Super Bowl Sunday… Although I didn’t have internet and only remembered what day it was afterward. February 7th for those who don’t do football. As we left the base that morning, we were planning on a typical Sunday in Cambodia: church to do a little presentation in front of the Christians, town for lunch and market shopping, and then back to the base for some rest and intercession.
We got on the tractor trailer, started down the road, and began practicing our songs for the morning. We were in the middle of the Khmer (ka ‘mai) song we had learned, and the tractor veered off the road. Our ministry contact was driving and was flung off, and when the tractor went into a heavy bush, two more people came off and rolled. We had minor bruising, an injured ankle, and one of people who rolled was our interpreter who had a sore back for a few days. The incident only took about 5 seconds.
Not to downplay that situation, but we were all okay, and it took about 20 mins to get the tractor out of the bush. Several Khmer people stopped to help get us back onto the road. By the time the tractor was back in the road, we were already 30 minutes late for church, and we still had about 15 minutes away from the church. We didn’t arrive at the church until about 20 mins before it ended.
While we were at church, we did our presentation, introducing who we were, singing two of the planned songs, and our team leader spoke for about 5 minutes.
After service, we went into town and went to the place where we were planning on have lunch. She was completely out of rice, and was about to close up for the day. We tried looking for the second favorite place for food in town, but they were closed, as were most of the places we tried. It was the day before the Chinese New Year, and Cambodia celebrates it, so everyone was packed up, or packing up, to go home for the holiday. We were lucky enough to get eggs at the one place we could just as they were closing up.
We went back to the base, made lunch and kind of just rested and enjoyed being together for the rest of the day. We did have dinner and a night of worship and intercession as planned, but most of the day was off from the original idea of what it would look like.
One of the more comical moments of the day was buying (without our interpreter) what we thought were sparklers for the New Year, getting back to base, and discovering we had actually bought incense… Usually used for the Buddist shrines at homes… Yeah, we have been using them, if nothing else but to mask our body stench.
Anyway, all this to say that things don’t go as planned on the World Race, hardly ever, not just in this particular instance.
