7th-13th Feb

Hello, greetings from Cambodia!
Sorry for the delayed blogging, but internet is still limited.

We had our first communion at church on Sunday, and felt a real sense of unity with the Khmer, and enjoyed the service. Later in the afternoon, we explored more of Poipet, visiting the local market, and continued to get our bearings in the town. The town is built up around a central highway, with a population of 150,000 people. The market is situated on one of the many unpaved side roads, full of potholes, dust and dirt; they get worse the further out you go. As we walked through some of the back streets shiny new 4 story buildings dwarf tin shacks, the contrast couldn't be greater, and rubbish litters the area.

We started our third week at CHO with our regular routine, which continued throughout the week. We start with the morning devotion. We are lucky to have so many English devotions (translated into Khmer of course) due to the many teams that come through CHO. Alex and Paul both led devotions, Alex's on Love and Paul's on The Sermon On The Mount. Unfortunately on Monday it was in Khmer so we've no idea what was being said, other than through the bible passage - even though we we all had different passages open, depending on our interpretation of the English translation(!), but it allows us to spend time first thing in the morning with God and preparing ourselves for the day. We then travelled to the safe haven (10mins) down the road to teach our English lessons and the bible class. This weeek we started a series of bible classes, looking at Jesus' life, starting at his birth, and we will continue to go through the main aspects of Jesus' teachings, death and resurrection over the next few weeks. We then continued the epic battle to teach 'safe haven baseball' - differing from the usual game, given the majority of the rules are lost in translation! We still dream of the day when we teach them cricket, and they understand it (by 'we' we mean Paul!),but this starts with teaching Calum! ('I get the jist of your inferior sport!' -Calum)

We continue to teach English in the weekday evenings to the CHO staff with ever increasing class sizes (for Alex! - totalling 24 to Paul and Calums 3 and 6!) This week we spent Monday and Tuesday working with the Agriculture team at CHO, where we are helping to construct a plant nursery at the end of the safe haven site. We have been moving rubble, and putting netting in place to protect the young plants from the intense sun; we have never fully realised that the expression 'dripping with sweat' could be an accurate description of ones predicament. We came across our first snake, but we are men, we can handle it (well most of us) and it got it's head mashed by the Khmer. On Wednesday and Thursday we vistied 2 more school on a mats, and had fun playing games and teaching songs to the kids.

We are still getting deeper into the Cambodian culture and history, and are looking forward to our week long holiday starting on the 20th, to Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. We spent this weekend in Bangkok on an implusive holiday with Sarah and Emily. We are still surprised at the stark contrast between Cambodia and Thailand, literally within seconds of leaving the border. In Bangkok we spent saturday looking round a market, and saw 'Avatar 3D' in the evening. It was good to return to Poipet on Sunday, and we felt like we were coming home.

Love to all at home. Keep the comments coming as we love to read them. 'Til next blog.