It's a long way around Ton Le Sap

Made it to Battambang after 8 hours of driving including a detour to visit the Kambour village. We called ahead and authorized extra feedings because we heard the kids come and hang out at our barn everyday wanting to be fed. We are unable to feed the children every day because we do not have sponsors for all of the kids. The food shortage is worse due to the floods and the kids are hungry. It is so sad. We had to go by canoe out the the site where we have about 100 hectares of rice fields. The land is completely flooded about 4-5 feet deep from the typhoon. It took about an hour to paddle out through the rice fields to see where we are planning to dig a canal and dike around our land to allow the river water to flow into the land during the dry season. It is such a beautiful and peaceful place until you come back to the village and it’s abject poverty and hunger. The new canal will also allow the neighboring farms to have access to water which will allow this village to be more prosperous. This farm helps us to support our ministry and we also minister to the local village children and their families there.

There is such a difference between the children at Kambour and our children at the David Center Orphanage. Our kids are happy and are constantly talking playing and hanging around, just goofing off like regular kids. These kids just stand around and have no smiles and watch us. You can get them going if you engage with them, but there is just something missing. It is a lack of a loving family and hunger. Many of the kids have been abandoned by their parents who have left the village to find work and are cared for by family members who struggle to feed themselves much less extra mouths. We saw people hunting for field rats that have been forced to leave the fields because of the flooding. If they catch a rat it would be their only source of protein and there isn't much meat on a rat.

Check out Setan's You Tube video about the kids at Kambour. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH4vDa0WZXM

We have added 4 new kids at the orphanage. Three siblings, 10, 8 and 3 years old whose mother left for another man and their father is in the military. The father was ordered to the front line in the war with Thailand. He left the children alone at their house so one of our pastors brought them to the David Center. The 3 year old cried all the time so Rhonda has had him with her as she is traveling around. He isn't potty trained so they have had some interesting times. Yesterday an old grandmother brought her 8 year old grandson to the orphanage. His stepfather would beat him and make him go out and beg everyday. We hope there is no permanent brain damage. We now have 54 kids. I went with Setan to pick up the older kids from school. He treated them to egg embryos, one of their favorite snacks at a roadside stand. I ate the grossest looking thing that I have ever eaten. If you didn't look it was quite tasty. Basically it is a chicken or duck egg that has matured to the point that the bird has started to form. You can see feathers, feet, head, the whole thing with a yolk. You crack open the top of the egg and scoop out the insides. I will never eat one of those things again! We have a young women that lives permanently at the Woman's Center. She was repeatedly raped and beaten by her drunk stepfather and thrown off the porch of their house. She has permanent brain stem damage that has affected her vision and hearing. She is cross-eyed and essentially deaf. Her jaw has been broken and her face is somewhat deformed as a result. Alison Comfort is her sponsor and she bought her a hearing aid that is about 10 months old now. It has been damaged by sweat and finally totally stopped working. Yesterday we went and bought her a new one for $50. She was so happy to be able to hear again. Rhonda bought her some glasses so she has begun to learn to read. She is self taught through reading the Bible. She looked so cute yesterday with her glasses and new clothes that Rhonda brought her. She is a joyful, happy young lady that has a positive influence on the other girls at the Woman's center

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000149 EndHTML:0000004687 StartFragment:0000000199 EndFragment:0000004653 StartSelection:0000000199 EndSelection:0000004653 Malcolm Cash and I had a good flight from SFO. When we were flying into Cambodia it is amazing that most of the land along the flight path was totally flooded as a result of the recent typhoon. Even in Phnom Penh there are some areas of the city that are flooded including the streets and into houses.

We went to Bill and Akemi’s house (they run the day care center) and had dinner with them and their 9 kids. After dinner we had a meeting and Akemi shared her vision for TransformAsia, she is quite a visionary! We focused down to two projects that we have funding promised for. We will remodel the Phnom Penh church and video studio upstairs at our office building so that we can continue to grow our church. We need to knock down the walls to double the sanctuary size and hope to start doing more than one service on Sunday. We will video the preaching and send the DVDs out to the churches in the villages. Our local pastors will do their normal service and then the preaching will be done by Setan and Bill via a DVD player and a $150 TV. We see this as a way to help our pastors be exposed to quality preaching methods and their churches to solid preaching as well. Our vision is to grow a large dynamic church in Phnom Penh that will continue to grow as the young people move in from the country side to find education and jobs in the capital city.

We will remodel the downstairs area of the office where we park the cars now and build a store and coffee shop as well as a training facility for young girls to give them skills to keep them out of prostitution and expose them to Christianity. There is a similar facility in Siem Reap that is very successful.

The preschool daycare is wildly successful with over 60 kids now attending. The present facility will accommodate around 40. We are looking for a new building already. Our initial financial projection was too high and as a result our funding will last almost twice as long as we anticipated. Many of the mothers of the children that live on the dump pile are coming to the center to help and it is apparent that we need to start a church at the daycare for the families who live at the dump and surrounding area. People seem to be open to the gospel as a result of what they see happening at the daycare.

Tomorrow Setan, Malcolm and I hit the road on a 7 or more hour drive to An Long Veng. The new road that was just completed this year was washed out and we will have to go around the washout. Hopefully that will not slow us down too much. We have a missions team that will arrive at the orphanage tomorrow to do some repairs and painting after having spent the last few days painting at the Trade school in Battambang. I wanted to be there to meet them and thank them for their work and wonderful servants attitudes.

Next day we go on to the farm where we will attempt to determine the feasibility of digging a water supply canal that will bring adequate water to the surrounding farms and see what type of equipment will be needed to do the job. A big rice farmer in Singapore wants to help fund this project. We have an evangelism project going in this area feeding the children and hope to establish a church here.

The following day we move on the Kampong Chhnang to the TransformAsia University site where we will make the final site placement for the first building and attempt to solve our water issues. We will return to Phnom Penh by Saturday and hope to begin meeting with the first of three different contractors and get bids on the project. It is a neat story how God has provided Teri Flynn to be our architect and she has come up with an exciting design for the first two phases of this project. We are hoping to begin construction in the next 4 months.

After Malcolm leaves in a week I will return to the countryside and make the loop around Ton Le Sap lake again visiting all of our sites. This time I will take a photographer and a translator. We will attempt to document all of the women and children that we support so that we can begin our sponsorship program in earnest. We already have more sponsors than children because of the difficulties we have experienced getting the information on the kids to our web developer. Please pray for clarity and solving the computer and software issues that have plagued us.