Cambodia

I've finally got access to the Internet and some time to tell you about the past 3 weeks in Cambodia.

After spending the first night in Phnom Penh we travelled around 3 hours south-east to the province Kampuchean where we spent 10 days in a small village working with Pastor Uee. The trip there was quite interesting. I sure wasn't used to travelling through rice fields on one small truck with 24 people plus luggage but we made it.

In the village we stayed at Pastor Uee's church. It's built on stilts, gives a perfect view of a beautiful rice field and palm trees and was more than what I would have expected. Every morning we got woken up by roosters and loud Khmer music at around 4:30. Buddhist weddings last 3 days in Cambodia and they blast music and Buddhist chants from around 4:00am to 10:00pm (and you might have thought your neighbours were loud haha).

I feel priviledged that we got the chance to live and work in a village with Uee. He is the perfect example for how one man can change a whole village. Since he became a Christian 7 years ago, he's started a church in his village, brought his whole family and a lot of his friends to Christ, discipled many young people, has started computer and English classes in his village and is working with other pastors around his province. He's got a real servant heart and provided for our team so well. It was quite different eating rice and meat three times a day but "Mama" was a great cook and insisted on cooking for all of our team (all 16 of us!) three times a day.

Our ministry times in Kampuchean were incredible. During the day we visited different villages and did Christmas ministry, which included dramas, songs, testimonies, teaching and playing with the kids or doing evangelism in our village. In the evenings we all taught English classes. We spent a lot of time praying and interceding for Cambodia and our village and were able to experience the power of prayer.


I'll just mention a few of our highlights:

One time a few of us went to a temple to do some spiritual warfare. When I walked into the temple I got sick to my stomach and felt a great heaviness on my chest. After praying, reading scriptures and doing worship at the top of our lungs for an hour we could sense the heaviness of the place fade away and could feel how God's presence came into that place. The remarkable thing was that a bunch of monks were working right outside the temple and nobody kicked us out!!

I loved teaching English in the village and never thought that it would be such a great evanglism tool! I was able to tell the kids a lot about the Bible and one lesson was all about Jesus, sin, heaven, hell, the cross, repentance and salvation and after the lesson my whole class of 16 students gave their lives to Jesus! I was all excited to be able to share about hearing God's voice and having a relationship with God in the following lessons.

At one of our Christmas services a friend and I preached on John 3:16 and offered prayer for healing afterwards. We got to pray for one man who was deaf and had great pain in his legs and couldn't walk. After praying for a long time he still wasn't healed so we kept pressing in for him and the pain in his legs left and he was able to walk! He still couldn't hear though so we continued praying and praying for him and in the end a girl felt to blow in his ears and he could hear! Praise God! That same day a women was healed of a cough and another woman was healed of pain in her eyes and legs.

Many people we talked to in Kampuchean had never heard of Jesus before. They knew about Christians and thought Christians do good things but they had never heard of Jesus before..

Alltogether we saw 92 salvations, 7 instant healings (one blind, deaf and lame woman was healed!), taught hundreds of kids, did around 25h of intercession and experienced the glory and power of God in a whole new way. God gave us great promises for Cambodia before we left on outreach and he's been faithful to fulfill them one by one. This generation of Khmers is hungry for God and in desperate need of discipleship.

Other than that we hung out with Uee and the young leaders he disciples and went to their church services and prayer meetings, harvested rice, planted banana trees and did some prayer walks and I was able to have great times with God watching the beautiful sunrise and sunset over the rice fields from our porch.


I've been in Battambang now for a little over a week and am enjoying the benefits of a city again. We're staying at the YWAM base here and are working in many different types of ministries. Some are working at a baby house, some at the youth center that YWAM runs here (around 600 youth come to the center daily knowing that it's a Christian place to learn English, drama, art and sports) and others are teaching English. I'm teaching English at the only Christian school in Cambodia in the mornings, running a kids programm at an orphanage in the afternoon and teaching English at the Rapha House (a shelter for trafficked women) in the evening. It's been challenging to come up with 3 different English lessons every day, teaching ages 3-25, but I'm learning to love teaching. Before we left the village to go to Battambang God gave me a word that my work in Battambang might seem insignificant to me but that it really isn't and I've noticed how much you can encourage and build up people as a teacher.
I especially love hanging out and loving on the kids at the orphanage and they really, really need it.

I'm also enjoying getting to know the Khmer culture. I've already mentioned the weddings and truck drives but there are many more interesting cultural differences I was able to observe these past 3 weeks:

- I've seen 6 people riding on a moto

-People love physical touch here so it's not unusual to see guys holiding hands, to have strangers touch and massage your thigh or to have strangers spider-grip your shoulder. It's just a sign of friendship here..

-Cambodians are very honest people and it's not considered impolite to ask about your weight, relationship status, shoe size or how much your bag cost. We've also had women and kids poking our stomachs and asking if we were pregnant!

I've also loved getting to know my teammates better and better. It really is incredible how well you get to know your teammates on outreach! Most of my team has been quite sick lately but I've been healthy and doing great. Thank you for your prayers and thank you you God!
On Friday we're leaving Battambang to go to Auckland and I'm hoping to be able to update you guys more often there.

Thank you for all of your prayers. Please continue to pray for us and for Cambodia. Please pray for the seeds we're planting to fall on good soil, for disciplers in this country, against the spirit of fear and the spirit of confusion, for the YWAM base in Battambang and for the health of my team and for God's protection on us.

Time to say Goodbye

Outreach has begun! Last week our other two outreach teams took off to Ethiopia and Sri Lanka (it was a super sad good-bye). We are leaving tomorrow evening. This past week we’ve been busy doing prep work for outreach. We’ve done a lot of worship and intercession, practiced dramas and songs, research work and learning how to give a sermon, done evangelism in the city,..

Evangelism was great. I was able to visit Carrie-Ann again (remember, she was the first door I ever knocked at and whom I’ve visit a couple of times after that). It was a great time, we had a long talk with her that left her in tears, we prayed for her, gave her a Bible and got her facebook so we can keep in touch with her while we’re gone.

The same day a friend and I felt to go into an art gallery and started talking to a security guard from India. His name is Amandeep and he is a Sikh. We asked him loads of questions about the Sikh religion and after that he wanted us to share about what we believe in. He had tears in his eyes when we shared about God’s love and how you cannot earn your salvation or his love. He couldn’t believe that God can and wants to speak and was very interested in everything we had to say. In the end we got to share the gospel with him and pray for him and we definitely were able to plant a seed that afternoon.

By the way, Matty who is one of our leaders has been sick for over a month now with some mysterious sickness that makes him feel tired, nauseated and dizzy and the doctors haven’t been able to find out what it is. Last week we found out that he won’t be able to go to Cambodia with us because of that. It was a very tough decision for him to stay back but he also strongly feels that God wants him to stay in Perth and rest. We are praying that he recovers and will be able to join us in New Zealand. Please pray for Matty’s health and that his strength and energy will be restored so he can join us in NZ next month.

As I’ve mentioned before I’m taking off tomorrow afternoon. We’ll be staying a day in Thailand before we fly to Phnom Penh. I’m stoked to be able to go back to Bangkok, even if it’s only for a day.

We’re going to be living in a small village about two hours away from Phnom Penh for the first two weeks. The pastor we’re going to be working with already told us that we’ll be working in orphanages, doing a lot of evangelism in the village (around 300 people live in that village, mostly Muslims and Buddhists) and doing CHRISTMAS MINISTRY! Yes.. that’s right, I’m going to celebrate Christmas all over again because Cambodians don’t care about the date, it’s the event that counts! I never would have thought I would have to bring my Santa hat on outreach haha

After that we’re going to Battambang to work with the YWAM base there. I’m not quite sure what we’ll be doing there though. I just know that that base has a great variety of ministries there and that we’ll probably be working in orphanages again and building huts.

After that we’re flying to Auckland on January 30^th where we’re going to travel the main cities from North to South and working with different churches and youth groups and also with the Maori people for a part of it.

I won’t be taking my laptop with me so I don’t know how often I’ll have a chance to go on the Internet but I do hope that I’ll be able to send you an update every once in a while.

Please keep me and my team in your prayers. Pray for safety on our trips, for team unity, that we’ll all be able to draw closer to God, for our ministry times, that we’ll be able to impact the village and tell every single villager about Jesus, that we’ll be a blessing to them, that we’ll learn to love and to serve selflessly, for wisdom and cultural sensitivity,…

I would appreciate your prayers a lot! Thank you!

Love,

Steph