Cambodia Bible Education Centre

We ran our most recent seminars at the Townview Hotel in Phnom Penh. The hotel has a nice upper conference room and breakfast area we could use for lunch and discussion. We made all the normal preparations, putting an advertisement in the classifieds of the ‘Cambodia Daily’ and the ‘Rasmei Kampuchea’. The latter is a Khmer newspaper, but the advert in English stands out amongst the Khmer text for those who can read it. We emailed our list of contacts and called their mobiles. With over a hundred contacts, that can be time consuming, but it’s not as ‘telemarketeresque’ as it sounds. In Cambodia, people are actually glad to receive your call, especially about a Bible subject. Maybe that will change after they have been assaulted by constant ‘free’ holidays, phone companies and surveys. But so far, you almost always receive a polite and interested response. Most of our contacts come from attendees to previous seminars or those who call/email and ask to be kept informed. Our biggest proble...

Recently, we took a trip down to Sihanoukville, the beach resort of Cambodia. When I say recently, I’m referring more to about a month ago. But time is passing very quickly here. It only seems like yesterday we were being savaged by bird flu carrying rabid chickens. What’s a bit of rabies between friends. Anyway, we toddled off down to Sihanoukville by luxury bus. It was quite a pricey trip at $6 a ticket, but they gave us a cold chicken and mayo sandwich, a little cake and a bottle of icey water, so that was ok. Of course, I didn’t eat the sandwich. I don’t care if they are a luxury bus company, eating cold meat and mayo in a pre-packaged meal is almost applying in triplicate for a virulent case of salmonella. The trip was lovely, the hostess was friendly and could speak her scripted lines in English in a mostly decipherable accent. Despite a quick stop to offer sacrifices to pagan patron saints on behalf of our bus, we found ourselves in a cloudy but still reasonably beachy Sihanoukv...