I've heard about Prek Pneu for a while. It's a fishing village on the outskirts of Phnom Penh where my friend Leanne runs a catch-up school for the 50% of kids who haven't been attending school and are thus behind their grade level. I've learned a lot about the challenges it faces: water contamination, unmet medical needs, rampant child trafficking. I've seen photos on my organization's (Asian Hope) website, teachers from her school have joined my after-school English classes, and I've even blogged about some of Leanne's stories. But my first visit last weekend wasn't through Leanne or her school...it was through my church.
For several weeks, people at my tiny house church had been giving us prayer updates about a home being built for some of their co-workers at Mercy Medical Center, a free hospital for needy Cambodians. Somrak and his sister have done amazing work during their several years at MMC, counseling, encouraging, and sharing the Gospel with patients. But since they're orphans, their salary at the hospital was barely enough to provide for their six younger siblings, and Somrak's work as a pastor in his village doesn't really help. They've all been living in a rickety wooden home in Prek Pneu where the roof leaks and the house floods with the first raindrop. So people at my church were excited to report that they'd been selected by Habitat for Humanity for renovations, giving them a sturdy concrete home. Somrak and his siblings, ranging from early 30s to older teens, paid for part of the renovations and did a fair bit of the labor.
Habitat doesn't include painting, but someone donated money for paint. So our church went out last Saturday to help this family put primer on their new house. Of course, since this is Cambodia, it turned into a party: on top of their family and 17 of us foreigners, the house was brimming with cousins, friends, and curious neighbor kids. (Curious neighbor adults were a bit more discreet; they chatted with us outside and/or walked by frequently.) Everyone seemed delighted to welcome us. I met too many to remember, but a few stand out: a sweet 10-year-old girl named Lakhina, and a teenage boy with a harelip who I later heard was completely ostracized until this family showed him compassion and acceptance. He is now a Christian and has learned pretty decent English. He and a few others gave me a quick tour of the village, showing me the beauty of the river and proudly pointing out their homes to me. He and the others spoke with warmth and confidence.
Compared with some service trips I've been on, this one didn't feel so much like a "hit-and-run" of outsiders descending upon an unsuspecting community. Most of the foreigners who went with me work for Mercy Medical Center, which means that they speak pretty decent Khmer and have a deep respect and appreciation for the two oldest siblings. Many of them had attended one sister's wedding the week before, and several had visited the family at home before. The rest of us who work for Asian Hope likewise had some common ground. One of the guys painting for us is a guard for the school there; many of the kids attend it; and the siblings all know Leanne, as well as the teachers attending my English classes. Angie Ketchum will be researching health concerns in Prek Pneu next year as part of her master's program in nursing, so she was excited to meet some people who might soon be able to help her.
The outside walls were often slow going, since their house is sandwiched between several others. So accessing the walls involved being sandwiched inside a chain-link fence, clambering onto on a shaky tin roof, or climbing a ladder in a neighbor's courtyard. To reach the second story, we taped the paint rollers onto bamboo poles. So for almost two hours, my job was to refill one guy's paint roller since he couldn't reach the paint tray from his ladder. I flipped the pole around between the ladder and clothes rack on the paint roller side, and between the neighbor's staircase and chain-link fence on the top end of the pole. My job also included directing someone how to paint the trim above the window, since he was sticking his arm out the window to paint blindly. It was pretty funny.
Even given those constraints, our work wasn't exactly efficient. We ran out of paint and had to send someone on an hour-long errand to get more, giving us time for a leisurely lunch of fried rice and pork with the siblings. The Ketchums brought all four of their girls along: the older two were quite helpful, but of course the younger ones (ages 7 and 3) couldn't contribute much to painting. Still, they were a great connection point for Angie and the neighbors, who couldn't get enough of little Megann's blonde locks and shy smile. Addie was super-excited to meet a girl who had the exact same bike as her, plus an amazing hot pink basket on the front. Could we have finished faster and with fewer people under the right conditions? Sure, but taking six hours with the whole gang meant more joking, more encouragement, and more connections with people who had a knack for making us feel like treasured friends.
Somrak was so animated in thanking us. He kept saying, "We never knew how to paint...none of us...but now that you showed us, we can show others!" That surprised me - it never occurred to me that they wouldn't be as competent as we were at painting (if not much more). He added with a grin, "And it doesn't even have to look perfect." That was certainly true: we splattered paint on everything from shutters to tiles to nearby bicycles, not to mention ourselves. I just took that as a given; Khmer don't usually pay much attention to details like paint spatters, or even varying shades of paint. Hopefully he didn't mind either!
At the end, we all gathered downstairs to pray over the house. Voices mingled in Khmer and English to ask that their home would continue to be a source of great blessing and hope to the community. This family's lives speak powerfully to their neighbors of a God who cares for the downtrodden, who loves the overlooked. It was an honor to connect with people who have overcome so much hardship and who can speak with such confidence about the goodness of God. We may have passed on a few painting tips, but there's a lot I'd like to learn from them.
Monday, March 11, 2013
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