Happy Khmer New Year! Cambodians count years in the same way as the Western world, but their traditional new year is a big deal and they celebrated it all last week!
The majority of Khmer people go visit their relatives or their home province during this time. Those who are Buddhists make ceremonial visits to 5 temples, offering sacrifices and burning incense. For Christian Khmer, it can be difficult when visiting relatives because of family pressure to visit the "wat" (temple).
Since I obviously couldn't go visit my own family for the week, I went with some friends on a three day trip up north to the province of Siem Reap. Siem Reap is famous for the ancient ruins of Angkor, dating back to the 9th century. It was so cool for me to go there, since I have wanted to see Angkor since I was about seven years old and saw a picture in the encyclopedia! I'll be posting pictures from the trip soon, the architecture was amazing. :)
This past month has been busy in many different ways. There was some government paperwork that we finally completed right before Khmer New Year... basically it is an agreement with the Cambodian Ministry of Social Affairs, to recognize that In His Steps is working in Cambodia and submit our plans for the next three years. I'm glad that the application is completed; now we just have to wait for it to be processed! Please pray that we have favor with the government so our application can be approved.
My English classes with some of the Sak Saum girls have been going well... so far we've been covering things like simple verb conjugation, likes and dislikes, and general vocabulary. This week we're beginning prepositions.... all this sounds very systematic and formal but actually it's mostly conversational and simple. It's important to keep things simple, because English is a hard language! English speakers in Cambodia have much better job opportunities, so it's an important skill to teach.
Lately I've been working with Joanne (our New Zealand staff member) on cataloguing our Sak Saum products. All the profit from the products goes back into helping the Sak Saum women, but in order to sell the bags we have to market them more! Fortunately all the products are beautiful, and practically sell themselves whenever they're shown in the states. :)
This morning at our weekly staff meetings (Sak Saum women also attend), I had the opportunity to do a teaching on worship with our Russian staff member Svetlana. We both got to share about different aspects of worship and some of our own testimonies. Svetlana demonstrated a beautiful worship dance while I sang, and then we had a fun time introducing everyone to a simple Hebrew dance so they could all join in!
Our directors Eric and Ginny will be returning from the US on Friday, so please keep their trip in prayer. I missed them while they were away (they're kind of like second family to me!) and am glad they'll be back soon.
Angkor pictures will be posted shortly!
God bless,
Emily
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