Hi! I know it’s been a little while since I blogged, I apologize for that. Since you’ve read last, I’ve switched ministries, experienced more hotttt days, and made some new friends 🙂
My team switched from village ministry to city ministry. We now go to a lot of high schools and universities around Siem Reap and we teach conversational English, American culture, or teacher management skills. At some of the schools we’re with the same students every week, and this gives us an opportunity to build relationships with them. At the universities, most of the students are my age or older, which is really funny to them sometimes.
I thought I would come back into the blogging world by doing a day in the life photo blog. I am not a photographer, so many of these photos aren’t necessarily the prettiest, but hopefully they’ll give you a look into what a pretty typical day in Siem Reap looks like.
Friday, May 3rd, 2019
This is my bed! Well, mine for the time being while my squad leader Jackie is away. Normally, I share the bed directly across from this one with my fellow team leader Shekinah. I often wake up anywhere from 6-7am and spend 10 minutes trying to get out of bed. Then I read my bible either on this bed or on the balcony, which looks like this:
After devos with iced instant coffee, I eat a quick breakfast of eggs or oatmeal, sadly not pictured.
Then, we hop in the Ministry-Mobile and our host, Gette, drives us to our first school of the day.
It has a really beautiful, green campus with lots of different plants and lawn decorations everywhere. I love it.
This school is for students studying to become teachers, and it’s here that we teach the class on classroom management.
You may be wondering, ‘Why are girls who are not educated in teaching teaching teachers how to teach?’. Well, such is the world race. You come unequipped with ability, and God gives you the ability. Or at least ability to try your best. Sometimes it doesn’t look great, but He gives you opportunities through it anyway. For instance, in these school, though we do teach classes, our main goal is to create friendships with the students and share the gospel with them when we hang out outside of the classroom.
This is me with my group of teachers’ training students. They don’t know much English and are sometimes a bit shy, but I love them and I love that my team gets to teach their class every week. We have a different class on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday every week, so that means that we’ve made a lot of new friends recently!
After the teachers’ training school, we headed to the high school we normally go to. On our way there we took a terrible selfie and saw a beauty store aptly named “Take Care Your Skin”. I took this picture as an homage to our alumni team leader Olivia Wouters, who would ALWAYS talk about how she took care of her skin. Eat your heart out, Wouters.
The students in our high school were taking exams, so the teachers sent us away for the day. This is also quite normal with ministry in Asia (or really, on the race in general); plans are randomly changed and awkwardly communicated. It’s definitely something to get used to. SO, we went to The Alley, which is a place with boba tea right by our third school of the day. I got a tea called “In Love With Lemonway” and it was so good! Very tart, but very good. A fun time of hanging out with my team and ministry hosts.
This is USEA, our third school of the day. We teach a class on American culture, and this Friday Allyson taught about Christmas! It’s weird to be in a place where this holiday isn’t well-known or celebrated.
Here’s the amazing smiling teacher with the confused and also amazing woman in control of the slideshow.
Another awkward selfie after a good class.
Back in the van we go, this time we go home to clean the church where we live. We clean every day as part of our ministry.
Here’s a really beautiful picture of the broom and dustpan I used to sweep the floor! Cute, I know.
During our lunch break, I went with my team (+SQL Stephen!) to Sister Srey, a fun cafe restaurant thing in the city. They have a lot of western food, so a lot of tourists go there.
They have really cute drink menus that are inside children’s books!
I forgot to eat a picture of my meal BEFORE I ate it, but here’s the remains of some amazing avocado toast with feta, beetroot hummus, and a poached egg. Delicious.
After a couple hours of free time, we left home to go to our last school of the day. We only go to this school on Fridays, because class starts at 6 and usually goes until 7:30 or 8.
Here’s where we climb a few flights of stairs to get to our class. Here we just teach conversational English. And sometimes we play games! Liiiiike
Pictionary! You can’t really see the drawing that well because of the glare, but it’s a really cute stick figure.
Here’s an action shot of Allyson, Dan, and Madison showing the class our dance that we’re learning for another part of our ministry. They killed it.
This group of girls is really fun to talk to! They make me laugh and they make me think about cool things, like how lucky I am to speak English when it’s such an international language. They all speak it really really well, and I admire them for striving to learn more and more every day.
After we got home from the last ministry of the day, I made a dinner of scrambled eggs, a crispy ham and cheese tortilla wrap, snap peas, apple slices, and mango slices. A weird conglomerate of food, but pretty good if I do say so myself.
I took dinner to my room and Shekinah was trying to eat it right off my plate. She’s weird, but I love her.
I walked out of my room to discover my friends being creepy, as per usual. So then I turned around and went to bed immediately. Nah, I’m just kidding, I stayed up really late trying to catch up on a Bible study I’m going through! I feel like we’ve all been there, to some degree.
And thus concludes a Friday with SJ. I hope you enjoyed it and got a small taste of what it’s like doing ministry here in Siem Reap! It’s not always just evangelizing or teaching Sunday school classes (though I do that, too). Sometimes it’s preparing lessons to teach classes you might not feel qualified to teach, but then looking past that to really just love the students well. They are such amazing people, and I am grateful for the opportunity to talk with them every week!
Thanks for coming along with me on this Friday, May 3rd of 2019.
