Happy New Year! Again!

Well everyone, it's that time of year, again... and again... and yet again! April is the third and last time each year that Cambodians have new year celebrations (we've already had International New Year and Chinese New Year). This country has a lot of holidays, but Khmer New Year is by far the most important to Cambodians. It is technically a three-day holiday, but it's relatively common to hear of people taking off the entire month to go and visit their home village... Very difficult to relate to when coming from a country where no one who's finished college expects to have much vacation time!

We have been super busy here at In His Steps: our sponsored children have been studying up a storm for their exams (and many got top marks in their classes!), Sak Saum girls have had some visitors and are learning new skills, our English classes are overflowing with students, and our church plant is growing! On the administrative end of things, I have been very occupied with helping our directors get ready for tax time (non-profit organizations have a lot of accounting responsibilities to prove to the IRS that they are legitimate!). So we have been going over numbers from last year and getting ready for the rest of this year. It's kind of mundane, but also very important if we want to keep going with the work our ministry is doing here.

It's extremely hot in Cambodia right now, to the point where you wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if the fan is really on. Even local people say it's hot, which helps make us foreigners feel less conspicuous as we sweat gallons and fan ourselves with anything that happens to be available!

As I mentioned earlier, the English classes at our Foundation Center are overflowing... Eric recently made a short video at the Center so I thought I'd post the link to let you catch a glimpse of how busy it is here every day. But yet again, Blogger.com is having problems posting links. So if you want to see the video, copy the following URL and paste it into your browser. Sorry for the hassle, enjoy!

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSEz0m2g0W4

God bless,

Emily