Kellyville Seventh-day Adventist Church

It’s been difficult to get into the swing of things this past week. We’re mid-project two and after leaving our beautiful hotel in Siem Reap and jumping on a minibus to the middle of nowhere, I struggled a bit moving into a room that had bugs and dead rats. It took some getting used to but the kids made it all worthwhile!

We’ve met so many amazing people on this trip from Buaket (Superwoman) who runs the ICC Kirsten Jade Refuge Centre in Thailand to Nick our translator in Om Koi and Chiang Mai to the beautiful children here at Light of Hope Childrens Village in Cambodia.

This is what’s happened so far on project 2:

Friday – TEACHING. We taught all day and were so tired at the end of it all. It was more full on than we could have ever imagined or expected. The extent of English that they understand or recognise is limited especially in the little ones but the older kids in the high school can generally speak English quite well. We’ve been trying to give them as much exposure to English as possible so that basically means hanging out with them and talking to them about anything and everything!

Saturday – The thing we’ve all experienced on this trip is that they LOVE for the foreigners to take their worships. So we took Sabbath School, Church and Closing Sabbath! It was a big day. In the afternoon they took us for a walk up 800 steps to the top of this mountain where there was a Buddhist temple and MONKEYS AT THE TOP! I’ve never seen monkeys other than at the zoo before so it was pretty exciting.

Sunday – That’s today. We worked really hard. The boys worked on a security upgrade at the gates of the childrens village. They laid bricks and it was hot so they got tired real quick! The girls spent the day sorting through a huge container of clothes that had been donated to the village. We then separated the clothes into piles of boys, girls and adults clothes and had each of the house families come and receive two sets of clothes for each person. It took a while but we got through all of them! Some of the remaining clothes will be taken out to a village we’re visiting on Tuesday and we’ll distribute them to whoever rocks up to the truck!

Seeing all the random things that people donate makes me think about how silly some people are! It’s good to help and all, but when you donate dirty clothes, is that really going to help someone? Just because they’re poor, should they have to wear our dirty old clothes? I’m re-evaluating my whole clothing situation (which I’m sure my father would be pleased to hear) and feel both blessed and embarassed at the amount of things I have.

We are having an amazing time and feel thoroughly blessed to have experienced such culture and also such faith.