First Week in Siem Reap

First week on the mission field is complete. We have been in Siem Reap, Cambodia since last Thursday 10/20, it is currently Saturday 10/29 and I love it here. My team along with one other of the girls team all live in a house together that is about a 5 minute walk from the main base. There are 3 rooms which means 5 to a room and I can’t express how much fun it is to have roommates. I feel like I’m in a college dorm room. Anyways, we don’t spend much time at our house besides bedtime and the occasional cribbage game with Marly before bed. 

This past week my team and a different girls team, not the ones we live with, have been going to 4 villages that are about an hour and a half drive north of Siem Reap in a district called Angkor Chum (pronounced choom not chum). The organization that we are working with have a school program in each of the villages for kids during their lunch break of school to come and learn English and hear stories and sing songs about Jesus. There are kids ranging from 2 years old to 14 years old who choose to come to class once a week. So we got to go and participate in class for the past week. The kids are learning letters A-F and then they volunteer to say bible verses that they remembered, or sing songs in front of the class that they remember. It is so cute to see a 4 year old go in front of the class and sing a song and do the motions. After that we preformed the story of Adam and Eve and many of the kids laughed at us. We then sang the songs with the kids, all in Khmer (main language spoken in Cambodia, pronounced Ka-my). We know all the motions and try to say the words but really have no clue what we are saying. After, we play games like freeze dance and the kids are all giggling during the whole thing. The kids are truly some of the cutest kids I have ever seen. We did two villages a day on Monday and Tuesday and then on Wednesday and Thursday we went around the villages meeting with people, some who were Christians and others who just needed some medical help. Now this was all so much fun and I absolutely loved it but not a single person spoke English so we really weren’t able to communicate with anyone. In the city quite a bit of people speak some English but no one in the villages do which is very understandable. We met an 80+ year old women who had never left her village. Not once has she left. She was wearing pants that she wore during the Khmer Rouge that ended in 1979. She lives in the same small hut/house that she was born in. So of course she doesn’t speak English. Luckily we had two women with us who are absolutely incredible and I’m sure I will do a blog post about them soon, and they are both Khmer women who are Christians and are the ones who teach all the children. They were able to translate some of the conversations but other than that and our few Khmer phrases we know, such as what’s your name and hello and goodbye we didn’t talk to anyone. We weren’t the ones teaching in the class, we just did a wordless play and danced with the kids. 

At the beginning I felt so pointless. But then I switched my attitude and realized that even when I’m not doing anything, I can still be joyful and love people well through it. One of the last talks we had in Georgia was that sometimes we have to just do things because that’s what we’re told to do. We say just jump through the hoop. Don’t question why. Just do it. If you can show obedience to the Lord by doing mundane tasks, than he can trust you with bigger things. So I found joy in it all. I may not be able to speak words to them but a smile and laugh is universal. And I can’t wait to do more of it.