Party Like a Rock Star!!!

On Thursday, we finished laying the pavers, skimming the borders and sweeping the sand into the gaps. It was exhausting work, but we were treated very well. The kids are so amazing; they treat us like rock stars – clinging to us, carrying our bags for us, wiping our faces with cold towels, bringing us water, giving us massages, handing us our shoes…even putting them on our feet for us like worshiping servants. We’re celebrities here! Now I know what it feels like to be a rock star!

We had planned to give Rataa (orphanage director) one of our laptop computers with copies of all of our photos so the kids would have a permanent collection of all the photos we took…I mean they took! Thursday morning, he suggested we have a “picture party” that night with popcorn & soda and watch a slideshow of the previous week’s work. Unfortunately, none of our laptops had an HDMI output nor did we have an RCA adapter with us. So, John asked Rataa to drive us to the computer store to see if we could find one. When John mentioned this, Rataa said he'd also like to price a few computers while we were there - he mentioned three or four times to John that he need really needed one. When we told him we’d planned to leave him a laptop, he was so grateful; he said that he had been praying everyday for a computer.

Since, amazingly enough, we finished ahead of schedule, we headed back to the hotel around 3:00 to clean up. After grabbing a few supplies, we were back at the orphanage by 5:00 for dinner with Pastor Vek and his wife and the “picture party” afterwards.

For those of you who aren’t aware, Pastor Vek and his wife, Samoeun, worked for Campus Crusade for Christ prior to the revolution in 1975. They narrowly escaped death several times, either from starvation or from execution during the Khmer Rouge's bloody four year reign. He and Samoeun escaped to Thailand with a tiny group of other survivors in 1979. They emigrated to the U.S. and lived in Long Beach until 1991. He said he and Samoeun asked each other why they had survived when so many others had been killed; he said the only answer they could come up with was maybe God wasn't finished using them. When Cambodia “opened back up” to outsiders, he and Samoeun moved back to Cambodia as staff members of Campus Crusade for Christ. Around 2002, he left Campus Crusade and founded New Life Missions in Phnom Penh. Since then, they have expanded from one church to fourteen, started four orphanages (Battambang’s was the first) and purchased one radio station from which they broadcast 10 hours a day – 7 in Khmer & 3 in English, including messages from Charles and Andy Stanley.

After dinner, he thanked us for our help and support. He said that when he was a boy, he was the only Christian in his whole school. Everyone, including the teachers, used to make fun of him and call him “Jesus” as a derogatory name. Back then, there was no such thing as a Christian Cambodian - if you weren’t Buddhist, you weren’t considered Cambodian. He said that is slowly changing. He explained that one of the goals of New Life Mission is to have 5,000 people commit to sharing Christ’s message with someone new every week. They calculate that 5,000 x 52 = over a quarter of a million new Cambodian Christians a year.

All week, we had given the kids our cameras and let them take as many pictures as they wanted. So after a bit of ice cream & cookies, we set up the laptop to play a slideshow of all their photos on the widescreen TV. They got a huge kick out of the pictures they’d taken of themselves - we had almost 2,500 pictures!!! After about two hours, thankfully, Rataa said it was past their bedtime and the party came to an end; otherwise, we’d still be there looking at pictures.