After breakfast at the restaurant, we headed for Prey Veng Christian Centre for the Sunday School Teacher Training.
Firstly, we performed the Prodigal Son Skit to explain to the teachers how to teach Bible lessons in a more interesting manner. After that, we were allowed to do what we wanted.
I saw a little boy kicking around a piece of wood near the kitchen area. He looked a little lonely and bored, so I started kicking the wood back to him. He seemed to be having lots of fun, even though his "soccer ball" was just an old, abandoned piece of wood!
After a while, he went for lunch. The VWAP team members were given buns to eat as a snack, but I wasn't hungry, so I gave mine to the boy. His eyes lit up when he saw the bun, and he began to eat it slowly, savouring it.
Then, he went to the kitchen area. I saw that he gave some of it to a cook working in the kitchen. Later, I found out that the little boy was the son of the cook, who had brought him to the Christian Centre with her as she had to work and wanted to keep an eye on him.
After the boy had eaten, I took an empty plastic bottle from the ground and kicked it to him. It was much better than a piece of wood and the little boy soon began kicking the bottle with great enthusiasm. I saw three kids who were older than the little boy in the kitchen area, watching us longingly.I invited them to play as well. They, too, had fun with the bottle.
Soon, it was time for the VWAP members to eat lunch. Lunch here is prepared the old-fashioned way. Chicken meat is chopped up using axes.
Soup is boiled in pots over a charcoal fire.
A basic Khmer meal always consists of: Rice, Vegetables in the form of a salad( Carrots, Cucumbers, etc.) and soup, boiled using herbs and bones to give it flavour.
After lunch, Hannah and Ernie, 2 other VWAP members, joined us in our game. The kids were laughing loudly and having a lot of fun. They had quickly warmed to us and started showing us around the Christian Centre. They showed us how they fed the fish in the pond with scraps of chicken left over from their own meal. They also took us to the garden to catch insects. Although they were only engaging in simple activities, they were really having fun. Before we left, the little boy began hoarding all the empty water bottles he could find and refusing to let anyone else so much as touch them.
Looking back, I felt that city kids like us should be thankful for what we have. These kids could enjoy themselves without any electronic devices, or even without sports equipment. What more us, with all our high-tech stuff?
We are so much more fortunate, with decent clothes, a bed, a roof over our head, enough food, and plenty of things to occupy us. To the little boy, the bun he received was a treasure beyond words. It was probably all he would eat for the rest of the day. The bottles, too, were priceless to him. He had so little that even useless things like those discarded bottles were considered his treasures. I felt ashamed when I thought of all the times I had wasted food, or when I had wasted money buying things I don't really need.
We visited the market nearby. The road wasn't a
ma lu (horse road), it was a
niu lu (cow road)!
This is the condition of the wet markets in Cambodia.
After returning to the hotel, we showered and had devotion and worship again. The adults shared about how they had been training the Christian Centre Leaders to run the Centre effectively while we had been performing the skit and playing with the children.
It was back to Phnom Penh today. We checked out of the hotel and travelled the 2 1/2 hour journey back, once again using the ferry to cross the Mekong River. Like in Prey Veng, locals were knocking on the windows, trying to get us to buy stuff while we waited for the ferry. I felt sorry for them. They were begging us to buy from them, to give them a little lifeline, some money to survive another day. Unfortunately, fried spider is not my cup of tea.
