Cambodia Bible Education Centre

Just for a change, we’ve had another holiday over here, but with any luck it should be the last for a while. The annual Water Festival normally means celebrations, fireworks, and most of all, dragon boat racing in Phnom Penh (on the Tonle Sap River, that is, not in the streets, although we nearly managed it this year). However, the normal festivities of Water Festival were cancelled this year, somewhat ironically, due to the over-abundance of water! The government announced that the money normally spent on the festival would be re-directed to assisting those displaced by the floods and repairing flood damage. For us, the five-day weekend meant a chance to travel with Sisters Nirath and Sokhorn to their home in Kratie province, six or seven hours drive north from Phnom Penh. Nirath arranged the transport—our first experience at travelling by shared taxi-van (shared in the sense of sharing your seat, your legroom, and a good chunk of your personal space with a fair number of other peop...

Rasmey invited us to her niece's wedding. This being the first wedding that we had been to in Cambodia, we were not really sure what we were in for, but we were in for it regardless! Rasmey dressed for the occasion First of all, the preparations: Bible class was cancelled so that all the girls would have time to put on their make-up, together with fake eyelashes, fake fingernails, fake hair, and anything else deemed necessary to be make oneself sufficiently beautiful to attend a wedding. We decided that we would go out on moto as it seemed the easiest way to get to Rasmey's house, out past the Phnom Penh airport. We left with Vitou and Danny but some how we lost them when a big truck pulled out in front of us, so after successfully navigating our way we arrived at the wedding long before anyone else we knew. Mercifully, the wedding marquee was located in the front yard of their house, rather than sprawling across the street as is the normal practice---the st...

We didn't get a lot done last Wednesday. Anna and Vitou were busy teaching; after getting back from the dorm, I settled down to some admin, emails, blogs, and so forth, but within an hour or so the power was off. Blackouts aren't uncommon here, but they normally kick in at either 10:30am or 3:45pm-ish; this time it had barely gone 9:00. Unfortunately, electricity is relatively critical to the operation of the BEC: it keeps computers alive, and the freezer cold, but more importantly, it keeps the lower levels, where Anna and Vitou were in the middle of lessons, habitable, via lighting and fans. Cut the power to the downstairs teaching rooms, and a enlightening lesson immediately sinks in a black hole, where one can't see one's hand in front of one's face, let alone the words on a page. Within minutes of the fans stopping, touching a book will be unthinkable, due to the quantity of sweat that will have formed on one's hands. This time it was a long blackout, nea...