Home Thoughts From Abroad

We’ve been back in Phnom Penh for a couple of days of ministry before heading back to Malaysia. This has been an incredible trip, one that I will never forget. We promise to upload some pictures as soon as we get back to KL and fill you in on some of the stories that we have to tell.

We are sitting in the airport – a lovely modern facility – sipping cappucinos and thinking that we are two of the most fortunate people on earth to be seeing what we are seeing and doing what we are doing at our stage of life. Thank you to all who prayed for our safety and our spiritual refreshment. The Lord has been good to us and we feel truly blessed.

Kep, pronounced kep, keep, or kipe depending on who you are talking to, is on the Gulf of Thailand on Cambodia’s south coast. It was favourite of Cambodia’s colonial masters, the French, and the site of King Sihanouk’s beach cottage pictured above. That was before the Vietnam War. Now it is a mostly deserted town visited by tourists who are looking for a Asian beach without the glitz of a Western resort.

We stayed at a reasonable little hotel for $15 a night and rented a motorbike for $5 for the day. Without the tourists Kep has reverted to what it must have been throughout most of its history, a small fishing village supporting an indigenous population in small thatch cottages dotting the coast. A little further inland are the rice paddys stretching back into the Cardamon Hills where spice has been harvested for centuries. Closer to the coast are the salt flats where salt farmers eke out a living. It is a peaceful and pleasant place.

We travelled into Kampot, a provincial town with a fair sized wet market consisting mostly of fish and locally grown vegetables. There is the beginnings of a tourist strip along the river, and some quite nice little cafes and guest houses line the eastern shore where we stopped for lunch. Traffic was light along the coast road and the ox carts and bicycles that fill the road ensure that no one travels very fast, for which Pam was very grateful.

Our evening were spent at the Riel, owned by Marcel and ex-pat Dutchman and his Cambodian wife. The clientele were an odd bunch: young Australian tourists on a cheap holiday, world trekkers making their way from China to India, and do-gooders like ourselves involved in a number of projects to help turn this country around after 150 years of colonial abuse by both the French and the Americans. More on this later.

We got to Phnom Penh on Wednesday, travelling by bus through the Cambodian countryside in a very pleasant five hours. Rice paddies and water buffalo were everywhere, much like in Bangladesh. What was missing were the people. Cambodia has been decimated by war going back to the Japanese invasion in 1942 and continuing more or less continuously until the Vietnamese drove out Pol Pot in 1979.

Phnom Pehn is on the Mekong River, the ninth largest river in the world and navigable by cargo ship right up to the city. Before Pol Pot took power in 1975 it had a population of two million, but under the Khmer Rouge it was emptied to 50,000 loyal cadres, most of whom were employed in the torture and extermination of everyone who could read. Slowly it is becoming a city again, although without an entire generation of doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, clerks and administrators, it has been a long slow road.

We took in the temples and monuments, including the infamous S21, and strolled along the quay. We bought a few things in the Russian and Central markets and relaxed in the numerous little cafes that line the streets. Tomorrow we are headed down to the south coast for a few days on the beach before coming back to Phnom Pehn to meet Pam’s colleagues in the city. We are working on getting some pictures up, but it is not so easy when the internet cafes have no photo programs. Believe me, we have lots to show you!

What are the new seven wonders of the world? 100 million people in 200 countries voted on the new list and although Angkor Wat was a finalist, it did not make the top seven. But I’m thinking that this had a lot more to do with the voting populations of Italy, Brazil and Mexico than anything else. I have seen the Colliseum in Rome and the ruins of Chichen Itza and let me tell you neither of them can hold a candle to Angkor Wat.

First there is the size of these things. There isn’t just one temple, there are dozens that cover miles of territory, about the size of metropolitan Toronto. There there is the scale of each temple. You could drop the Collesium inside the moat of Angkor Wat with lots of room to spare.

As for Chichen Itza. It was impressive, but again it just one site. Imagine a walled city large enough to hold a population over over a million, dotted with temples and ruled from the center by the brooding face of Jayavarmen VII staring at you on all four sides of 54 massive pillars. Or a palace that covers five acres with a fronting wall a long as the Houses of Parliament in England decorated with bas relief sculptures of parading elephants. This leads to a promenade down to a ten acre man-made lake and you begin to get an idea of the scope of the ancient Angkor whose civilization extended from Vietnam to Burma.

The dozen temple sites that we were able to see were remarkable for their originality and scope. From the regal Angkor Wat, to the enigmatic Bayon to the eerie Ta Prohm, backdrop for Tomb Raider, where the jungle has reclaimed its own, each site had its own splendor and story in the history of this remarkable empire.

I have always been a little in awe of Pam’s organizational skills. Yes, her varied career in administration has given her plenty of practice, but there is a gift there that I just don’t have. She moved the five of us to Bangladesh in six suitcases when our oldest was just five and I don’t think we went without anything we needed for an entire year. She organized our trips through Europe when we were in Germany with ease, booking ferries, flights, hotels and campsites on a day’s notice. She got us to Malaysia barely three months after we sold our house and moved into a condo. Who else would even tackle that? She is amazing.

So why should I be surprised at our accommodation in Siem Reap? It had to be the nicest place in the entire town. It certainly was the closest to the temples and the closest to the airport. It was also the loveliest and quietest little spot you can imagine; more like a spa than a hotel. We had a lovely room with a veranda by the pool, an intimate little restaurant and bar just steps away and sweetest staff imaginable. And this cost us twenty five dollars a night? Incredible!

I won’t disguise the fact that I have had a tough first term. I knew it would be. I have worked my little tail off to make the transition to a new culture, a new school, a new curriculum, and a whole host of new software. But three days at the Pavillion Indochine in Siem Reap has been a wonderful tonic to my weary soul and I am very grateful to have been there. Thank you, dear!

When I was younger I wanted to be a folk singer, like Bob Dylan. Not an unreasonable goal for a sixteen year old growing up in the sixties. I taught myself some chords and some basic finger picking and with a bit of talent and a lot of gall I was on my way. But life is what happens while you are doing other things, and I ended up a teacher instead, which is probably just as well. Aging folk singers make pretty thin wages these days.

I never gave up the guitar though, serenading our children until they wouldn’t take it anymore and leading in music in a number of churches until I got too old for that as well. I made a tough decision not bringing my guitar with me to Asia knowing that the demands of high school preparation, not to mention luggage restrictions, ruled it out. I have missed it.

Last week I broke down and blew RM300 on a reasonbly decent Chinese made guitar (That would be $75 Can, spendthrift that I am). It was like finding an old friend. I’ve never been a very good guitarist, relying more on my voice than my hands to get by. But that doesn’t matter to me anymore. What matters is that I can sing a tune that is meaningful to me in a way that soothes my heart and encourages my spirit. Isn’t that what good friends are for?

   I would start this post with “Rogers Cable, we hate you,” but then I would sound like my son, and we would both hate that even more. So when we got the message that the Banmans were no longer supporting our Rogers email, I just sighed and said “Figures,” and knew immediately where the problem lay. 

Kim and Larry, who if you haven’t met are just wonderful people, did their level best to ensure that our email service would not be disrupted by their move to Delaware. They maintain our email address under their service while we are out of the country. They had every assurance from Rogers that what has just happened would not happen. But neither of us believe anything that Rogers says, and our cynicism, it seems, was well founded.

So until Larry can get this sorted out, please reroute your emails to us through steve@spwise.com or pam@spwise.com both of which are currently active. Those links and our weblog are both maintained by Jon, our son. We are just hoping that he is not planning on moving his wee family in the immediate future or we will be really up the creek.

Love to all. Keep us in your prayers.