Cambodia – Day 2, December 11th

We woke up refreshed and ready for the day! I cooked the eggs on the stove at the back of the house for breakfast – my first real cooking experience in Cambodia. I also learned how to run Sophorn's washing machine. The water (from the river) that the machine is connected to comes out in a trickle, so you fill up 5 gallon buckets with water and hoist them into the tub until it's full enough. You do this again when it rinses. The Nuon's have a deep drilled well outside their house, which has a pump so they can use this water to water plants, fill the washer, and other things that I'm sure I'll learn about. After the clothes are finished, you turn them all inside out and hang them on a clothes line in the sun (you turn them so they don't get bleached by the sun quite as badly).

We went for a walk to the church today and observed them practicing for the Christmas production they are putting on December 20^th. This is a big production and they are working hard on it. We pray that many people from the community will hear the gospel. The church rents chairs and fills up the sanctuary to capacity plus, and afterwards they serve a meal for everyone. It's a giant Christmas party, and such a great opportunity they are seizing for outreach. We plan to help out too in every way we can! Since it was Friday, the student's did not have their English classes. But Kris, Anna and David watched them play volleyball for a while. After Daniel and Thomas woke from their naps, I took all three boys back to the church to watch the community English classes. They have maybe 200 kids (I may have to correct this number later) that come for English classes, and the PATC students teach them. They separate the kids by ages and put them into different classes with different teachers. I helped out in one class for a little bit with some pronunciation, and then one of the students took Kris and I and kids around to meet the other kids in all the classes. There were so many beautiful smiling faces. We pray that these kids will not just learn English, but learn about the God who made them, and learn to love Him and follow Him.

We found out at dinner that Daniel loves some tiny little fish that Sophorn fried up. They are only about three to four inches long, and when fried they are very flat. She cuts the heads off these tiny fish before she cooks them, but they still have bones, so you split them up the side and separate the bones from the flesh. When you're done, there's really not all that much meat there, but Daniel loved them and ate all the rest of them – it was about six of them.