Villager Spotlight: Steve Tangsombatvisit Cambodia 2008

Hi EV, I’m really new to this site, learned about you from the TimBeTold concert. Anyways, i thought i share a story about a missions trip i went on last year.. Hope you enjoy it.

9 Days In Cambodia

Well. I can’t really believe that it was only two weeks ago when I was halfway around the world playing with orphan kids, traveling on dirt roads and moving bricks. I wished I’ve had more time to reflect and think about the trip, but since getting back, things have just been moving so damn fast with work, family, church and just life in general that I really haven’t had time to think about Cambodia, pretty much since getting off the plane at SFO. Our plane touched down around 1PM, and I get a call from my boss at around 1:30PM PST (welcome home Steve!)

Anyways, it’s impossible to fit all I want to say, all that I experienced in one blog entry, but I’m gonna try. (This is gonna be gigantically long). It’s gonna be impossible to fit all the pictures, but again, i’ll try to select the best ones for you guys. (Links to all of the photos will be on the bottom).

Before I start, just want to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who supported me. Whether financially, through prayer, through advice, through encouragement or just by being a friend, I really appreciated it all and it touched me deeply that you all were so willing to support me in this endeavor. THANKS!! Hopefully I have seen you all by now and have given you a little token of my appreciation, if not, I’ll make sure i see you soon.

Alright, so without further ado, let’s do this. Here we go.

Day 1 – Fly out of SFO – 01:00 AM PST June 20
This is our team, minus two (one member who flew into Cambodia earlier, the other is taking this picture, we have not figured out how to use a tripod yet). And on the left hand side is the sendoff party. Even though it was ridiculously late on a workday, a lot of people came to see us off. Thanks!



Flight to Hong Kong took about fourteen hours and then a connecting flight from HK to Phnom Penh, Cambodia took another three hours or so. I slept through most of the flight and then watched one of my favorite movies Man on Fire (Denzel Washington) to pass the time (kind of appropriate I thought, man goes to strange country to look after a kid). After who knows how many timezone changes, and who knows how many hours pass, we land in Phnom Penh, capitol of Cambodia.

Day 2 – Killing Fields, Garbage Dump, Toul Sleng Museum – June 22
We hit the ground running in Cambodia. The first day was dedicated to learning about the history and culture of the country. Cambodia has a pretty horrific recent history. It’ll take a whole blog entry to describe it properly, but basically in the mid-late 1970′s a mass genocide knocked off an estimated three million Cambodians. The genocides were ordered by Pol Pot, the communist ruler of the Khmer Rouge. The majority of the people killed were scholars, engineers, teachers, doctors , and other working professionals. Killing off an entire generation of working class individuals set the country back decades and intellectually, back to the dark ages. These killings happened between 1975 and 1978, so three million people dead in three years, which was approximately 30% of the population.

The first place we are taken to after a quick stop for lunch is the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh. The Killing Fields was one of the places where mass graves were found.









In the pictures above you can see the mass graves and some of the signs that were placed in various places in the field where the atrocities took place. One of our team members said later that you could feel the ‘evilness’ in the air as he walked though the fields. I don’t know if I would go that far but walking through that field… it hard to describe the feeling, but it felt a little other-worldly… In the last two pictures, I tried to capture how peaceful and beautiful the place was. Very green, lots of trees. The place is so serene, so tranquil, so peaceful, yet not a long time ago, a massive amount of blood stained the same grounds we walked and took pictures on today.

After the experience at the Killing Fields, we went to a village that resided on a garbage dump.



The road leading up the village/dump was flooded (above, top-left) and it took some effort for the van to maneuver through the road. Once there, we saw people , literally, living on piles of trash (every other picture).

This was the first time during the trip in which I wondered, how can these people live like this? I my shallow American centric view of life, I just can’t fathom how people just live in the stench, with flies buzzing around, picking at trash all day for things that might be of worth to sell. It sucked. I wanted to get out of there five seconds after I stepped out, but I didn’t want to look like a wimp in front of the others so, i stepped out and walked around for a bit. Every moment of it was painful.

A couple thoughts did strike me though. I realize how much pride Cambodians have. I mean, you look at all the panhandlers in San Francisco and how they don’t even try to make a living. And here you have people with less than the SF homeless still gamely trying to make a living. Even amongst the poverty, these people have the dignity to at least try to support themselves. These people are not just sitting at the dump all day begging, they are digging through trash, looking for things they can sell or eat. (Not just at the dump, but in the villages as well). If this was me, I probably would give up on life. Here are two more shots (courtesy of Jen Sr. using w/o permission) that provide a more personal touch. A kid at the dump and a mom and her baby, all living in the dump. The kids there spend all day picking through trash.



After spending what seemed like an eternity at the garbage dump (even though it was only fifteen minutes max), we went to the last destination of the day the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. The museum was a former high school, which was transformed into a security prison during the genocide years. An estimated twenty-thousand people were held and tortured there and later shipped to be executed from this location.

Seeing some of the photographs of victims of the genocide really (finally) added a personal touch to the genocides. Before seeing this, to me, the mass killings were (more or less) just a number. Even after seeing the killing fields, I don’t think I really realize what the genocide years did to Cambodia. But now, seeing actual photographs of victims, seeing where they were held and capture, it dawned on me that entire generation of families were destroyed, real actual people with real lives were killed for no good reason. The photograph that got to me is the one on top-right, picture of some of the children victims. WTF? What kind of sick people kill children? A surge of anger went into as I thought that all the while this is going on, that no one did anything to stop it. Where was the United States? How in the world could NO ONE know about what was going on??

Seeing Toul Sleng sucked the rest of the life out of me. Being bombarded by death, torture, poverty, and more death can do that to a person. By the end of the day I was pretty much ready to hop onto a plane and get the hell out of Cambodia. I mean, what the heck were we doing here? It was depressing, numbing and I could not help feeling hopeless and helpless, I felt like crawling into a hole and just staying there forever…. And this was only the beginning of the trip.

In hindsight though, I think seeing those sites, though painful, was necessary in helping us understand Cambodia. I would not have been able to understand some of the things we saw down the line if we did not see those sites. On the first day we saw the past, and the rest of the trip would be about the present and the future.

Day 3 – New Hope For Orphans Phnom Penh Church/Driving – June 23
Day three started with a church service at the Phnom Penh orphanage. I honestly was not sure what to expect about a Cambodian church service, after all, i have been going to GRX Fremont services pretty much all my Christian life. When we stepped through the gates and I heard the song Here I Am To Worship being done in Khmer, it struck me that this is just like home… except, that it wasn’t. To see people openly praising and worshipping God in another language halfway around the country, impacted me a lot, it sent a chill down my spine. I mean, i guess I hear all the time about Christianity being practiced all around the world, I listen to all the Christian songs about going off and spreading the word in Africa (thank you, Caedmon’s Call), but to see it in it’s reality… for some reason, it was a sort of an awakening for me. Realizing that God is not just in Fremont, California , but all around the world. Wow.



The worship team and the orphan kids doing a skit/dance/drama/strama for us. (Right picture taken from Jen Sr, again without permission).So after the sermon, the kids came out to play with us. I was a little bit hesitant cause I hate kids (no no no, just kidding, I love kids). Seriously though, working with kids is not one of my strong points. However, the Cambodian kids are so friendly and happy and nice that I couldn’t help myself but have fun. I think the entire team took about a thousand pictures in about forty minutes. I didn’t even bother taking pictures, I just gave my camera to one of the orphan kids and had him take pictures for me (my personal photographer). Here are some of my favorite pictures from the day.



L. Kids having fun. More later on the girl in the pink dress.
R. Take a look at the eyeballs in this picture. I think four cameras were pointing at the at the same time, hence no one knew where to look.



L. The taller kid is the one i let borrow my camera. I think by end of day, he was a better photographer than I was. Most pictures you see with me in them is because this kid took them… For the record, every single orphan under the age of 15 will be referred to as ‘kid’. Since i don’t remember much names.
R. I have one kid on my back, holding up another one with my arm in front and still smiled for this picture. I think i now know how Brad Pitt feels like.



L. I teach the kids the peace sign.
R. This girl was on the shy side (compared to the other kids), but she was the first one to just walk to me and give me a hug for no reason. I don’t think you can teach love like that. (Shot by Jen Jr).



L. The girl in the pink dress name is Sara. I think she was my favorite. (Hence four pictures of her). I know we were not suppose to have favorites, but oh well… She liked piggy back rides, heights and jumping on me. When we came back the second time, she remembered me but I did not remember her. Still more on her later.
R. The older kids liked playing soccer…. More on soccer later.

… And there are just too many pictures to put up. If you want to see more pictures, please refer to the album links below where you can see EVERY SINGLE PICTURE from EVERY SINGLE CAMERA from the trip.

After church service, we hit the road, our hearts full of joy for seeing the orphans so happy and friendly. We would drive 6 hours to the next orphanage in a province called Banteay Meanchey, about 30 kilometers from the Thai border. We arrived in the late evening, did a short skit for them and then went to bed. We enter the hardest part of the trip, sleeping at the orphanage. The guys slept outside on a hardwood floor under the stars, with the misquitoes and with nature… For all you outdoor lovers, it was not what you thought. We were hot, we were sweaty and there were bugs all around. There seemed to be like a million dogs barking and howling doing who knows what… I slept seven minutes, maybe eight minutes that night… It was the longest night of my life.

Day 4 – Banteay Meanchey – June 24
We all woke up pretty early this day, I think me around 5AM. The itinerary for the day was some field games with students at a local school and then a presentation for the teachers about the validity of Christianity.



L. The school was for all grades, elementary to high school.
R. We played games like tag, capture the flag and soccer with the kids. (Here the setup for capture the flag). The students were on the shy side and never really warmed up to us, the country kids were less outgoing than the ones we met in the city the day before..



L. We played tag with them. (Look at Jen Jr run).
R. .. And taught them about Micheal Jackson… His dancing of course.



L. And of course, futbol. Let me tell you something. There is hard physical activity, there is very hard physical activity, there is transcendently hard physical activity, and then there is playing soccer with a bunch of Cambodian teenagers in 95 degrees heat and 98% humidity with no shade or water in sight… This was for me, the hardest physical thing I did on the trip… I almost died out there. And the Cambodian kids, wanting to be nice, kept on passing me the ball even though I could do jack squat with it. The game lasted about thirty minutes (it seemed much longer), and i was exhausted after three minutes. I was at the point where every time the ball got to me, i just kicked it as hard as possible so the game would stop and I could catch my breath. I didn’t really care where the ball went. I was so thankful when they called timeout for a break.
R. And another funny soccer story… Jen Sr thought she was Mia Hamm for a moment and kicked a ball towards the goal…. only that it missed the goal (by about 10 ft) and hit a bicycle rack instead, causing a domino effect in which rows of bicycles fell down, just like in the comedies….. GOAL!!!!!!



After the soccer and gamesfest, we went into a classroom and did some singing and an arts & crafts project with the students. Richard Hart led the students in making a bracelet that symbolized Jesus and salvation. After that Michelle Chun lead them in doing some songs.

After the morning session at the school, we took a short break, went back to the orphanage for lunch and then came back for the PM session.



L. The afternoon activity would be a presentation about the validity of Christianity to the teachers of that school.
R. Min and the translator.

The presentation was about two hours long and the teachers asked a lot of tough questions. It was kind of hard for me to follow though with all the translation going on and our translator had a tendency to interject his own thoughts into the message, so I am not even exactly sure what was said. Afterwards we went back to the orphanage for dinner and to hangout with the kids.

Some thoughts on the last two days. The kids here grow up way differently than the kids back home. Here, the kids are tougher, most having to fight for themselves and fend for themselves. I guess if you grow up without a mom or dad, you really have no choice. One scene told me we were no longer in America, I was watching some of the kids (all ages) play a game in which they tried to knock a pingpong ball off a water bottle blindfolded (yes, i know, we are in Cambodia). If you are able to knock the ball off, you got a piece of candy. There was about twenty kids and one caretaker monitoring the game (and handing out the candy) and I notice that there was absolutely no mercy in this game. You had to knock the ball completely off, you cannot cheat by looking, you cannot cross the line, if you did any of those things wrong, you lost. And if you lost, the caretaker screamed at the kid to “Get back to the end of the line and try again, no candy for you!!”.. And the kids, some really young, would not cry, complain or anything, just go back to the end of the line and try again. Some did this for five/six times before they got their piece of candy… I honestly thought the treatment was kind of harsh, i mean one kid had like a half a foot over the line and they kicked her out. No such thing as pity, no second chances, no false building up of self-esteem, in Cambodia, you earn everything. Compare this to how spoiled American kids are, well you can see the difference.

In another example, during my second soccer game, one kid (about six years old) got nailed in the face with a soccer ball. Did the game stop so that we could take care of the kid? No way! I mean, i stopped because i thought everyone else was, but then everyone else was running the other way with the ball, no one even bothered to check up on the kid, I think someone yelled for him to get his ass off the field, but that’s it. The kid did not cry or anything, he stayed down for like five seconds, and then got back up and rejoined the game, if that had happen to me, i probably would have given up soccer.

It is kind of sad actually, that these kids are forced to grow up so fast here (learn to fend for yourself, depend on yourself, fight for yourself at a very young age) they don’t really have any sort of childhood. But i think this is why they really appreciate it when they get a chance to be just kids. Like when we came and did the songs and crafts for them, i was wondering if some of the older kids would think that the things we did were stupid or childish (imagine trying to get a class of 8th graders to sing together), but no, everyone participated and everyone genuinely seemed to have a good time. That is why i think there is so much joy at both orphanages, when the kids played , danced and laughed with us, it gave kids the chance to be kids.

Day 5 – Pursat Day 1 – Building Day 1 – June 25
Day 6 – Pursat Day 2 – Building Day 2 – June 26
Day 7 – Pursat Day 3 – Building Day 3 – June 27
Day 8 – Pursat Day 4 – Building Day 4/Seeing future occupants of our work – June 28

So I am lumping the next four days together because they were very similar. On the 25th, we left Banteay Meanchay (thank GOD, no more camping), and headed back into the mini-city/town of Pursat. We check into a hotel and never have I been so happy to see a mattress. The next four days or so would be dedicated to the ‘building an orphanage’ part of the trip. I don’t think any of us really knew what ‘building an orphanage’ meant and what kind of work it entailed, we were about to find out.



The first picture (left) is what the site looked like when we first started (i’ll show you an after picture later). We would be working with some Cambodian construction workers, basically doing just what needed to be done….



What needed to be done was to move a lot of brick and a lot of stone from one area to another area. We literally spend a good two days doing that. You see that pile of brick in the left picture, we move about six piles that big from one area to another. Then you see that pile of rock on the right hand side? We then moved those rock from the side of the road to another part of the plot where they were to be used later as foundation for the building. No where was a wheelbarrow, wagon or bulldozer found. They would not be invented in Cambodia for another five years.





Top Left : Me moving bricks
Top Right : Lina moving bricks
Bottom Left : Alvin moving bricks
Bottom Right : Me putting down bricks
I was gonna put more pictures of the team moving brick, but i’m just gonna assume that, by now, you guys get the picture of what kind of work we did.

The working conditions, for a group of 70 degrees loving Californians, was less than ideal. In the morning it was hot as hell and humid as hell and then in the afternoon it would rain and we would have to work in the mud for a couple hours. We were thankful for the rain cause it dropped the temperature a little bit. Combine that with the physical nature of the work, i think i dropped about five pounds in three days. Water never tasted so good. I think it’s a good testament of our team that no one complained, griped or whine (at least outwardly) during the three days of hard labor. Looking back, I also see that God protected us that no one got hurt. We were working in a hardhat area without any hardhats. The ground was slippery and wet, we were lugging around 50lb rocks, the ground was uneven and sketchy machinery was being operated very close to us. It is kind of a miracle that no one got injured.. My back didn’t even hurt after it was all said and done.

It was hard. It was tough. But amidst the conditions, we still found ways to have fun and enjoy ourselves.



We drank coconut juice (kind of overrated, i thought it tasted very bland)



L. We climbed trees.
R. We flipped.



L. We cartwheeled.
R. We took pictures with skinny cows.



L. We took pictures of other people taking pictures.
R. We … well, I am not exactly sure what these two are doing, but it looks like fun.

After three days, approximately twenty hours of hard labor, many bug bites, cuts and scratches, this is the end result.

Admittedly, it’s nothing spectacular, but I don’t think that’s the point. We contributed to the foundation of the building, which will be finished up when we are gone. They expect to finish it in 3-4 months, hopefully they will take pictures and send them to us so we can see what became of our work.



Group pic on the last day. Everyone is dirty, tired but happy (I think). We also carve our names into a tree as a reminder that we were there when it all began. Hopefully this tree is not cut down for firewood anytime soon.

On the last day of building , we headed to the Pursat orphanage to see the future habitants of the building we were building. Currently, these orphans live in nothing more than a two-story shack (boys on one floor, girls on the other). Of all the orphanages we visited, this one was the one in the worst condition (one of the reasons why we decided to sponsor and help with the building of a new orphanage in the area). It was literally, nothing more than a gigantic shack. We see that once again, amid the squalid (I am reaching deep into my vocabulary for this update) conditions, happiness, love and God, still existed.



L. The kids here (as in the other orphanages) were extremely respectful and well behaved.
R. They danced and they sang for us.



L. When we left, they said a prayer for us.
R. Some friends I made. The dude in the middle’s name is ChaiYa and he is eighteen.

I have a neat story about the guy in the middle. When we had finished our program and was just hanging out with the kids, this guy comes up to me and starts asking me questions in English. For Cambodian kids, this guy spoke pretty good English. He asked me things like what’s my name, what’s my age, where do I live in the United States, what sports do I like… After a while, I started thinking it was kind of odd , maybe he was just really curious about Americans, who knows. Then he offers to take me on a tour of the orphanage so he goes and shows me around. He shows me the kitchen, the sleeping area, the shower, everything. At the end of the tour as we sat chatting, he said that the day before, he had prayed for my arrival. This actually confused me a bit, cause I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant (or what to say back). Then he goes on to explain that for a long time, he had been taking English lessons and that he had wanted someone to be able to practice his English. He says that he is usually shy about going up to strangers so when I approached him, he knew it was God answering his prayers. Through me. Wow, I was speechless for a bit, that caught me off guard. Such faith. And it was encouraging to me as well, that I had made the right decision to come (cause I was wondering a bit about what we were doing on this trip). What are you suppose to say when someone says that you are the answer to his prayers?

I plan to write to the guy soon, the next action item on my plate after finishing this megablog is to write to this guy and see if we can build any type of relationship.

Break – Reflection and Food
Reflecting back on the first 75% of the trip. (This is after coming back home and taking everything in, these thoughts did not form when we were there). I think from the onset, it does look kind of silly to go halfway across the world to spend just three days building an orphanage. I mean, what exactly did we expect to accomplish? What was the point? And it’s not like we did a lot of work (I mean, we worked a lot, but in terms of overall accomplishment, not so much, I’m guessing the nine of us did in three days, what a good construction crew can do in half a day with the proper equipment and training. IE, a wheelbarrow? unloading the bricks in the correct location and NOT having to move them a second time?)

And the other work we did, playing with orphans and teaching them to sing and dance, what exactly did that accomplish? Would it have been better and more practical to take the two grand each of us spent on the trip and just send the money directly to the charities? Wouldn’t that had helped more in the long run? At the end of the trip we would have done very little to solve the ‘problems’, the orphans still be orphans, the poor still poor, the lame still lame, poverty will still run amuck in Cambodia. What was the point? I struggled with this a little bit (over there and coming back).

But it’s starting to make sense a little bit, I’ll quote from one of my favorite musicians, Sara Grovesabout her song The Long Defeat (about missionary work) she says “There are many losing battles worth investing, in, simply because winning is not the point.” The first time I heard that quote, i thought it was a cool quote but now, I think I’m beginning to understand what it actually means. Sometimes we can’t look just at the big picture, but instead we must look at the small picture. And sometimes, it’s not about the ‘ends’ but it is really about the ‘means’, and for a very ‘ends’ oriented person like myself, that’s something hard to digest. Us being there (hopefully) touched lives in ways we do not know about, and may never know about, but we know that they were. I’m not sure everyone can understand that unless you were there and you saw the happiness in the orphan children’s faces as the danced, played and sang with us, the smile on their faces, the look in their eyes… It’s just too hard to describe. We may never know the full impact what our presence those nine days in Cambodia had, but we take faith that there is some impact, and one day we hope to find out what it is.

I’ll end this portion with a quote from Mother Teresa (taken from liner notes of Sara Groves (again)Add To Beauty album).

You can do no great things, just small things with great love.

Alright… Fun subject time. Everyone has asked me this question. What kind of food did we eat there??? Well. Wonder no more!! For the record, I am not sure what ‘Cambodian’ food is. We ate a lot of noodles, rice, stir fried and a lot Thai food (since Cambodia is neighbor to Thailand). I think we avoided the ‘real’ Cambodian food because it might make us sick… And just for the record, we did not eat any dogs, cats, squirrels or rats.

Here’s what we ate.



L. Fried chicken. All the chicken we ate were skinny and had very little meat on it. I guess the chicken of Cambodia, like the people, are very skinny.
R. Vegetable fried rice… Yummy.



L. Seafood soup and some filet fish.
R. Typical breakfast for us. Egg, bread and coffee.



L. I LOVED the peppers they had there. They gave us these for almost every meal and I ate them with almost every dish. You mix the red peppers with this type of soy sauce they give you and dip everything in it. SO GOOD. If I could have gotten them through customs, I would have brought a boatload back with me. (Sidenote. I had stomach problems for a week after getting back. Thank you peppers).
R. Coffee and condensed milk.



L. One american restaurant called Hagar’s in Phnom Penh served good american food. This is some fish dish.
R. Chicken Cordon Bleu. (about $6 US)



L. Ice cream! We spend two days trying to get ice cream from this one quickie mart in Pursat. The first time we went it was closed, the second time, they ran out of ice cream. We finally got some back in Phnom Penh. Look how happy Jen is.
R. Some of the girls sampled the local beer…. Without me… Damn you guys.



L. We had sweet rice fruit wrapped in banana leaf for dessert one day. It was good.
R. We drank a variety of interesting soda (Lychee flavor, soursop flavor etc etc).



L. We ate a variety of fruit as well.
R. Mangosteens! So good.



L. Rammatron (sp?) fruit..
R. I ate my first and last durian in Cambodia. There’s nasty, there’s very nasty, there’s transcendently nasty, and then there’s eating durian. It was gross. Quite possible one of the grossest things I did in my life.



L. By the end of the trip I was craving American food. They had this burger joint there called Lucky Burger
R. And of course, in the burger joint, they served pizza.



L. At Bantaey Meanchay we ate noodles at this very good village hut restaurant.
R. And lastly, we drank a lot of fruit shakes there. Pineapple, apple, banana, coconut, watermelon, papaya, you name a tropical fruit, we had the drink.

Day 9 – Kompong Chnang, Russian Market… And Karaoke?!?! – June 29

Home stretch time! One thing that’s really amazing to me is that I am typing these events up almost two week after getting back from the trip and the details are still very fresh. As if they are burned into my mind. I mean, i still remember what we did, what day and where…. Anyways, two more days to go.

Day 9 saw us done with Pursat and we drive to see the last of the four orphanages. This one in Kompong Chnang, is about 70 kilometers from Phnom Penh and we spent about 2 hours there playing games with the orphans and just hanging out with them.



L. We played games with them
R. They did a dance for us.

So admittedly, I don’t have much to share about this visit. It was short (about 2hrs), pretty much a hit and run visit. Let’s move on, shall we?

After Kompong Chnang, we had pretty much finish up all the tasks on our itinerary for the trip. The rest of the trip was suppose to give the team some timeoff to rest, reflect and do some shopping and sightseeing. We first head back to Phnom Penh, after we got there, we went to Cafe Yejj, a quaint little place that had really good fruitshakes. Cafe Yejj has a very positive story, the cafe is run by charitable group who’s aim it is to provide skills training and employment in catering and hospitality to women from high risk and vulnerable backgrounds. It’s encouraging to know that people like the Yejj Group are doing things in Cambodia to help the citizens. That’s just encouraging to hear.



L. Cafe Yejj
R. We lounge there for a bit, enjoying the air conditioning and the fruit shakes.

After relaxing at Yejj, the team prepares for some shopping at the Russian Market or ,as I like to call it, preparing for war. It’s almost impossible for me to describe the Russian Market, but let me try. Imagine a huge warehouse, bout the size of a city block, and then inside that warehouse there are all types of little shops and restaurants. And it’s not organize row by row, it’s like a huge maze inside. And the lighting was pretty bad. And it’s hot as hell in there, no ventilation, no windows, no emergency exits, if a fire would have broke out in there (high probability, considering some of the stuff they were selling), everyone dies…

But still, the prices were ‘low’ so we risk our lives to buy T-shirts three-for-five dollars. I have no pictures since I didn’t bring my camera, only my money, since the place was suppose to have pickpockets and thieves… (the things we do for low prices). I go in there and do all my shopping in half an hour flat, i bought gifts for all my supporters and I didn’t mugged or die of exhaustion in the process. Thank you.



L. Inside of Russian Market
R. Inside of Russian Market.

After winning the battle with the Russian Market, we rest up. That night, as a celebration for the completion of the missions trip we decided to go karaoke. Across the hotel where we were staying in, there was a establishment that seemed to be a ‘karaoke’ place. I say ‘seem to be’ because we suspected other ‘shady’ activities went down in the building as well. So we send in our mighty leader Min to scout the place out for us and see if it’s appropriate for us to go in there for a night of fun. After what seemed like forever, he okays it and we go in for karaoke.



L. This is the building from the outside. It’s huge. Reminds me of a Las Vegas casino.
R. They didn’t allow cameras inside (because of the probable shady activities), but we snuck one in and took this shot.

Karaoke was fun. They had a good choice of American songs along with Khmer, Chinese and Korean songs. Our Cambodian friends sang some Cambodian songs, there was a rousing rendition of ‘My Heart Will Go On’, I dropped Lifehouse’s Hanging by a Moment, it was a lot fun. I good way to cap the ending of the trip. On a side note, I really wanted to do Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day, but they didn’t have it. In a strange way, I feel it symbolizes a lot of the people in Cambodia.

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don’t know where it goes
But it’s home to me and I walk alone

A lot of people think that song is depressing, but I don’t. (I feel it’s actually kind of encouraging). To me, it’s about defiance and pressing on regardless of the situation , win or lose. And I think that describes a lot of Cambodians, that despite the poverty, despite the horrid past and the bleak future, these people don’t give up, they press on, what they press on to, they don’t know, but they press on regardless. (See the people at the garbage dump and the kid from Pursat that I talked to). And I think it’s our job to make sure they know they are not walking this road alone and to help them along.

Day 10 – Phnom Penh Church and Sightseeing – June 30

Our last full day in Cambodia. The day started like how our first full day in Cambodia started, church service at the Phnom Penh orphanage.



L. The musicians on the team did a short two-song set for the congregation.
R. A french dude spoke this day… Ironically enough, his sermon was about being servants of God and being willing to go wherever God calls us to serve.

After the service, we once again play with the orphans. It was much like the first time, again I’m just gonna post a bunch of pictures.


L. Me with some boys, examining my camera.
R. Lina kidnapping a bunch of kids.



L. Min playing pingpong with the older orphans. Some of them are pretty good.
R. Jen teaches them some hand games.



L. Sherry, smile, your in Cambodia
R. Me and Lina compare kids on us.



L. We teach them gang signs.
R. Here’s me giving a ride to the same girl I met the first time. She actually remembered me.



Last picture of an orphan. Here’s Sara again (my fave, haha). She is actually not really an orphan and by that I mean she has a mom. (In hindsight, I should have known this, she was dressed a lot better than most of the other kids.) I found this out while I was giving her a ride on my shoulder and she pointed to someone and said “MOM!” I talked to her mom a little bit, it was hard to communicate (obviously), but she kept saying ‘thank you’ to me. She must have told me ‘thank you’ about twenty times in three minutes, I don’t know if she’s really thankful or if that’s the only English words she knows, i’m guessing a little bit of both. Even though I didn’t understand what she was saying, I could tell she was happy from seeing her daughter so happy. I don’t know why, but it made me happy to know that Sara has a mom (happiness abounds!), I at least know someone is taking care of her and that made me feel happy.

And that was it. We leave the orphanage once and for all. After a quick lunch, we head down to the river to take pictures and see some sights.



L. Queens Palace.
R. I think this is a casino. Or university.



L. Four Faces River. This is the area where four rivers collide.
R. Flags by the riverside.



L. I find the only lazy Cambodian in Cambodia.

Final Words

Well, there it is. Nine days in Cambodia, my journal for the entire trip. If you read the whole thing… Well, then I applaud you. I actually had a lot of fun typing this one out and selecting pictures and taking a trip down memory lane, even though I was in Cambodia less than 2 weeks ago. I really enjoyed punching this update out, hope you guys had as much fun reading it as I did writing it.