I used to complain about the roads near my home…a little bumpy, not always even, but still tarred and easily passable. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to complain about them again after riding on “our” road to the orphanage. Imagine this: the worst, bumpiest, most pot-hole filled two-track you’ve ever seen, as wide as a regular two-lane road, so muddy in parts you almost can’t get through, remnants of tar causing bumps even in the “smooth” parts…and then multiply that all by the fact that today we rode on that for an hour in the back seat of a pick-up truck that contained nine people in the cab and about twenty in the bed. It’s all about perspective.
I freak out at home when the power goes out, never knowing where there’s a flashlight that works. It’s almost like we can’t survive without electricity. This month, though, we’re being stripped of that. The orphanage is wired to run on electricity, but apparently a thief stole the wires that run from the main power line in to the orphanage. So we’re awake early in the morning (the sun rises before six am and so do the kids…we usually get up around 6:30…so I guess it’s not that early) and we’re locked in our little room by about 7:30-8:00 at night (it gets dark around 6 pm). Our host turns on a generator for about an hour every day, but that’s only enough to run the ceiling fan for a little bit to attempt to cool off our room. We’re learning how to operate very simply this month as our comforts are taken away. It’s all about your perspective.
We take our freedom and safety for granted at home. We forget that many people have died so that we can be as free as we are. We forget that other parts of the world are not as safe as our nice homes. At home, we don’t post guards outside our sleeping rooms or lock the gate across the driveway to keep out whomever may want to roam our way. Here, those are things we see every day. We don’t go anywhere outside the orphanage alone (some of the girls went running the other day and a couple boys from the orphanage went with them)…which means some of us don’t leave the orphanage hardly at all. At home, we can communicate freely with those around us; here, it’s a chore to get our English translated into Khmer, we’re teaching the kids English and they’re teaching us Khmer. It’s all about your perspective.
We’re so blessed this month. We get to learn and understand a whole different way of life. We get to hang out with some precious, adorable kids 24/7 and just love on them. We have an amazing host who is definitely seeking God’s heart. We’re able to have a lot of team time. We get to go to bed early every night (although it doesn’t seem early because it’s always dark and we’re always tired). We get to live by chickens and pigs and ducks and geese and cows and dogs…who all make lots of noise at all hours of the day and night. We get to live. Plain and simple. I’m so excited to see what else God is going to do through us this month!
p.s. I’m taking pictures of things we’ve been doing, but the internet is slow here in Cambodia so I will try my hardest to post them when we’re back in Bangkok.
