Visiting Sokly We found our dream house! Actually its Sokly’s family house…It’s made all of wood – wooden stilts, wooden boards for the walls, wooden window shutters, wooden floorboards with cracks in-between to sweep the food down to the chooks. It has one big room that is used for entertaining guests, eating meals and sleeping; one small room for keeping clothes in and getting changed; and a verandah out the back for cooking. The yard has banana trees, coconut palms, papaya trees and mango trees. The ideal house! It’s set in a quaint village where hay is still transported by ox and cart and all the neighbours come to check out any guests.
This is the home of one of our contacts, Sokly. Sokly currently lives in Phnom Penh while she studies at university. However, she often visits her family. Sokly has spent many hours studying at the Bible Education Centre. Despite her poor English skills, Sokly has shown sincere interest in the Bible and asked many pertinent and heart-searching questions. She is very sweet and caring and sincere in her wish to do “the good thing”. She is the only Christian in her village. Many villagers believe that Christians and Christianity are bad and that Sokly has made a very
bad choice and as a result they often discriminate against her.However, when we visited Sokly’s village on 17th November, the villagers were very warm, welcoming and interested. They asked many questions and seemed to enjoy having westerners visit their village. We were unable to give Bible lessons but found that this was a good chance to show the villagers that people who believe the Bible are real, kind and friendly. We pray that our heavenly Father will open their hearts so that Sokly can feel safe to continue studying the Bible and have opportunity to share Bible truths with them.
Kampong Thom river... view out of window of our ptear somnaq(guest house)
Visiting So Veasna
Stoung (Pronouced Stone and writen however the local authorities feel approprete at the time) is in Kampong Thom Province, about 50 km from the Kampong Thom City. We were unaware of the 50km when we set out Sunday morning to spend the day with So Veasna. We imagined it was quite close so we left half our belongings behind and hired a tuk-tuk for the day. Over an hour and a half later we arrived in Stoung – just a little longer than expected! It was a lovely drive though, past fluorescent green rice fields, brown rice fields (ready for harvest), ox-drawn carts, 4-year-old boys rounding up about 5 cows single-handed, and friendly villagers.We arrived, expecting to spend the rest of the day doing Bible study with Veasna but soon found out that he had other plans. We spent the morning sight-seeing. First we were taken to the local market and introduced to all his friends and students who work there. Then he took us to a Khmer Rouge memorial spot. Then it was time for him to teach English to his students and request us to help – whoever heard of going to English School on a Sunday? The students were all very attentive and we had at least 3 buddhist monks in each class. We took our 20 minute slots to tell the students why we’re in Cambodia and invite them to the Bible Education Centre. Some students seemed interested so hopefully there will be some fruit from this.
By the time we’d finished teaching the lessons it was 7pm. So we persuaded Veasna to come back to Kampong Thom City with us so that we could give him some Bible lessons the next day. Another 1½ hour tuk-tuk ride, this time in the dark which was quite chilly (I know that word doesn’t usually fit with Cambodia)The next day we spent a couple of hours studying the Bible with Veasna and received an hour’s lesson on the history of Cambodia and the Kampong Thom Province – did you know that Kampong Thom was still a war zone until 1998?
So, although we didn’t spend much time studying the Bible we made some contact with possible future students and built on our relationship with Veasna. We pray that our heavenly Father will cause the seeds to grow.
On the way home we were offered a delicious snack - fresh Tarantula - Chingung!
PS I paid 2000 riel for this photo - yes I was taken for a ride but the only reason I fell for it was because the girl has a bizarre resemblence to Min Nolan - look again
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