Happiness is ....

We have not yet been so brave (or foolish??) as to buy our meat from the market. Fruit and veges - yes - but meat hanging on hooks all day long (and wasn't that piece of beef there yesterday too?? ...) - no thanks. So, we do meat at Lucky Supermarket. 99.3% of the time it is either beef mince (if you got to chew a piece of the local water buffalo, you would quickly understand why we only do mince!) or plucked chook. That's pretty well our meat menu - mince or chicken.

Therefore, it was an event of considerable excitement when Sue Hanna announced that a leg of lamb had been purchased for our homegroup to knaw on in celebration of Graeme Taylor's birthday yesterday.

A picture to be framed and hung in the office - the smell wafts past me even now!

I'm in a girls missionary world here - Libby from Queensland, Pam the Pom, Colleen Banks from Tauranga, Sue Taylor (Te Awamautu) and Pat (Auckland). Missing from the group pic is Sue Hanna (also Te Awamutu) and birthday boy Graeme Taylor. These are the folk who meet as a homegroup weekly Sunday evenings at our place.

Kratie

Kratie is the name of both a province in Cambodia and the main town of that region. It is about 160km to the northeast of here by carrier pigeon, or precisely 348 km by the main highway that does some serious tiki-touring to the east before turning northwest. There is a third alternative route - head off up the Mekong River. The town is delightfully situated on the banks of the Mekong.

I had headed up to Kratie for two reasons - to make contact with our patient, Sreyda's, family and also to scout out this part of Cambodia. Sreyda has actually no living direct family, just her mother-in-law and mum-in-law's family. Tracking them down was not too difficult; maybe 20 minutes of door-knocking the suburb and they had a white stranger outside their door.

Talking to Sreyda at the Healing Home for the first time, mother-in-law openly wept. I gather that the dear lady thought that Sreyda had died, as she had been basically abandoned as a paralysed lady with hideous bedsores in a hospital. Now mother-in-law's son has contact phone numbers for two of our staff.

Sreyda's home, at the top of the nice wheelchair ramp. It is actually spacious with two large rooms, and very clean and tidy.

Bucketing down - the rains have reached Kratie about ten days ago. Sellers in the open market hopefully wait for customers (yeh, right!) above, as some of the local lads are rained off the job (below)

In the years ahead, we desire to see Healing Homes planted through the provinces. Kratie is a region that has really got my attention time and again over recent months. Sue and I are persuaded that much of what God is doing in Cambodia is happening under the radar in provincial villages. I plan to do more scouting in the future.

Mekong sunset with a boat heading across to Koh Trong, an island about 5km long by 500 metres wide across from Kratie town. The Mekong is a seriously large river!

A fan for a man

OK so we've already talked about this - but it continues to be ridiculously hot out here. Last Friday was our coolest day - at 36 degrees. Even our staff are looking like possums in a bush fire.

Usually we have our only aircon - located in our bedroom - on for up to an hour to help get to sleep. The little fan goes all night, 11 months a year. Recently we've got the aircon going for pretty well half the night or more - and within 20 minutes of turning it off it is just nasty hot again.

I went to give my girl a hug the other night - and got an armful of legs. She had turned around to stick her head hard up to the fan.

What is a bloke to do in this eternal heat-wave? I went out and bought a real fan today. Funny, the things you don't really notice when you buy from a shop with most of its stock on the sidewalk. The propellar blades should have warned me - this machine sounds like an aeroplane on the tarmac - and that is on the low setting! Click her to number 3 and we've definitley got lift-off happening in our sitting room!

Our three girls

At the mo we have six patients at the Healing Home. Three of our girls come from Cambodia's very rotund underbelly. One is a former bar-girl and now a full follower of Jesus. Another was sold by her step-father into prostitution and the third girl was orphaned at 11 years old and taken off the streets and into sexual trafficing at age 12 years.

Outwardly society here is refreshingly modest. Prostitution and the selling of girls into the sex trade is just huge, however. Coupled with that is a never-ending supply of scumbags who promise young girls unending love, and dump them at a moment's notice. Our pregnant girl managed to run away from the brothel that her stepfather had sold her into and was living with a guy like this. The moment he found out that she was pregnant, he told her that he had a wife and two kids - goodbye.

Sreymom (the patient) Sue, Sreymom (our carer) our pregnant girl whom I will not name and Sreyda on the far bed at devotions this morning. Sreymom has perfected the pout - she is 22 years old but much more like a 14-year old. She seems to be turning a corner these last couple of days, no longer constantly pining to return to her scummy home town near the Thai border and her ever-loving (not!!) boyfriend there. She had lost 26kg before she came to us. Note her pyjamas - normal daytime wear on the streets here. Her pj's have 'the dog have go home' printed on them. Reminds me of the t-shirt in the market of a happy puppy with 'Happy God' printed underneath ...

A couple of pics for the nurses out there .... Sreyda had very mean bedsores on both hips. Our girls are very happy to see sudden real progress on these wounds. These pics are taken a week apart of the same wound.

God speaking

What is quietly happening in the lives of the people we get to work with often astounds us. Take little Sreyda for example, a young lady who came to us over three months ago with really bad pressure sores. She became paralysed from the waist down in an accidental fall. Basically abandoned, she was a skin-and-bones wasted woman when discovered by an NGO group in the province.

The change in this lady has been wonderful. She has gained weight, has embraced a muscle-building exercise regime and has fully come to Jesus. Earlier this week when we gave an opportunity for testimonies, she shared the following:

'I never knew how to pray but last week God taught me to pray. When I was praying He told me 'try harder and you will be able to do it'. So I tried harder ....' and now she is doing stuff she never could do before; turn herself over; sit up on the edge of the bed by herself and very nearly get herself from her bed into her wheelchair by herself.

Sreyda in the tuktuk outing during Khmer New Year last month

Kov, our little Tigger bouncing kid, also testified that same morning. He said that he had been praying and praying a lot (I understood that this meant over many days) and then he said 'Jesus told me that my liver is healed; not to worry any more'. There was like an awesome shine on his countenance as he was talking. He's been given an all clear from TB also. Bunthorn who teaches Kov every day said this morning 'he is really different now'. Go, God!!

Let it rain

Cambodia has three seasons; summer mild, summer turbo and summer with rain. Summer mild is the time to come for a short visit, but you have to be quick; it can come and go in a couple of weeks any time between mid-November and early January. Temperatures plunge to 25 degrees, sending the locals into their winter wardrobe for ski jackets and such like.

Summer turbo starts around January and happily builds up in heat, peaking in April and not letting up until the rains come in May. 'Peaking' means 40+ degrees often; high 30's in the shade always. Sue and I are kinda 'over it' in the heat department, and longing for monsoon rains that help pull the temperature down a few degrees.

We've had a couple of good downpours recently, and yesterday again we had rumblings and lightning - that turned into a lot of hot air. A typical 'summer with rain' day is hot and muggy, with cloud buildup in the early afternoon and then 30-40 minutes of torrential rain around 3pm. June until October is our rainy time, when trips into the province can turn into a mudslide and trips around town can be like wild-water rafting with the road somewhere underneath.

Today was my first 'more power' experience with a motorised, bladed weed-eater that I bought from a nice American guy. No more hedge-clipping the lawns; 5-10 minutes of raw power did the job. The pic does not quite show it, but I was one drenched bloke after just these few minutes. Once the rains come the lawn needs a buzz every 10 days or so.