Stay tuned for a SPECIAL THANK YOU after this message!!
Seriously, I can’t believe I’m fully funded.
$15,000. No big deal.
I think back to when I initially wanted to go on the race a little over a year ago.
The thought of raising $15,500 sounded incredibly impossible.
I doubted I should go on this trip, but just kept pushing forward and waiting for the money to come in, and it did.
I was shocked at the generosity of friends and family, and mostly from the anonymous donations and checks from strangers.
I worked two jobs, sold paintings and ceramic art, held fundraisers, sold t-shirts, sent out letter after letter and continued raising support even while on the field.
Funding in and of itself was full of learning.
I had to humbly accept large chunks of money that would in turn help me survive for the next year.
I had to push through the doubts and feelings of inadequacy.
I had to fight lies that I wasn’t good enough to receive this money.
I had to say no to fun events and trips in order to save all I could.
I learned the importance of giving to other people’s funding accounts even while I needed money, realizing how the more I give, the more God supplies my needs.
I learned the power of impossible prayers: some nights I had $1,000 due the next day and I would wake up to a check for that amount.
I was inspired by the crazy generosity from people who needed money just as much, if not more than I did.
I felt like people believed in me and this mission. I realized how little money matters.
I learned all these things and more,
and all of these lessons still affect how I live today,
a year later in a small village in Cambodia.
So in order to thank you,
I wrote a special photo blog describing a “day in the life.”
So imagine yourself in the following settings.
Put yourself in a hot dusty village of Cambodia, and follow me through a day in the life of the World Race!
(The following describes my whole day yesterday, so you will essentially be me for the day.)
First things first, welcome to your little home:
The surroundings look something like this:
In the inside of the house looks something like this:
(Tents are set up inside because this house holds large rats, lizards and spiders more than it keeps them out! Also, rain pours in from the leaky roof, so rain flies are still necessary!)
Here is our local coffee and deep fried potato stand down the road a bit:
6:00 AM.
You wake up from a dream about being home with your family again…those dreams come a lot.
Breakfast isn’t until 8:30, so you decide to go back to sleep.
You roll over to feel something like a twig brush across your face and open your eyes to a hand sized spider on the inside of your tent, right by your face. Do you scream? No…just jump out of your tent, pull out your sleeping bag and shake it out. You woke up your teammate in the eno next to you, you apologize, climb back in your tent and fall asleep.
8:30 AM.
Wake up for real this time. Grab shoes and follow your team to eat breakfast. Yum!
Bread rolls full of a strange, chewy yellow jam.
9:00 AM.
First class of the day! The students are waiting for you to come teach. They speak pretty decent English and point to the next lesson in their book: “Future Tense”….so you spend the hour teaching how to use phrases like “I will” and “tomorrow” and “I’m going to”. You teach them new vocabulary, how to write in cursive, how to pronounce hard sounds, and then end class.
10:00AM.
Construction time! You help carry logs and branches to the construction site: the building of a roof for a porch. This will provide shade for the little kids to play under during the hot hours of the day and will probably be a place for the team to hang out and teach night bible studies. The boys saw, dig and lift, and the girls help where they can…..(haha)
Eventually, you realize you aren’t doing much lifting and cutting, so you decide to make some coffee, which requires building a fire…with an axe..of course.
Starting a fire isn’t easy and requires the help of the children from the Buddhist family next door…
…and tons of dry leaves and sticks and a few teammates to help.
(You are instantly thankful for stoves and coffee makers back home.) Finally after about 15 minutes of getting smoked out and sweating, a pot of hot water is ready. You use a dirty shirt you find in the mud to pick up the hot handles.
Your coffee press is like a beautiful shining goblet out here in the wild, and is soon filled with steeping coffee grounds and hot water.
11:00 AM.
Coffee Hour. This ‘hour’ is really just 30 minutes of the morning where you and the coffee drinkers of your team have a cup of freshly brewed coffee and sit in a circle and talk about certain topics. These topics range from music, how parents met, favorite cities back home, or how fast time is going on the race. Today it is about how everyone spends birthdays at home. There are three birthdays on your team this month, and today is Jenny’s! Happy Birthday Jenny!
If you don’t have coffee hour, it’s also a time to ride bikes down the loooong dirt road to the small market outside of town.
Here you find tiny vendors selling anything from chunks of raw meat covered in flies, strange foreign candies, cold drinks, clothing, fresh fruits and every smell you could imagine.
11:30 AM.
Lunch time! We eat a delicious lunch of mystery meat mixed in stewed green tomatoes, rice with sweet and sour sauce, piled with egg on top. It’s so so delicious and you have seconds.
The fly counting game is popular at lunch, there can be anywhere from 12-15 flies on one spoon at a time, and 20-25 flies on your plate! They become less noticeable every day. You feel a brushing across your feet and it wonder if it’s a small child, a duck, a mouse, a large rat, a big fly, a cockroach, the family kitten or Bungy the biting dog. All are possibilities.
12:00 PM.
Class time begins! You will teach classes from 12 till 4. All seven teammates teach different classes to different children. It’s fun, tiring, long and hilarious. The kids are jokesters but are incredibly smart. The people here are different from any other culture so far, even the babies are funny and play tricks on you. All are welcoming and down to earth. You teach the kids about American holidays as well as grammar and spelling. By the time 4 rolls around everyone is over heated and tired.
4:00 PM.
One on one time with the students is your favorite part of the day! The older students sit with you and talk about families, lives, food, school, friends, hobbies, and their future. It’s a sweet time and you realize how similar you are to these kiddos. The hour usually flies by and by the end you find yourself laughing with the girls while watching movies, listening to Taylor Swift, looking at pictures of back home or browsing magazines as they point out all the boys they think are cute!
5:00 PM.
Play time! Soccer is optional, and the boys from the team are building a tree swing for the kids. You remember how long it’s been since you’ve showered, and that you’ve been wearing the same sweaty clothes for 3 days…so you decide to do some laundry and take a shower.
Showers consist of dipping a dirty pan into a vat of collected rain water and bucket showering! Bucket showers are actually quite nice and refreshing. Laundry is done in the same room with the same water and some soap. The water coming off you and the clothes is dark grey…and you remember how easy showers and laundry was back home. If you avoid the cockroaches and ignore the smell coming from the pig and cow pens outside, it’s one of the few wonderful times you can spend alone and away from people.
6:00 PM.
Laundry is hung and it’s almost dinner time! You spend the next 20 minutes journaling and reading in your tent, or taking a walk through the tiny paths between the rice fields with your iPod. The heat of the day is gone now and it’s getting cloudy.
6:30 PM.
It’s starting to sprinkle a little as you head to dinner with the team. Dinner is the best meal, French fries and cooked peppers with pork, rice and sweet sauce. Delicious! You sit and eat under a tin roof and listen to the rain and huge pigs squealing next to you.
(This is the dinner table.)
7:00 PM.
Bible study! Tonight the team didn’t have time to prepare, so last minute you volunteer to share your testimony and a word for the people. A few people pray, read the bible, you share your story, and sing some songs.
8:00 PM.
Bible study wraps up and the work day is done!
Your team gathers together for team time and you all talk about the day. It’s mostly a time to laugh about everything, talk about how tired everyone is, share things on our hearts, talk about problems or issues being worked through, get a back rub from Morgan, or pray. It’s a time to unwind, watch a movie, have Wes do his professional magic tricks, or celebrate some event (such as 4th of July, a birthday, or just build a fire and relax)!
4th of July:
8:30 PM.
Again, tonight is special ‘cause its Jenny’s birthday. She loves pancakes, especially chocolate chip banana. Your awesome team leader, Wes, has taken the time to drive to the local village for internet to look up a pancake recipe and buy all the ingredients. You and Morgan are in charge of mixing the batter and cutting up tiny bananas and snicker bars for the pancakes! In a tiny mud hut, with a Cambodian family and students sitting in bed or watching you, you fry up the craziest tasting pancakes over a small fire in a bowl. They only light you have comes from a headlamp and the tiny tv playing a Thai movie.
Your favorite two girls from class, Jen and Lyna want to learn to cook, so a cooking class is thrown together in the small shack as you show them how to flip GIANT pancakes in the dark. Everyone is laughing while batter is thrown in the dirt, the fire goes crazy, dishes are washed and it starts to rain.
9:00 PM.
The rest of the pancakes are carried out as a surprise for Jenny and the team who are sitting around a blazing fire!
10:00-10:30 PM.
After a game of charades with the kids, everyone is too tired to stay up and heads to their tents. Between late night reading, watching a movie or writing, you finally drift off to a wonderful sleep full of dreams.
So that’s it: a day in the life of a Cambodian missionary. 🙂
It’s not super fancy or super spiritual,
just a day of building relationships focused on love,
working hard and enjoying the simple life.
It’s always the small things that count,
such as taking the girls from class to the internet cafe to help them make facebook accounts and email addresses,
It's the moment while you're taking a shower in a small dirty room
that you hear a little girl outside singing:
“His love’s like a hurricane, I am a tree…”
…and smiling to yourself. God is here.
I am bringing more of His love with my presence.
You are bringing more of His love to the people around you every day…just by being who you are.
Thank you for supporting me!
See ya in 4 months!
Love,
Rach.
