I’m not sure which is the furthest place I’ve traveled from home. Could it have been my two weeks in Socorro? Or my several adventures in Kampong Thom? Whichever it may be, I’m going to share one of my very first memories from being overseas.
My team and I were going to spend the summer in a small village. There were six of us Americans. 4 girls and 2 boys. We had known each other a total of a week, maybe, at the time we arrived in country. We would be living in a dorm within a church. We would be teaching English, building relationships, and doing quite possibly whatever we could to share the gospel. Soccer? Mud/water fights? Uno? We did it all and then some.
One of our supervisors met us at the airport. We spent the night in the capital before making our way to our home for the next 7 weeks. After a 3+ hour bus ride, we made it to the province we would be in. We then took a short, 10-15 minute ride via a tuktuk to our summer home. Because of the size of our group, we had to take 2 tuktuks to get to our final destination. During our tuktuk ride, the supervisor was telling me about the spiritual warfare she had encountered while being in country and tried to help prepare me and my team for what could come.
We arrive at our summer home. It. Is. Dark. 20+ people were waiting outside of the house to greet us- because people in SE Asia are the nicest people you will ever meet. I get out of the tuktuk and this boy appears. He is all up in my personal space. I have no idea if these kids or people we will be living with speak English and if they do, how fluent are they? I test the waters by saying hello to the boy. He replied hello back. I’m thinking, GREAT they speak English!!! This summer is going to be a cake walk… I then ask him his name, he replies with S. He then becomes all serious and yells at me “What your name?!?”. I jumped and then answered. He ran off into the darkness.
Looking back at that first interaction, I should have realized how exciting the summer with S and the other people in the house would be. S taught us to shoot a slingshot. He had us aiming at a beehive in a tree that you only knew about if you had climbed up the tree. After several tries, S took the slingshot from us. He launched a rock and hit it. We heard a loud crack and realized it wasn’t a tree he hit. S began laughing, yelled run as he was already running, and we all saw the hive come falling out of the tree as well as all of the bees that it housed. I don’t know that I’ve ever run that fast in my life nor do I know if I will ever run that fast again.
S also caught a bird one day and brought it in the house during lunch to show all of us Americans what he could do. We asked him where he got it. His response was me catch. We asked how he caught it. He said me jump, me catch. Naturally as he said this, he gave us a demonstration of what catching the bird looked like. I still have my suspicion that there was more to catching the bird than jumping and catching, but I guess I’ll never know for sure.
My male teammates asked S to hold his bird. He smiled a big grin and passed the bird to the first teammate. After taking a picture with the bird, he went to pass it on to my other male teammate. Somewhere in the handing off of the bird, the bird pooped on the 2nd teammate and escaped from their care. Chaos erupted. All of the kids then spent the next 20 minutes yelling and chasing the bird with a broom. The lucky bird survived the event and flew out of the house.
I know I was supposed to share one story and I shared three. But, every time I look back on that summer in Kampong Thom, I smile. I laugh. I thank God for the adventures, the people, and the team I got to experience in those short, but long, 7 weeks. It’s fun to look back now and see how the Lord used that summer to continue shaping and molding me into who He has called me to be. He changed the trajectory of my life that summer. So that place, and those people, and S will always hold a special place in my heart.
Grief. Going. Healing. 
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