Tour of the Bend
Dear Friends and Family,
We live in a place called Bend. It’s actually Knoal Gine, located on an S-curve in the highway where trucks race by like the corkscrew in Laguna Raceway. Only here, houses and shops are built within yards of the pavement. Careening by are huge trucks blaring airhorns incessantly, scattering away in terror any motorcycles, carts, tractors, bicycles, cows or anything else that dares get in the way. We know the regular trucks by the grumble of their exhaust. Some we know by their gears or their attitude when blasting their horn. There are two or three dentists on our corner, a clinic, a greasy motorcycle shop, a “2500 riel” store (discount store) with everything you need and a handful of other little shops. The biggest news is the opening of the first-ever chain restaurant — Five Levels Spicy Noodle. (Tip: Ask for a level zero!)
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2500 Riel Store & mango tree with sandwich & corn seller |
Bend is buzzing. Besides the clinic, there is a fresh-squeezed sugar cane juice stand. Between there and the greasy mechanic is a smattering of hammocks and a card table with a chess game always underway. There is a seamstress shop with a sandwich stand out front. The mango tree in front of the “2500 riel” store provides shade for street food vendors hawking boiled corn, grilled meat or coconut-rice waffles, all steaming, sizzling and splattering over white hot coals. At night, the Spicy Noodle restaurant is all lit up. It is air-conditioned, with a wall-to-wall glass dining area and an indoor play area for kids. Outside, strings of vintage lights give a soft look to the rows of private, grass-roofed gazebos that surround. Next door, you can buy honeycomb still hanging on the tree branch it came from. Above all the sounds, you can hear the call to prayer from the gold-domed mosque right in the pit of the bend. The Great River People don’t waste an inch.
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Spicy Noodle Restaurant |
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Local toys & books shop |
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Phone repair shop |
At night, when the trucks finally slow down, Knoal Gine is a new place. It’s a little cooler. Everyone is home. The shops, the stalls and the road itself become the living room for one giant family. Many of them really are family. No one pays a sitter because their children run from one cousin’s house to another in droves. When shadows start getting long, the children start appearing in their dim, smoky doorways.
One evening this week, I felt the call of the corner. After worship, I let Steph put the children to bed while I ventured out. I passed a group of women listening to a lecture on Islam on the veranda of an old-style wooden house. I almost didn’t recognize my friend, the local hardware store owner, who sat cross-legged on the ground teaching. He had traded his usual cutoffs and t-shirt for blue robes and a flowing white turban.
Bocce Ball Game |
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Corn Seller |
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Ladies relaxing in front of Moto mechanic shop |
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Everything shop. Notice the fuel in water bottles in front of the drink stand |
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Local child enjoying his boiled corn |
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Big, noisy trucks |
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Local mechanic |
Then, a tall man with very manly square features came. He had square temples, thick eyebrows, long black sideburns, and long cheekbones. His sturdy feet and hands conveyed a life working hard outdoors. He was dark, with tan on top of tan until the sun could do no more. He stood insisting we all come to eat. There is to be a wedding in the family on January 28, and the women had prepared a thank-you meal for the men who spent the afternoon splitting wood for all the cooking. He insisted I come too. We men sat in a circle while the ladies brought each of us a steaming bowl of spicy rice porridge.
One manly man sat opposite of me. His wife is a loud, friendly lady from whom I have bought boiled or roasted corn many times. He wanted to know all about me. Did I like the porridge? What kind of foods do we eat? What is America like? The whole room got talking about culture, and I put in a hook designed to see if anyone in the room was interested in seriously discussing faith. “Where I am from, we would not have a meal like this where the men sit around, and the women serve them. God created men and women as equals. I often help my wife with chores like preparing food dishes.”
Hatzy, the young man to my right, instantly agreed. “Yes. That is how the Umma should be. Our prophet treated women very well. I would like to speak with you more about this.”
The reactions from the other men ranged from indifference to comments like, “Men’s work in the fields is harder than women’s. It is only right that they do their part, too!”
Hatzy and I sat talking a few more minutes after the rest of the men left. I found him to be a thoughtful listener. He is 22 years old and teaches 4th and 5th grade at the Muslim school behind the mosque. He is single and lives in a one-room, stilted wooden house with his mom, a married sister, a brother-in-law, and their children. His dream is to go to college and study education, but tuition costs $1,500 a year, which seems impossible.
When Hatzy left, I remained, talking to Manly until almost 10:00 p.m. (I don’t know his name yet, so I will just call him Manly. We never write about people using their real names anyway. But we do try to make the names we give them sound similar to the actual name or remind us of them somehow so we don’t lose track of who we wrote about. Hatzy’s name might be Hat-aty, Hutzy, Haty or the like.)
There were 10 women lounging around Manly’s neighbor’s sandwich booth discussing the wedding. They were counting how many coconuts they still needed for cream for the curry, plus how much garlic, chicken and other ingredients they needed.
I told Manly the parables of treasure hidden in a field, the lost sheep, and the prodigal son. I encouraged him to stop smoking. I tried to leave a few times, but he kept saying the night was still young. I found out they had just given a rubber tree plantation back to the people they rented it from because it wasn’t producing. “I don’t want to be rich or poor,” he said. “I know treasures on this earth are temporary. I just do any work I can find to provide since we have seven children, and all but the youngest are in school.”
The next morning, I paid a visit to Hatzy, and we had a heart-to-heart talk for almost two hours. He asked me what the difference was between my kind of Christianity and Catholicism, but I told him that was a discussion for another day. I told him about Creation and the Fall and how, thousands of years later, people had all but forgotten God, so Jesus came to show what God was like. I told Hatzy how Jesus healed the sick, washed his disciples’ feet, and then died to cancel sin’s power over us. I told Hatzy that if we make Jesus the King of our life, He will give us a brand new life. And I told him some of my testimony of how God has been recreating me back into His image generationally, in my marriage, and individually. I ended by saying that life with Jesus is the most delicious thing imaginable. He nodded the whole time and kept asking me if there was anything else.
This morning, I went back to visit Hatzy once again and met his mom, sister and some of her children. The sister’s husband walked through the house briefly but didn’t seem too friendly to me. He didn’t return my greeting but said, in Arabic, “Praise be to Allah,” without as much as looking at me. I wonder what it means because I’ve received that kind of treatment before.
I learned that Hatzy has been working as a volunteer teacher for almost three years and has not been paid a cent. About a year ago, he started noticing a sharp decline in his health and now has a visibly enlarged thyroid gland. He has been treated for it whenever they have money. They go 40 minutes to a private clinic that only gives ten days’ worth of unmarked meds at a time. The meds are only $2.50 per day, but that adds up for people with little to no income. The pills are removed from the packaging, and the patients are not told the medicine’s name, so they can’t go out and buy it cheaper at a pharmacy. Hatzy said he used to be healthy and play soccer, but now, with his thyroid condition, he gets tired just walking up the stairs. It makes his heart beat faster for no reason.
Please pray for Manly and Hatzy and their families. In Hatzy’s case, the one-on-one conversations were much more spiritual and intimate than when his mother, sister and her children were around. I sent him the creation story in a message and some verses about God putting the lonesome in families and being a father to the fatherless. His father died of sickness a long time ago. Hatzy hasn’t really interacted with me since or given me an indication that he wants more. However, he did send me a video in English with Khmer subtitles of a Christian who converted to Islam.
Pray that our team and I will be inspired to spend as much time as needed with the people. Pray that we will know what to say to hook those ready to know Jesus. Pray that we would find people with whom we can study enough Old Testament stories so they will understand what happened at the cross.
We are praying for small Bible study groups to be established within walking distance of each other throughout the Great River People territory. That is how close their mosques and prayer houses are. Pray for Bend and the surrounding villages to have an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that leads to a breakout of Jesus followers.
In other news, our partners, the Tirados, are almost due to deliver their baby girl. We are on standby to watch their boys when it happens. Please pray for a safe delivery.
Also, we have started sketching a house to build soon, which many of you have contributed to. We have been living in a building that was always designed to be a ministry facility with offices and classrooms. We will need the space as we expand our work with digital evangelism through social media and printed materials. Having work at work and home life at home will be nice. We have already picked the spot to build and have moved 3,000 of our own compressed earth blocks made from soil dug on the property.
I have hired Vannah, the father of the boy who died of Leukemia, to be my full-time construction/grounds manager, so building the house will take as little of my time away from ministry as possible. Until his son died, Vannah was doing construction management in Phnom Penh. Pray for Vannah to give up smoking and desire to join his wife in loving and serving Jesus.
We leave for our furlough at the beginning of June. We hope to see many of you at that time. This is our tentative
Until next time. Love from your missionaries,
Joshua, Stephanie, Nathan & Alyssa
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