Short Term Outreach

Hello everyone! Sorry I didn’t have time to write last week. Things were so busy, and we were getting ready for short term outreach, which was AMAZING!

My team went to Poipet – which is on the Thai border. Poipet grew in less than 7 years from 10,000 people to 100,000. It is hot. And dusty. There are no jobs. No economy. The people there, from what we were told, are hopeless. And they have no way out. In the no-man’s-land between Thailand and Cambodia there is a strip of Casinos. Prostitution, gambling and organized crime are huge. And that’s just what we knew going in. It doesn’t begin to describe what the town is actually like, because all of the stuff we were told, we never saw firsthand. But I get ahead of myself.

We left Battambang by bus, arriving in Poipet in the late afternoon. It was hot. It’s the dry season in Cambodia. The roads in poipet are unpaved, so a hot cloud of fine dust fills the air behind every car, tok tok, and moto. We got off the bus and into a tok tok (a moto with a cart attached to the frame – should hold maybe 5 people, we often fit 11), and went to meet our contact. Joel is a lone wolf missionary, starting and running four churches, an HIV outreach, and several children’s programs out of his house, as well as guitar and English lessons. We found out before we left that there was no place to stay at the churches (Westerners – get the idea of a church building out of your mind. Think a hut on poles with the roof falling in, with 20 people sitting in a circle while the owner of the house chops up raw chicken behind you –that’s CHURCH here), so the Cambodian pastor took us to a guest house that wasn’t too bad. (NB. If a Khmer person says “not too bad” or “delicacy” – expect trouble) It wasn’t too bad. We rented two rooms in a cheap guest house. The corner of each room was cut out into an all in one bathroom – meaning a squatty potty and a spigot with a bucket underneath. That is both your means of ‘flushing’ the toilet, and your shower. The walls and floor are tiled, and the bathroom walls do not meet the ceiling. The rest of the room is a side table made of scrap wood with a piece of pressed board thumbtacked to the top, two wooden slat beds, and one mosquito net. Bopa and I had each bought a personal net before we left, which was good, because the room had a cockroach infestation that we only controlled, but never eliminated. We walked into this room, which had not been cleaned in some time, and were told that we were going to clean our guest house. I never expected to spend my first hour as a missionary scrubbing down a squatty potty with some toilet cleaner and a foot cleaning brush. The other three girls killed cockroaches, swept up dead bugs, drenched the floors with water and mopped. I took my mattress (very stained) outside and beat the dust out with a stick. Then we covered them up with a (hopefully) clean sheet, hung our mosquito nets from screws above the headboard, and wrapped our bedding in them to keep the cockroaches out.

So that's the 'bad' part -- but it really wasn't. In the beginning when we walked in, for one second my mind thought, oh dear GOD, how can we live here. The first cockroach sent us all screaming for the opposite side of the room. But after four days we just shrugged, slapped them to the floor and sprayed the SNOT out of them with a can of Raid someone bought and watched them writhe. HA. Stupid roaches. Honestly the Khmer can't figure out why some bugs bother us westerners more than others. I had to explain that in my country (we start a lot of sentences that way) having cockroaches means a place is very dirty and not well cared for. Here, it's just part of the scenery most places. Oh, and we saw a spider the size of my hand when fully spread. I kept thinking how glad I am that Mom wasn't there, and several Khmer were thinking how good it would taste deep fried. Ah, culture.

After we finished cleaning we got in another Tok Tok and drove out to a village church -- again, think ramshackle hut with 30 people crowded in. We sang some songs, played a few games, and prayed for a little girl that had a tooth infection that hadn't been cared for, and now was spreading through her face. And, we also made arrangements to get the girl to an American doctor working in a Christian hospital for free medical treatment. The Khmer doctor had given the girl...painkillers. The village was amazingly bad. All the children wear all that clothing that American Thrift Shops deem too bad to sell and bale up and ship to Asia for several cents a pound. I asked Sam if the people here ever see the irony -- that they make all the clothes, then ship them to America where we wear them completely out, then sell them back to Asians to wear as rags. Sam said they are too poor to notice. The children are so easy to love -- even the dirty ones crawling with lice. The small children usually run around naked, or with just a shirt on...why bother clothing the bottom half when all clothes have to be washed by hand...the children just squat where they stand to pee. Flea infested dogs run in and out of the shacks, as well as chickens. The women usually wear brightly colored beautiful cotton sarongs with a button up shirt (it never matches...it's a thing here, the more patterns the better). You see very few men. A whole generation of Men were killed off by the Khmer rouge, so fathers are scarce. And often they have to move elsewhere to work. Most of the children are dreadfully unschooled -- one 17 year old boy was in the third grade. Many will drop out to get a job if they do go to school. University here is expensive, so many children cannot see the use of continuing their education beyond elementary level, since they cannot afford college anyway, and their family desperately needs the income.

There is much more to tell, so, to be continued. That was just the first day...