Far bigger Christmas party

Sue with her mum just eight weeks ago

Sue's mum has been so looking forward to having Christmas with the NZ family this year. Sue's sister Kaye and her husband are over from Perth together with their daughter and her brand new shiney husband Dan, so this year is extra special.

A few days ago Sue's mum realised that she was just not well enough to make it to the party. Jesus had something far more special in mind for her. She had a really well day yesterday with lots of family and visitors - and gorgeous weather. Then she headed off to the party of all parties 4am-ish this morning - peaceful as.

We've booked to come home to honour one neat mum and be with family and friends. We leave here on Saturday and arrive in New Plymouth Sunday evening. Our three children will be there, having already planned a Bonnevie kids late Christmas reunion on the Monday. We'll get to gate-crash that as well!

For all those that have visited Keitha, prayed for her and been so gracious to us through this time - thank you so very much. God bless you each one!

Christmas party

That's Phanna nicely positioned at the front in his white shirt. We sat on low cushion squabs and it was fun. Yes, Susie could not resist footsie with Bonna opposite her.

On Sunday evening we headed to the Khmer-Thai restaurant for a dinner out with all our Healing Home staff and volunteers. We were 14 people - and just three whities in the group. We had such a fun night together - and for some this was their very first time ever at a real restaurant.

After dinner it was dessert time at Donnie and Sophea. The Khmer just love party games and little Sophea had asked me 'would you like some games - I have some ideas ...' So we kicked off with the old 'stomp on the balloons' before introducing our friends to the wonder of coke-floats and fruit salad Kiwi-style - together with ice-cream and cakes.

Susie cheating - as you all know that she does ...

The icing on the cake surely was the presents. I had a heap of fun with them as Donnie and Sophea's gift was reasonably large and all the other gifts were small sized. I explained that married couples get big presents and that next year we were hopeful that there would be many more large gifts. Our folk love to laugh and there were hoots and glances sideways ...

Pressies! Chantol and Bonna.

The laughter went up several notches when the Uno cards were brought out. The cards are the same, but they play differently - in a way that has them in constant hilarity! We had such fun watching our great team enjoy themselves so thoroughly.

We've been on the receiving end of some real generosity from friends in NZ and Australia. As a result, we have been able to honour our staff and volunteers - and we are so glad for this and grateful to you. Many, many thanks.

Uno - like I never did know

Team Toowoomba

The team (less Jiaren the photographer) - Stephane, Edna Will, Yew Meng, Andrea, Elana, Benjamin, Jason, Patrick, Andrix and Seng Yee.

Yew Meng and Elana, our good friends who lead a church-based ministry to international students in Toowoomba, arrived with 10 great folk last week. Most of the team members are uni students in Toowoomba. They are an international bunch - Singaporeans, Malaysians, Bruneians and Chinese.

In their five days here they ventured where no teams we know of had gone before - out to three provincial churches in the Kampong Cham area. Village outreaches are very different to here in the city, and they experienced the fair dinkum mckoy - booked into a rowdy Cambodian outback bar (they moved!!); an open-air Christmas outreach meeting at the end of a outright scary track that their van-driver charged into like a death-wish ... and more. Their prayer lives appear to have improved greatly ...

Their first few days were around town. I tagged along for their orientation morning with Karen Hanna (an amazing Aussie girl who organises the schedules for visiting teams) and discovered lots of stuff about the the church and various ministries .... after 18 months of being a part of the place!

Elana - a one-woman evangelistic dynamo. Her last words to me - to get follow-up sorted for the van-driver because she led him to Jesus the day before!

It was a full-on, unforgettable experience for these guys and we just loved having them! Now we are a bit wiser too about what to expect in village outreaches ...

Daa

Chantol massaging some special stuff into Grand-dad's feet. Our girls are such treasures!!

Grand-dad came to our home two weeks ago. He is 83 years old and has never, ever been to a city before, let alone such a big city as Phnom Penh. Further, he has never heard of Jesus; has no knowledge of Christians or our faith.

Daa (Khmer for grandfather) was suspicious at first. He could not understand why our staff and volunteers were so nice and caring to him.

Last Wednesday Chantol shared on the love of God at devotions. Daa got it. The penny proverbially dropped. He has become a big fan of Prrayer Ong.

He is such a character! The folk here are regularly hooting with laughter over his stories and his witty comments. His grand-daughter Channey brought him to us as he had 'itchy skin'. We reckon that she really just wanted her dear old grand-dad to hear about Jesus.

Straight to the poolroom

Jason and Julia Hamilton-Smith have arrived for three weeks. Julia was here at the same time last year, while her husband was in government service in a distant land.

They came with a good-sized suitcase each laden with children's supplies and other stuff - and a big mystery cardboard-wrapped parcel. This went under the Christmas tree (well - beside the tree, seeing that it was about the same size!) 24 hours and I just had to know ...

My very precious picture - so much colour and character!!

Julia had done three extraordinary things rolled into one.

1. She remembered how much I miss vibrant colours in this nation. Often I'm wanting to get colour into our world as we live in a city dominated by grey concrete.

2. She remembered the time last year when we happened to find a great art gallery with paintings by a resident French-Canadian artist.

3. She had a certain picture, taken by herself in the local vege market.

So, 1, 2, 3 - Jason and Julia got an artist friend to paint a stylised rendition of the photo in the style of the above artist. This is the result - an awesome picture that now has pride of place in our dining room. Walk into our living room and your eye will now be automatically drawn to this great splash of creative colour. Thank you, guys!!

Daughter Melody is not so generous in her 'Christmas-come-early' policy. Her gift to us also arrived in Julia and Jason's luggage ...

Watch this space - Jason and Julia are farmers and avid gardeners. They have done an impressive amount of research on tropical vege gardens and have a detailed plan of visually transforming the Healing Home land into a productive haven. Bring it on!!

Jackfruit jackpot

Dtouch and Bonna with the jackpot

Our fruit trees are beginning to produce the goods for us! The big mango tree in the front is giving us a great supply of fruit now and the girls picked two delicious jackfruit on Saturday. Eight more of these beauties are hanging high in the branches, to be harvested over the next few weeks!

Mangos every morning ...

Good-byes and hellos

We waved good-bye to the great team from NorthCity Church, Christchurch, yesterday. They have been here in Cambodia for two full weeks. It is always hard to say 'good-bye' when you anticipate the arrival of good friends for so long.

It appears that aeroplanes are dodgy disease-carrying machines that we need to take better into account. It is pretty common for people to develop good bathroom-seeking skills after they have been here a bit - but quite a few of this team arrived with bugs picked up en-route. Matt ended up spending his last two days in a medical clinic with a fever that spiked over 40 degrees and all kind of stuff showing up in a blood test. He literally walked out of the clinic and took the plane home. He was looking a heap better tho'.

Sue checking Matt's temperature before it really took off. Matt was raised by missionary parents to PNG and just thrived in this culture.

Donald Scott, the church pastor, sharing at morning devotions at the Healing Home on Tuesday. Chantol does great with her interpreting. Tana and Katerine are the other two team members in the pic.

One of the team members, Jan, is a trained school teacher. In her last two days she found her stride in teaching English language teachers in teaching creatively. This was great - as there is very little of this kind of 'outside the box' kind of training to be found here. We are always discovering new ways of serving and blessing the people of this nation. Well done, team! We totally look forward to your ongoing, purposeful and fruitful relationship into this amazing nation.

It was back to the airport the same evening to welcome Yew Meng, Elana and their team of 10 mainly students from Toowoomba, Australia. The neat thing with these guys is that they are all Asians studying in Australia. We have Singaporeans, Malaysians, Chinese and two folk from Brunei (Bruneiarians??) in this team.

They got introduced to Phnom Penh properly - gridlocked in magnificent traffic chaos in tuktuks on the way back from the airport. They have since been watered, bedded, orientated, involved in street-children outreach and last heard of, trying to find a tuktuk that had a remote idea of how to get them back to their hotel. To any members of the Christchurch team reading this - you know just exactly of what we speak ....!!

Tomorrow Jason and Julia from Brisbane hit town for over three weeks. We also have Nicole Willinks from Palmerston North safely arrived last week and with us for two months. I know, I'm blog-behind. Christmas will not be lonely in 2008!

Big day out

We went a long way on Sunday. It's a long story - about a very sick man in a village, whose son asked if he could come to the Healing Home. He sounded to be far too sick to move, so Sue kindly offered that we would visit. He just happened to come from Bonna's village, so she got a nephew of the sick father to take her out and we followed. Bonna said 'three hours - two if you drive fast'. We drove fast. It was over three hours each way - on roads that roughly translated into one hour tarseal, one hour gravel with potholes and dust and one hour not a road at all.

Crossing the Tonle Sap River by ferry on the way out - a pleasent 15 minutes before the rough roads kicked in. That's our staff girl Bonna with Sue. Bonna's pink helmet was my signpost for six hours!

It was a very interesting day, so far from the now-familiar life we have in Phnom Penh. Little ponies pulling wooden wagons replace the tuktuks and pick-up trucks of the city. There were some vehicles, but mostly everyone else moves on the trusty motor scooters, bouncing along roads that have potholes big enough to swallow bulldozers (... almost ...)

Dtou's father was indeed a very sick man. It was very hard to get any definite information as to diagnosis. Sue is of the opinion that he may have Aids. The evening before we arrived we had word that he had actually died, and folk had gathered from all over in expectation of this. So we were pretty surprised to come to a village house with people galore gathered.

After spending time praying for him we went a few houses down the road where Pastor Mara grew up. Mara is an awesome man who is one of the pastors in the church here. This happens to also be his village. While we were visiting with his sisters and rellies he phoned in (yes, the village abounds in pigs, coconuts and mobile phones!!) and was real happy that we were in 'his place' looking at his wedding pics on the wall and meeting with his whanau.

Then it was back to Dtou's dad and more prayer followed by lunch. Bonna got to spend a wee bit of time with her parents too, much to her joy. Her folks run one of the three little eatery places in the village. Her dad starts work 3am seven days a week, getting the noodles ready. He works through to 10pm closing. Do the maths ...

In Mara's village home - some of his nieces who came to meet us. Not many pics sorry - left the camera at home and just used the phone camera.

Our latest report is that the dad is doing better. When he has gained some strength we will look to get him to the home. This is what we believe for.

One of the real benefits of this day in the province was to get a feel of what Healing Homes could look like in villages. Bonna is still a village girl at heart and it sure was a privilege being on her home turf and hearing her heart for her village. One day ...

As for Susie, she was an absolute champ. We were both a bit worried at what we had gotten ourselves into, but she handled the moto marathon real well. There was just one time when I felt her wriggling around and then seeming to disappear off the back seat. 'Whatever are you up to?' I asked her. Her cheery reply - 'I'm just farting'. It was a challenge to drive a straight line after that one!

Raining kids

One of the things we are getting to is to run a kids club out of the front yard. There are so many little mites everywhere and to love God is to love kids.

Yesterday our devotion was about Jesus wrapping his arms around children whilst the disciples were trying to chase the little ones away. We talked about learning to have a Jesus heart instead of the predominant hard religious heart.

Part of the first wave this morning.

Literally this morning, I saw a little hand reach thru' our gate and undo the latch. In no time we had 15 kids running in our yard, kicking a soccer ball around, checking out the fish pond at close quarters and giving the garden swing the time of its' life. Their timing was great, as this also is the day that the Christchurch team is coming to run the first childrens program. So I let them run riot for 20 or 30 minutes, then sent them off with instructions to return at 3pm.

Donald Scott and team were here at 2pm for the 3pm launch. We talked in terms of having 20 kids come. Pause - Tui ad. Not less than 50 kids and two dogs poured thru' the gates

The team did great. They kicked off with Danny and Caitlin singing Maori action songs. A couple more songs; then the boys hit the soccer pitch (NZ vs Cambodia) while the girls did face-painting and hopscotch. Some of the little girls had even arrived in their best clothing, such was their excitement that there was a neighbourhood happening.

Cambodian striker in action

Danny spreading a little love around

Jan leading the hopscotch

Jan led a lively dramatic retelling of the Prodigal Son after the games. We had the dad, the sons, the party boys, the pig farmer - and squeals of laughter coming from ... outside the gate. This was a neighbourhood event and we had a good crowd of parents peering in from every vantage point!

Watching eagerly

The Christchurch team in 'My God Is So Big' song mode. Donald was taking pics.

Covered in kids

David and Tana making a literal pile of new friends at Centre of Peace orphanage this morning

I am purring through this week. We've got a great team of 10 Kiwis in town led by Donald Scott, a pastor and friend from Christchurch. It thrills me more than I can say to see a pastor lead a group of his congregation out to Cambodia, to put into this nation in a purposeful way.

The team have had a full schedule prepared for them by the legendery Karen Hanna, an Aussie who wonderfully administrates the coming of teams into the church. Yesterday they were involved in the Joytime Club - an outreach to street children around the Olympic Market area. I got to pop up for 15 minutes and found Donald on security duty. He was a happy man. He had been watching his team cleaning the kids and washing their feet. His comment was 'it does not get much better than this - seeing our young people washing the feet of the street children'.

Donald's eldest son Jono horsing around with the boys

Today the team are in a slum area. Then tomorrow they hit the province for a Christmas outreach. Next week includes taking everybody at the Centre of Peace orphanage to the beach for two days/one night. That is 70 kids and 10 staff/adults. No wonder the kids there are so full on boisterous today. They are excited out of their little skins!!

Srourn's long road

Srourn - such a lovely guy

Susie and I went across town yesterday to visit our lovely friend Srourn. He is the man who has a bad bone infection in his leg. He had been put into a Khmer hospital with a view to amputating his leg - but happily his leg is still with him. The doctors have carved a big hole in his buttock where he also has bad infections. Susie had a peek and her face was enough to persuade me not to even think about it.

The hospital room was maybe 10 metres square. It had 18 beds in it - quite a squeeze but manageable. Overall it was pretty clean. Srourn is in good heart but he must be bored out of his brain. His daughter Sinart is with him too. We'll keep in contact and expect him back at the Healing Home in the future.