Party party

The annual Healing Home Christmas party is a very big deal with our staff.  It is only a week until we head to NZ for Christmas with our family - so the party needed to happen on Friday just gone. We really had fun!

This is our fourth Christmas in the Healing Home.  We followed last year's pattern: give each of the girls money to buy their own present (it has to be something that 'spoils' them: what they would really like) which they must wrap and put under the Christmas tree.  Then we plan a menu according to what they wish for (banana cake from Susie's oven; chook from Kentucky, big fried fish ...), set up a long table upstairs and have a whole lot of fun.

Sokha's first Christmas with us - and like a duck to water ... She is our week-end cook as now Vanny, our previous week-end cook is now promoted to a carer position. Darra the guy works for Donnie and often transports our patients to clinics. Sypho is next to him, with her new curly hair-do, and sandwiched is Sopheap.

We invited Heng to come and join us too.  He is such a great guy even tho' life has not been easy for him since he went to a rehab place.  Talk about excited - this party invitation has fixed a huge smile on hs lovely face.  We're kidnapping him for four or five days now; he loves being among our staff again.

I'm in a girls world - here are all our choice staff.  Rin, the girl next to me volunteers two days a week, as part of the 12-month internship church training program she is part of; all the others work for both love and money!

The girls all bought us pressies too - very, very sweet!  Here is Touch our cook - she has been with us since Day 1 in the Healing Home.



More!

One of the cultural mind-sets we have in Cambodia is 'more must be better' thinking.  This reasoning pops up everywhere.  If two pills are good, 17 must be better.  If 70 decibels is great, 145 decibels is wonderful!  The list goes on ...

I mention this because I recently came across a very puzzled Donnie.  His trusty Nissan Patrol was just back from the fix-it people.  One of the jobs - sort out the leaking tyre that is the spare, mounted on the back.  Now, here was a quizzacle Donnie: he wanted to open the back door and it would not open - it hit the spare tyre.  He had places to go, things to do, so he pulled off the spare in order to sort the issue another day.

Next connecting time, I asked him if he figured it out. Sure did - the answer was: let some air out of the tyre.  As in, if 35psi is good, 70psi must be better ...!!

Provincial prices

I was back in Takeo province recently to speak at a great little country church again.  This is about my sixth time with pastor Samdy.  He is an excellent young guy who has a recent miracle testimony about his wife conceiving and giving birth to their first child.  Docs said this was not going to happen :-).

Samdy has plans for his congregation, which includes moving the 80 or so folk out of their neat but very small church building and into a larger place.  There is to be a school, an English class, homes for the elderly ... the faith plans are all on the wall.

Therefore, he was pretty excited this visit - they have been able to buy land just 40 metres from their present site.  It is 40 metres in the right direction too, as at present the last 80 metres of access is off a decent country road and down a one-horse track. Takeo Province price: US$6000 for the 2000+sqm plus another grand to shift a few hundred cubic metres of dirt on-site to raise the level.

By comparison, our church in Phnom Penh has been seriously looking for a block this size for over three years now.  Land prices in the city are way out of kilter with real value.  My take on this is that so much of the money out here is not 'earned' - it pours into pockets by dodgy means. Therefore true values are twisted and some items like city land become enormously expensive.  What is $6000 just 75 minutes down the road becomes $1.5-2 million here in the city.  Hence, our church keeps on looking!

My buddy pastor Samdy, with Donnie and Sophea's daughter, Naan.  That is the new land in the background; all 42x56 metres of it.