Merry Christmas Family and Friends

So a very Merrry Christmas I wish to family and friends. I miss you all much. But it's good to miss you...too often we "don't know what we've got till it's gone", to quote Joni Mitchell. The good news is that I'm alone, but not lonely (yet :). Actually, I'm not even alone very much, except in the evenings when I usually have a quick bite and come home to my apartment. And even then, I have the pleasure of skyping with Margie, doing some bible study and prayer together. It's a wonderful, strange feeling seeing your lovely wife and home from half the world away, and talking as if you're in the same room. 


Well, it's past time that I updated the blog. As I feared, it takes more discipline than I can apply to do this. Sorting through photos takes time, and sometimes uploading them is tedious. Also, days go by with lots of activity and if I don't write about events immediately, I forget a lot of great things. One that I'll share right now happened just this morning. After breakfast, I like to walk around the market area close to my house. I was about to pass a place in a large villa called "Room for Reading" when I thought, why not go in and see what this is about. I found a wonderful NGO--non governmental organization--from America. They have been developing literacy programs for about 10 years by providing beautiful books and building schools and libraries and training staff to promote reading. They have powerful programs in a number of south Asian and African countries. And they are going to give a Christmas present to my school: I'll bring the librarian, Chhavey, and the English teacher, Sovann, next week and they can choose tons of free, high quality books for the school! They are free of charge for public schools and ngo's. They have expensive books, like the Dorling Kinderley titles and lots of familiar children's books like, "Miss Nelson is Missing"...."Spitballs whizzed through the air...the kids in room 207 were misbehaving again"....ah the hundreds of times i read the story of the lovely miss nelson!

I'm not sure how folks in the tropics ever manage to get into the spirit of Christmas without snow, but somehow, they do. I had great fun at the Lighthouse Church Christmas celebration last Sunday afternoon from about 4 to 7pm. Wish I could post up the videos but the darned connection in my apartment is way too slow. I'll just post a photo or two. The second floor worship center was packed with lots of young people and some of us old folks too. The center is maybe 80 feet long by 30 feet wide and accommodates about 400 people. There's no airconditioning, but plenty of fans keep the room decent. They put on a nice program, with skits, traditional dance, recognizable Christmas carols, Khmer carols, a Christmas sermon, and lucky raffle winners. A live band played terrific music, Christian and later, dance tunes. Everyone had free drinks and veggie burgers :) 


At one point, we were standing and praying, when I noticed a lovely little face smiling up at me and pointing as if to say "Hey, it's me!!!" and indeed, it was she.....one of my students from the Community Learning Center. Later she brought me some candies and next day in school, told everyone that Mr. Kevin had been at her church.

Here are the lovely, but mean, ladies who forced me to reveal my dancing ineptitude.


After the celebration, they cleared out the chairs and a whole bunch of folks got into the favorite Cambodian passtime, group dancing. There are these favorite tunes that go on forever, like the song that never ends, and people love them. It's so much fun that I actually wish I didn't have two left feet. Yesterday, I was forced to display my leftfootedness at the Hagar staff Christmas party, when the teachers dragged me onto the dance floor. Thank the Lord I don't have a video of that!

Security Office 21, or S21 is the former high school turned into a torture chamber by the Khmer Rouge. Babies, girls, boys, men, women--more than 20,000 enemies of the state were slaughtered here between 1975 and 1979. These people were treated with diabolical cruelty. Babies were ripped from their mothers' arms and bayoneted. These pictures are the silent witness of the dead, many thousands of whom perished here. It is now called the Genocide Museum. You really don't know what to say as you pass through here and imagine the anguish of these poor victims. Yet now, many young people are not much aware of the Khmer Rouge and tuk tuk drivers promote it as a tourist attraction "I take you to killing fields", just business for them.

S21's 10 Commandments

About photos

I've included a pictures link on the right side of the page. I'll change the material on this link maybe once a week. I don't really have time to describe the photos, but you may enjoy just browsing through what has caught my eye. In this posting area, I'll try to put up a photo or video regularly and relate my impressions to it.

It's about dusk. This young lady sits high above a busy street, maybe 20 meters up, listening to her music, I suppose; no safety net.  . 

What I intend to do with this blog

My new office :)

I've found the perfect place to blog: a beautiful cafe with wifi, where I can get a decent meal for 5 bucks and sit all day blogging if I wish. The problem now is to figure out exactly what to say and how to manage this from day to day. I take a lot of pictures, too many to attend to each day. It's even difficult to find time to post them on the internet. Maybe what I'll do is choose just one picture/video of the day and use it as a springboard to give my impressions. 

So far, life is on the sunny side for me....though the Cambodians complain that it's too cold...winter here is an unbearable 30 during the day, dropping to an utterly frigid 22 at night. Though this is a very poor country, the poverty is not as visible as in say, Manila, where beggars abound at every street corner and people sleep on pieces of cardboard on the sidewalks. Maybe the laws here are very strict and perhaps the poor are pushed more out of sight. A lot of neighborhoods in this city have a very rich look. Plenty of huge, even palatial estate homes. Lots of new, modern businesses and facilities. I've walked through some very poor squatter areas along the railroad tracks, but as mentioned, these areas seem just out of sight. You could visit this city as a casual tourist and have the impression that most people are doing quite well. As to the prevalance of the sex trade, I haven't noticed too much yet. Have walked past a couple of sex bars, have guys calling out "You want lady" once in a while, but I've seen nothing yet of the really horrible side of life here.

Polo and friend

My first impression of Cambodia is of Polo, a tuktuk driver (motorcycle taxi) who greeted me with a friendly smile the moment I stepped out of my hotel. Of course, every tuktuk driver has a friendly smile, but Polo turned out to be a true friend. He speaks excellent English, which he has taught himself. When I told him that I'm in Cambodia to help children who have been abused in the sex trade, he proudly showed me the back of his shirt, which reads "Be a Responsible Tourist". It's provided to drivers by Ecpat, an anti-trafficking organization--a great omen to begin my work here with abused children. Polo showed me where Hagar, the Ngo I'm working with, is located. Then he took me on a tour of the city. Next day, he found me a great apartment near the school. Every couple days he texts me to see how I'm doing. Polo is 39; he was old enough to remember well the Khmer Rouge regime. They murdered his father, a doctor, and his mother.