some conflict within my team, ministry in Vietnam had left me exhausted, and 4 months is a long time to be away from home. Starting in this low place made me especially motivated to dive into my ministry. On a personal level, it was a great month for me in terms of learning to be intentionally vulnerable with my team and those at home. I made a point to intentionally disciple those around me, and continued leaning into what it means to be disciplined within such a free-form year.
Lighthouse is a ministry for High School students run by a swiss man and his Cambodian wife. They saw a need for financial assistance for High Schoolers, and started a community of youth who receive some scholarship, but also pay enough on a case by case basis to remove entitlement. The students have outlets for music and artistic expression, have sports and exercise requirements, and just a really FUN new family of peers. The ministry also creates revenue through local farmers, who they loan cows to in return for labor. When the cow had a calf, they split the profit from the sale, or the farmer chooses to purchase and keep it. eventually creating financial freedom for the farmers. Over all, the vision behind the ministry is exactly the type of thing I love to be a part of. Empowering without being enabling, loving without being loud, and compassionate without negative conditioning.
Each day, we would wake up, sometimes at 5am, to work out with the students, go on a run, or attend the local YWAM cross-fit gym. We had mid-mornings off because our students spent that time at school. This was a great time for us to have team time, go into town for groceries (or in my case, pizza) or to walk around the neighborhood and make some friends. Half of our team also worked on construction projects around the property. Around 11, the students would start arriving back at the dorms, and we would all gather for a Bible Study. Students at Lighthouse don’t have to be Christian. Lukas, our host, makes it very clear to them that they do not need to accept Jesus in order to live there or benefit from what the ministry does. He wants them to have the freedom to make the decision for themselves, as he has seen the dangers of manipulation through religion. He does, however, make the gospel ever present. While we were there, the students and staff were working through the gospel of John.
After bible study, we’d all head down, sit around the one giant outdoor table, and eat lunch. Lunch each day (for those of you who love hearing food details) was a bowl of white rice. There was always some sort of soup to add on top of the rice if you wanted to, but the rice every day thing got a little old. It was worth it, however, because these were some of the best community times with our students. After lunch, Allison and I would head across the yard to a little open air shelter where they hold tutoring, and teach English. We had one class in the afternoon and two in the evenings. At the beginning of the month, I was dreading these classes. I had just taught for a month in Vietnam, and it felt totally draining. As we grew closer to the students however, I couldn’t wait to go to class. Teaching English became more about the relationships being formed, which made it both more fun and more effective.
We had some amazing Swiss brothers in Cambodia as well. When we arrived, we were introduced to Joram from Switzerland, who was volunteering manual labor and construction for 2 months, improving the Lighthouse property. He was immediately sassy, loved to play worship on guitar, and took nightly Kmer language lessons with me from a few of our students. A few weeks in Elias arrived. He is the goofiest, loudest swiss man you will ever meet. He has a passion for baking and he used it to make us cookies and Sunday bread. These fellas made me eat rat and snake, took me to lunch on their motos, and even played the male parts in a very intense skit we did at church one night.
One unexpected blessing was our living situation. We lived in tents on the porch of the dorms with the very students we were teaching, which I thought would feel exhausting, but it was so sweet. We often spent nights listening to Justin Bieber, helping with homework, and even sometimes having spa time or a movie night! These high school aged strangers quickly became like my little brothers and sisters. Early on I decided I wanted to be more intentional about discipleship, so I asked one of the girls if she would do a nightly bible study with me. Minea is 17, wants to be a doctor, and has one of the sweetest hearts I’ve ever encountered. She and I would go out on the porch each night, me with my English bible and her with her Kmer bible. We would read half a chapter of Ephesians and each answer three questions, which I communicated to her through Google Translate…
1. What was your favorite verse in this section?
2. What is a truth that you learned from this section?
3. How can you apply what you learned in this section to your life this week?
About 2 weeks in, another girl asked to join our bible study. Kumpheak is 17, as sassy as you can imagine, and wants to be an English teacher. She loves the Lord and those around her (myself included) so well. These were my sweetest moments on the race so far.
Adventure and off days this month were spent largely learning about Cambodian history and culture. We hiked to the killing caves near where we stayed, saw some incredible bat caves, and took a weekend trip into the city to learn about the not-so-ancient Cambodian genocide. You can read more about that in my next blog, “Jonah and Genocide.”
Every Friday night we had “family time,” meant to cultivate the community within the dorms. I loved it. Some weeks this looked like playing name games or Duck Duck Goose, one night it was a frosting fight after a birthday celebration for some of the students, and one night we all snuggled up together to watch “How To Train Your Dragon.” My favorite family time of all, the students told us they wanted to show us a traditional Kmer New Years game. They took us around to the back of the building where they had strung up clay pots from high in the trees. They blindfolded us and told us we had 3 tries to break the pots with a stick. It was essentially a piñata game, but the pots were filled with baby powder, so it was a mess! All the yelling and chaos and laughter are such a sweet memory in my mind.
My last day at Lighthouse was a hard one. In general, I am not someone who becomes very attached. I haven’t cried leaving a ministry site until my students, who’d quickly become my little brothers and sisters, started leaving for school that last day. I struggled for what to say. I’d learned how to say a lot of things in Kmer. I knew how to say “see you tomorrow” or “see you later”, even how to say “I love you.” But, I didn’t know how to say “goodbye.”
My sweet student, sister, and dear friend Kumpheak grabbed me by the shoulders and said, in her best attempt at complete, authoritative, English, “Rachel. No cry! Happy every day! I see you at heaven!”
Praise the Lord for this incredible month, for my sweet new brothers and sisters, and that I don’t have to know how to say goodbye in Kmer.
