Invocation

Spring graduation is the day after tomorrow. I've been asked to do the invocation and benediction. For the latter, I'm using Psalm 20:1-5, but I've written the prayer myself. In fact, I've written two of them, because there will be two commencements: the 10 AM will be daytime traditional undergraduate students, and the 2 PM will be graduate and online students who tend to be a little older and have some work experience. Here's what I've written, 10 AM first.

• "Abba Father, of the countless days You have made, we like this one an awful lot. We weren't always sure we would get here, but You called us, You equipped us and sustained us, and now here we are. You set this day aside for us, and we will rejoice and be glad in it. One way that you equipped and sustained us was through the love and support of our friends and family. We pray that you will remember their generosity and sacrifice. A big part of today's joy belongs to them; please reward them richly. We started out with some people and met others along the way who are not with us now. They've had to postpone this day, or even turned aside to another path. They are on our hearts, so we pray You will bless and prosper all the work of their hands. You are the perfect Father, and You love them better than we can possibly imagine. As for us, we are here to testify to the world that You give wisdom, and in Your mouth are knowledge and understanding. Now, as we cross this stage, we pray that You will lead us in the triumphal procession of Christ, and then send us out to make Him known to the world. Amen."

2 PM:

• "Almighty God, You spoke to an eighty year old shepherd in the land of Midian from a bush that burned and was not consumed. You told two uneducated fishermen on the shore of Galilee to leave their nets and follow You. You had a job for all of them. You saw to it that Moses had an upbringing in Pharaoh's palace, then gave him Aaron's help, signs and wonders to show to Pharaoh, and later the Torah to help him lead the Israelites; You prepared him. You walked with Peter and Andrew for three years, You taught them the Gospel, and You breathed on them to give them the Holy Spirit. You prepared them. Then there came a day where you told Moses, and through him all of Israel, to prepare a meal and be ready to leave in a hurry. You told Peter and Andrew, and all of your apostles, to wait in Jerusalem for power from on high. Lord, you called us to this campus. You prepared us through our studies. We have arrived now at the moment of sending. We pray that You will consecrate us, anoint us, and send us out to do the work You prepared for us before You created the world. Moses pleaded with You not to send him if You were not going to go with him, and we echo that plea. You promised Peter and Andrew that You would be with them always, to the end of the age, and we claim that promise. Amen."

Title

This morning, on my walk to work, I suddenly realized what the title of my autobiography needs to be: "God knows what he's doing."

And yes, that implies that one of these days I need to actually write my autobiography. That goes on the to-do list, but not very high.

Dal

For the past several months I've been eating the same dish for lunch at least five days out of every seven. It's a recipe that has a lot of variables, which lets me experiment. I'm putting up this post because I've stumbled upon a couple that I really like and don't want to forget them. I plan to come back to this post and update it whenever I find more variants that are keepers.

The recipe itself is a thoroughly American bastardization of an Indian dish, dal. "Dal" is just the Sanskrit verb, to split, and as a dish it refers to split lentils or beans with other ingredients. My basic recipe for dal consists of the following:

• Between 1.5 and 2 cups of lentils or beans.
• About two cups of petite diced tomatoes.
• Two onions of some kind, minced.
• One fairly small ginger root, grated.
• One fairly large head of garlic, crushed.
• Three tablespoons of curry powder.
• An additional ingredient for flavor.
• Rice, about 1.7 cups before cooking.

The recipe is very simple: the lentils/beans, onions, tomatoes, and the additional ingredient all go in the crock pot in the evening. Typically I mince up the onions, pour one tablespoon of vegetable oil over them, and then microwave them for about five minutes to get them started, which is a shortcut I learned from the America's Test Kitchen easy prep crock pot cookbook. Then I throw that plus the tomatoes, pulses and additional ingredient in the crock pot, and add a little boiling water to get things started and give the pulses something to absorb as they cook. The crock pot goes on low, and chugs away for nine or ten hours. In the morning, I add the ginger, garlic and curry powder, let everything cook for about another sixty minutes, put the rice in my rice cooker, and then assemble in small tupperware containers five servings of two-thirds of a cup of rice topped by a fifth of the contents of the crock pot. All five go in the refrigerator for a day, and then I backpack them to work one at a time for my lunch.

There are four variables in the recipe: beans/lentils, onions, the additional ingredient, and rice. The different rices don't really change the flavor much, although I suppose they do make a marginal difference in the texture, so I just vary those often enough that they help to diversify my diet a bit. For the onions, there are only four options: white, yellow, red and sweet. So far, I've only found that sweet onions make a big difference in the flavor of the dish; the other three all just taste onion-y. I do have favorites among the beans/lentils -- red lentils are what I like best, even though I think a lot of folks would find them too mushy after cooking.

The biggest variable is the "additional ingredient." That can be anything. It can be vegetables, fruit, mushrooms, nuts, coconut milk, or whatever else I can imagine blending with the core recipe. So far, here are the variants that I've enjoyed enough to post them here for the sake of not forgetting them:

• Mango dal -- red lentils, sweet onions, mango salsa. Oh my heavens, this is tasty. When I make a batch of this, I daydream about lunch all morning. If it wasn't important to keep a balanced diet, I'd just fix this every week and consider the matter settled.
• Chipotle dal -- white onions, three cans of chipotle peppers, button mushrooms, beans instead of lentils. I stumbled upon this about three weeks ago, and was very pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it. I can't pin down why the occasional mushroom made the chipotle so much more enjoyable, but it certainly did.
• A nice variant that's not too different from mango dal, and not as healthy as most of my recipes, is tropical dal, where the flavoring ingredient is mango, coconut milk and banana. I use a lot less mango in that -- instead of a full portion of mango salsa, I just use one of the smaller fruit cup portions of mango. It's not as fresh, obviously, but there's so much going on flavor-wise that I don't really notice that.
• New edit, July 10, 2019: I'm currently eating my way through a batch of Pad Thai inspired dal. Here are my cryptic notes on how to make the sauce.

It's cheap, tasty, unbelievably easy to make, and healthy two different ways: it rounds out my diet and also helps to keep my weight in check. There are no down sides to it. It's one of the best discoveries I've made in my adult life.

Terpsichore

Quick crackpot analogy that just hit me this morning. Listening is dancing.

Some people aren't any good at dancing, and they know it. Some think they're wonderful dancers, but it's plain to everyone they know that they're awful. Some refuse to dance as a principled stance. Some seem to take to dancing very naturally, but are a little clumsy and raw. Some work very hard to be precise and accomplished dancers, sometimes building on top of a bed of inborn talent, other times overcoming a lack of talent with determined hard work.

And you can't get better at dancing just by watching other people do it. You have to put yourself at risk, suffer failed early attempts, and pay intense attention to what you're doing wrong and what moves you've got to retrain and purge in order to make progress.

Extremis

For quite a long time I've taught my interpersonal communication students that language is a scalpel: speakers and writers can use it for benign purposes, to promote healing, to end suffering, but it always does violence to reality. It always pushes in abstraction and slices away immediacy.

This morning, it crossed my mind that a failing grade is a bullet.

The thought of being shot, or of receiving a failing grade, is frightening. The experience is painful. People commonly change their behavior, under duress, to avoid either of them. Authority figures are issued the machinery to deliver them, and need to exercise great caution when using it. But it's also a bad mistake to be so gun/F-shy that they refrain from using it when it's called for. A pacifist police officer who won't fire a gun leaves other innocent parties at risk; a pushover educator who won't record an F places both students and their future colleagues at risk.

Some shots are warning shots, and some failing grades on individual assignments are timely warnings that enable students to redirect their efforts. Some people's gunshot wounds heal, leaving little loss in function, and some students rebound from failing a class, having changed their habits and their attitude. Some gunshot wounds are fatal, and some failing grades result in academic dismissal, or in such concentrated discouragement that the student drops out. And there are accidental gunshots and failing grades based in misunderstandings or recording errors; I hope the accidental failing grades are a lot less common than the gun accidents. Can't quite make the analogy work for suicide by gunshot, but I can live with a single mismatch.

It then struck me that guns, and bullets, also have a lot to do with people's relationship with animals, and that might be where the analogy breaks down. But no, we grade animals in a lot of settings, and often those grades make the difference between life and death. Livestock gets graded, and some livestock goes to the slaughterhouse and the dinner table, while other livestock lives on as breeding stock. Apparently in that class, the learning objective is to be unappetizing, and students get an F if they're delicious.

Then there's also the example of working animals, like disability service and bomb- or drug-sniffers, all of whom get extensive training, and are very much at risk of flunking out of the program. It could be argued that those who flunk are relegated to a cushy life as adoptable pets, but it's been my growing conviction for years that working animals have the truly healthy living arrangement, and that the overwhelming majority of human-pet relationships actually unfold as the piecemeal papering over of the animal's misery. But that thought wanders off in another direction, way off the path from the F and the bullet.

Cambodia, Day 21.5

Spotted on the way to the airport: tuk-tuk driver and copilot.

 

Cambodia, Day 21

Last full day in Cambodia, first day of transitioning back to life in the United States. We started at a place that opened its first shop in Phnom Penh a week or two ago, to fortify ourselves for a day of window and souvenir shopping in the downtown markets: 

I decided not to get anything, because I'd had my fill of K² years ago when I lived in Georgia. But then someone brought around a tray of plain glazed doughnuts that were just milliseconds out of the oven, and I caved and took one. Krispy Kreme's iced doughnuts from the display case are nothing special, but their fresh doughnuts are what made them deservedly famous.

We then spent two hours poking around the Russian Market, and I spent money on two things. First, I bought some fresh durian and went out to the parking lot to try it:

It was tasty! Fruity, and a bit tart, and a bit sweet, and all in all very enjoyable. I ate two fairly large pieces of it, shared a bit with Sarah and a larger portion with Sway, and later handed the rest off to Chloe and Joe to sample. There is now officially nothing about Khmer food that scares me.

Back in the marketplace, I took Don Brewster's advice and stocked up on Amok Seasoning.

The ingredients really aren't that exotic; it's just lemongrass, garlic, galangal and kaffir lime peel. I bought enough to make a bunch of batches, and after they run out, I can experiment with making my own seasoning mix from fresher ingredients. Since chicken amok is a pretty common variant, I'm thinking I might actually be able to take a few chicken thighs and whip it up in the crock pot. I might even use it for burrito filling. I am genuinely excited at the thought of Cambodian freezer burritos.

Not much was said, at least within my earshot, about more meaningful echoes of the past couple of weeks. It's still too recent, and I get the feeling most folks are letting the experience settle a bit before they make any bold claims about it. For right now, I feel good about paying attention to frivolous things, at least for a couple of days. The reflection and insight will amount to a lot more if we aren't in too much of a hurry and don't try to force them.

I'll also add, I'm already experiencing a bit of an emotional letdown, and I don't think I'm alone: there've been several episodes of mutual grumpiness today. I hope it winds down, or at least doesn't escalate, or the travel home could be even more wearying than it's already going to be. We had about an hour's talk before dinner about reentry, about the adjustment struggles and the way to tell the story to people who ask. Now I'm planning to look up some combination of Josh, Krista and Erik for lunch sometime soon, so I can pass along my stories and compare notes with them. I'm hoping that'll bring helpful perspective from people who understand, but who are not on this team. This team is made of some wonderful people, but three weeks of this much togetherness is quite enough. It'll be nice to work through some of this with other folks.

Time to pack, sleep, and then say goodbye to Cambodia. In the morning, we're headed home.

Cambodia, Day 20

This morning we worshipped at Rahab's Church in S. P., and then we said goodbye. Barang led worship and Pastor Chantha preached. The sermon was about 1 Kings 17, the power of a righteous man's prayers, Jesus' rejection in Nazareth in Luke 4, and God's love for all people from all nations. Afterward, we had a debrief with the Rahab's House staff and the Disciples for the purpose of thanking and encouraging each other. Pastor Chantha had another flood of kind words for me, and said he'd learned a great deal from the Bible study on Friday. I was caught very off guard by his praise, but Annie talked a bit with Kimloi, and came away with the explanation that they expect a college professor to be a very high status person who remains aloof, so they saw my taking part in games and conversation as great humility. Actually, it's more that they were delightful people, and it blessed me to learn their stories, so I think a lot of the kind words were unmerited, or at least greatly exaggerated. But either way, it was heartwarming to hear, and it made it even harder to say goodbye.

In the afternoon, Pastor Troy led us in a four hour discussion of the entire experience, including how it compared to our expectations, what we thought God taught us, and what we planned to do next when we arrive home. A lot of half-finished thoughts were shoehorned into words that didn't quite fit, and a few tears flowed. As I write this, he's out bowling with a few of the hardier students, and I'm thinking about an early bedtime. 

Tomorrow we hunt souvenirs, and the top of my shopping list is the spice packets Don Brewster tipped me off were available for making my own ហហ្មុកត្រី. Then, bright and early Tuesday morning, we hop on a plane to head home.

Cambodia, Day 19

This morning, we threw a party for the girls at Agape Restoration House. We set up stations, including a photo booth, a visor-decorating station, a coloring and drawing station, a games station, and a blind taste test station. The girls sang and danced for us, and we did "I can count on God" for them. We had lunch with them, including fried chicken and corn on the cob, and birthday cake for all the girls and staff whose birthdays fell in May. Again, as with Rapha's house, this was a place for our female members to take the lead while the men hung back unless approached by a girl. A few of the girls lured me into photo booth pictures, but otherwise I got to watch the fun, which is actually more enjoyable when the cultural gap is this wide.

One nice moment for me: the older girls did a traditional Khmer dance of blessing, which included a lot of practiced steps and hand gestures, but near the end they threw small flowers at us by the handful. I looked around for one with a long stem, and I tucked it into my goatee at about the midpoint. Immediately after that dance, they asked all of us up on stage to introduce ourselves, and when I told them my name, they all spotted the flower and got a good laugh out of it. It wasn't a calculated bid for attention; more absent-minded  than anything else, but it did break some of the ice, which I was pleased to see.

In the afternoon, we went to Bloom Cafe, which is where at least some of the women wind up after they complete the ARH program. As with Blossom back in Siem Reap, the cakes they had on display were mind-blowingly intricate. We  strolled down the street to Monument Books, and I thumbed through a Khmer language course that I plan to get on Amazon when I return home. (I'm all for putting hard currency into the Cambodian economy, but fifty dollars was a bit much, and I have to guard my shrinking supply of cash pretty fiercely.)

Tomorrow, we have church at Rahab's House, immediately followed by our big debrief with the Rahab's House staff, which likely will include some wrenching goodbyes. We've become very fond of a lot of these folks in just the few days we've worked together. Then, over lunch, we'll do our own team debrief, and then everyone else will go to watch the Cambodian national soccer team play a local club, while I hole up in my room and read something.

Cambodia, Day 18

Today was our last day at Rahab's House, which was happy-sad.

The storytelling students told their stories. Barang and Sakha were both very groggy, because they'd pulled an all-nighter to record a song in Khmer for someone who wanted it no later than today. The class voted Barang's story the best of all, and I asked him if he'd be willing to tell it in Kids Club. He declined, partly out of shyness and partly because he didn't think he could do the story justice on two hours' sleep. The story, incidentally, was how God broke through to him using his love of the piano. He started the story with the first time he ever touched a piano key, and how it brought to the surface all the pain he felt over his bad home life. The story was entirely in Khmer, so all I knew of it was the very short English synopsis he gave me, but everyone in the class said it was powerful.

In the Young Disciples Bible study, we finished up the year of jubilee, talking about slaves being redeemed and returning to their families. We talked about the passage from Isaiah that Jesus read at the Nazareth synagogue, and why He compared His ministry to jubilee. That got us to how sin enslaves us, but Jesus is our kinsman who redeems us and allows us to go home to be with God and our family of fellow believers. Pastor Chantha sat in and translated, and afterward had some incredibly kind and gracious things to say about the lesson. It turns out that he's preaching on Jesus in the Nazareth synagogue this Sunday. I truly love it when God arranges perfect timing like that.

At Kids Club, we also finished up the year of jubilee. Delia and Ratanak continued playing off each other; they have wonderful performance chemistry together, and the kids loved them. Afterward, the Disciples showed off what they'd learned in the morning classes we'd taught: Barang and Pia played "Jesus Loves Me" while we all sang, and then Dara and Kimloi teamed up with Joe and Chloe to do a wordless skit to music. Finally, I took a chance and asked Barang if he would possibly be willing to tell his story, and he smiled and said yes. Only when he got up on stage and looked horrified did I realize that he'd misunderstood the question and still didn't want to. But he was already on stage, and people were chanting his name, so he relented and told it. A couple of times he had to fight back tears, but the kids were attentive, and at the end he got a hearty round of applause. And I saw tears in a few other eyes around the room.

We prayed over them, sang and danced to several more songs, and told the kids goodbye for the last time. We'll see the Disciples again at church on Sunday, and possibly a few of the kids, but for the most part, we've wrapped up the big relationship-forging stage of the trip. Tomorrow we're staging a party for some girls in after-care, and then we pay a visit to Bloom Café.

Cambodia, Day 17

God has been very merciful to me in one specific way: I haven't gotten sick. No upset stomach, no fever, nothing. I'm one of the few who can say that. But I did yesterday finally get a little post-nasal drip, which means I'm sniffling and clearing my throat a tad, and I've had a couple of quick sneezing fits. It feels like the tiny bit of allergy I get occasionally back home. It's rained pretty hard on occasion over the past several days, and as the local vegetation gets a fresh burst of vitality from that, I suspect it's all belching some pollen into the air. Naturally, my immune system needs to commence playing war games to be ready for the threat of Cambodian pollen. At any rate, if this is the worst symptom I experience here, then I'm still doing pretty good.

Funny moment: Sway is our only team member that speaks Khmer, and today, one of the boys  asked him if I came down from the sky. Sway found the question confusing, so he asked the boy why he thought that. The boy said I looked like one of the Kung fu masters from a Chinese movie who come down from the sky. That was a fine thing to hear secondhand later on. I wish I could think up a way to use it to mess with them tomorrow, but it's our last day, and the setup likely would be too complicated.

Also this afternoon, I resumed giving away my office toys. The Kids Club lesson was about Leviticus 26, the year of  jubilee. One situation I wanted the kids to imagine was losing something they owned, but getting it back later, so we had a skit in which Delia was the teacher, and Sara was a pupil caught playing with a toy. Delia took the toy and said Sara could have it back at the end of the week. The toy we used was my large inflatable hammer, and there was a nice touch of absurdity with Sara swinging around this huge thing during class and getting caught with it. Then, near the end of the lesson, I wanted to make the point that everything belongs to God, and that He judges our hearts by what we do with the possessions temporarily entrusted to us. For that skit, Sara started by using the hammer to repair the leaky roof of a poor widow. Delia admired the hammer and asked if she could hold it, so Sara made her promise only to do good and nice things with it. Delia then scampered around the room, hitting everybody she could reach on the head with the hammer, which the kids absolutely loved. When she got to Ratanak, she hit him several times, and he playfully toppled over and passed out. After the end of the lesson, I explained about my office toys and why I was giving them away, and I presented the inflatable hammer to Ratanak. He almost immediately hit Delia with it.

Tomorrow is our last day at Rahab's House: the storytelling students will perform their stories, and the adults and kids all will learn about how the year of jubilee was supposed to mean freedom for all the captives. Chuttrah asks for more prayer for his wife's health, and all of the NCU folks could use prayer for the last of our energy to stretch through one more round of everything.

Cambodia, Day 16

I had another couple of good talks today. One young man named Chetra shared his testimony with me, and asked that I pray for his wife, who has heart problems. They want to start a family, but first they have to get her more healthy, and the available care so far hasn't done the trick. 

Then there's the youth pastor at Rahab's House, whose name is Ratanak. Pastor Troy calls him the best youth pastor he's ever seen. Today, he motioned me over after lunch, and we had a nice rap about the Bible. We talked about whether conflict between church leaders is a sinful departure from being of one mind, and Paul and Barnabas' split over John Mark was the example. We also talked about Bible study, and worshipful nature of menial service like sweeping floors. He's a very good man, and I'm proud to call him a new friend.

Ratanak has a lightning-fast sense of humor, and he's been translating for us during Kids Club. Yesterday, in the middle of a skit, he sang a line of Justin Bieber to Delia, and she lost it; couldn't get her laughter under control until we'd moved on to something else and taken the attention off her. So today's lesson was about Leviticus 16, the Day of Atonement, and I got an idea for how we could put Ratanak's gifts to best use.

We demonstrated the scapegoat ritual by acting it out. Sara played the high priest, and Delia played a goat, and Chloe and Joe guest-starred as the second goat for the girls' and boys' groups, respectively. Instead of choosing the goats by lot, we told the kids they would get to vote for which goat lived and which goat died. I then handed the microphone to Delia, and then to Chloe and/or Joe, and each got to make a speech pleading to stay alive. Unfortunately, since they were goats, the speech consisted only of "Baa! Baaaaaaaaa!" 

I told them Ratanak knew how to translate not only from English, but also from goat language, which meant he got to make up what their speeches said. And obviously, I didn't tell him in advance I was going to do it, because I thought what he improvised in the moment would be even funnier than what he might plan out. We have absolutely no idea what he said, but the kids laughed until they couldn't sit up. The Kids Club sessions went a thousand percent better today than yesterday. Now we just need a brainstorm for tomorrow and Friday.

Cambodia, Day 15

I'll get right to two prayer requests. Today I made a friend named Keo, which rhymes with Ohio, and he's remarkable. He's a second year engineering major, and he dreams of building dams and canals to supply drinking water to poor villages all over the provinces. I mentioned that engineers probably make a good living, and he said "I don't care about that at all; I want to do what God wants me to do." Keo asks that we pray for his father. His mother and sister believe in Jesus, but his father does not. He was a Buddhist monk for a number of years, and while he knows about Jesus, he hasn't yet come to believe. If you would keep Keo's father in your prayers, for him to come to know Jesus, that would be wonderful. You might also pray that Keo's studies and career be blessed, because he's going to work humbly and tirelessly to bring relief to a whole lot of suffering people, and to glorify his Creator in the process.

The other prayer request is for my student, Kia. Kia is in the storytelling class I teach every morning at 9 AM. He's trained as an English teacher, but they've been forced to discontinue classes because they don't have classroom space. They own land that's set aside to build a new classroom building, but at the moment they're out of money. If you would pray for their fundraising for the classroom building, that would also be wonderful. Kia told me that an education is one of the best protections against being trafficked, so there are lots of reasons it would be a blessing.

In other news, I can report improvement on all fronts. Storytelling went well again, the Bible study overcame a few translation struggles to end on a very high note, and Kids Club was a lot more interactive, although I did forget to start the timer, and as a result we ran a bit short. There's still room for more improvement, but I'd score it about an 8.3 out of 10. The Khmer staff are wonderful people, and the children are beautiful. I predict that by Friday I'm going to find it hard to leave.

Oh, and I had water buffalo for dinner. It was delicious.

Cambodia, Day 14

Day one at Rahab's House in S. P. On a scale of one to ten, I give it a 7.8. It wasn't great, wasn't even solidly good, but it wasn't a meltdown.

The first hour, I taught a storytelling class to five young adults. We introduced ourselves and did a little icebreaker, and then I talked through the five reasons to tell stories: to teach, to strengthen group identity, to speak for the unheard, because it's fun, and to testify of God's goodness. I then asked them to choose three stories that they would like to polish up and deliver: one from the Bible, one from their own lives, and one that hadn't happened to them personally, but they knew about: history, or news, or something along those lines. The Bible stories they picked were ambitious: Job, Jonah, David and Bathsheba, Jesus walking on water, and I can't remember the fifth. For the personal story, all five wanted to work on their testimony. For the third person nonfiction story, two want to tell the story of S. P., one wants to tell the story of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, one wants to tell a revenge story she heard someplace, and the fifth wants to tell the story of the Titanic.

The second hour, we convened the first day of a weeklong Bible study on Leviticus 11 - 25. Today was just the overview, so we talked about why, in the Good Samaritan, the priest and Levite passed the robbery victim on the other side of the street, and why Isaiah through he was undone in his vision in chapter six. Those were the springboard for a broad, conceptual discussion of clean vs. unclean, and tomorrow we get down to details. We then fellowshipped with the Rahab's House disciples for an hour and a half: an hour of a very energetic name-learning game, followed by lunch together. They gave us a tour of all their living centers and job centers, and by two PM it was time for Kids Club.

Kids Club didn't go badly, given the material we were asked to teach: it's the same as the morning Bible study, the laws of clean and unclean in Leviticus. We played a little game where Delia and Sara planned what to take on a picnic, while the kids yelled "Clean!" or "Unclean!" in Khmer after every selection. Some of the lesson was just unavoidably dull, and the room was hot, but our translator spiced it up with some creative sound effects and a hilarious imitation of the voice of God. This part is where there's the most room for improvement. We've got to figure out a way to make these lessons more eventful and interactive. Not easy, when you're teaching Levitical cleanliness laws, but it's a challenge and we deal in those.

The kids are wonderfully bold. Four or five have reached for my goatee, and I held still while they ran their fingers through it. So far, nobody's tried to yank it. A few have also helped themselves to rubbing my bald head, which is especially funny after all Pastor Troy's warnings that the top of the head is sacred in Khmer culture, and no one ever touches anyone on the head. But in our own culture, small children do all sorts of things that violate norms; it just means they're not too far along in the process of enculturation.

Leftover funny moment from Saturday: in the morning, Pastor Troy said something silly about the possibility of giraffes at the wildlife refuge. Afterward, at dinner, Mary Jo said "Troy, I thought there were supposed to be giraffes." Troy was distracted, so she repeated herself a couple of times. Calvin looked absolutely shocked, and after a confusing exchange, he explained that he thought she said "Troy, I thought I was supposed to beat your" something that rhymes with glass. That would be quite out of character for Mary Jo. So then this morning, I was talking Delia through the parts of the Kids Club lesson, and the last part was "What does this tell us about Jesus?" Delia got wide-eyed, and finally said she heard it as I was planning to hand out cigarettes. Apparently we're all getting too tired either to enunciate properly, or maybe just to listen carefully.

This evening, Troy told us about a raid that went down today. It's unclear to me how detailed I can be, since a lot of AIM's activities have to be fairly closely guarded secrets, so all I'll say is that God is good.

Cambodia, Day 13

So I know I have a striking appearance, and I'm quite used to being recognized when I return to places: the bald head plus the long goatee together mean that happens pretty often. Over here, though, they've taken it up a notch. All of us get stares, but I get more than my share, and a number of people stroke their chins while smiling and nodding. The hotel folks, both in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, have been handing me my room key automatically, where almost everyone else has to ask for their key by room number. Matthew Stock told me they would notice the beard and approve of it, since a lot of them actually can't grow facial hair, and that's turning out to be accurate. I'm glad, because I had a strong urge to cut it off short before I left, but he persuaded me not to.

This morning, we worshipped at New Life Fellowship. 

 

(That's not the entire church; that's just an event tent they set up on the sidewalk and part of the street for a jobs fair they hosted. Those tents are a common sight in Cambodia, but they're usually for weddings.)

At New Life Fellowship, both the pastor and the associate pastor's wife have roots in Eugene, so we felt a little cool breeze of home. During the song service, we sang "Great are You Lord," some in Khmer and some in English, which gave extra power to the line, "All the earth will shout your praise." The pastor, Jesse McCaul, preached in fluent Khmer, complete with good comic timing and very Asian nonverbals. They passed out small radio receivers with earbuds for instant English translation, but there are still some bugs to be banged out of the system, so most of us abandoned the radios midway through the sermon and just watched. They're launching a new church plant next Sunday, so that's something you could include in your prayers.

 

We spent the afternoon getting our ducks in a row for next week's ministry opportunities at Rahab's House. The Bible study was still in the very early stages, so we talked about it at length, and then broke up to write our individual assignments up. I'll be teaching a storytelling class in the morning, then teaching Leviticus right after that, then doing what amounts to a large VBS lesson in the afternoon. 

We 're trying to get to this point, where we're sufficiently prepared to teach children and build relationships. I think we're close to ready; tomorrow will be messy and improvised, but we're going to hold it together and be cheerful and enthusiastic, and by evening we'll have a better idea what we're up against, so we can firm up plans for the balance of the week. But we'll take any prayer you can spare.

Cambodia, Day 12

On Tuesday of this week, we started the day at Rapha House, but then had lunch at Viva in Siem Reap, and I made a discovery: ហហ្មុកត្រី, pronounced amok trey, which is steamed fish in a spicy coconut sauce. It's awfully good; awfully, awfully good. So good, in fact, that I've eaten it six times in five days: at Koulen, at the hotel restaurant, and then in Phnom Penh at Blue Pumpkin, at Olala, and at Freebird. I'm already a sucker for Asian food with coconut in the sauce -- my favorite Indian dish is navratan korma -- and I also like fish a good deal. I keep telling myself to knock off ordering it so often, but the rule I gave myself is to try Khmer cooking whenever possible, and several times there hasn't been another Khmer option on the menu that I hadn't tried. And it is very, very tasty, and very filling. I think Blue Pumpkin had the best sauce, but they did theirs as a ravioli, which was a bit odd. When I get home, I definitely need to get to work tracking down a recipe and learning how to make it myself. And I like to think this means I've been willing and obedient, but probably not; probably just God indulging His child.

(Pastor Troy wanted me to title this entry, "Doyle runs amok in Cambodia." I didn't title it that, because I've got a format going, but I did open with it. Incidentally, "amok" rhymes with joke and poke, so the gag doesn't work out loud. And Pastor Troy is on a similar obsessive mission for cashew chicken, so Mary Jo said he needed to title a blog post, "Pastor Troy goes nuts in Cambodia.")

We spent the late morning and early afternoon at Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Centre, which takes in animals that have been abused or are threatened by poachers. Here's a deer auditioning to be an emoji.

 

Vendors sold us bananas, sugar cane and bamboo to feed to the animals. There were dozens upon dozens of fearless and aggressive monkeys ready to relieve us of all the food if we got distracted. Some of the animals were native Cambodian species we'd not heard of, some were variations on familiar wildlife, like the black-necked pelican, and some were very familiar. We had several good minutes with a monogamous pair of gibbons; the female gibbon liked to put her hand through the bars and let human visitors hold it. She and her mate snuggled and groomed one another, and when she treated us to her ululating call, he joined in with a little doo-wop harmony at the tail end. And near the end of the visit, we spent a bunch of quality time with a couple of elephants.

 

Needless to say, every beast we visited belongs to God, and in some ways it was a good way to follow up yesterday's sobering reminders. Animals can be dangerous and violent, but they're free from the sort of calculated, meticulously designed cruelty we studied up close. The animals we greeted and fed were curious, friendly, and wonderfully made.

Tomorrow morning we're off to church, followed by an intense afternoon work session to be ready for next week's ministry at Rahab's House. Keep praying for us.

Cambodia, Day 11

I was a World War Two buff for most of my childhood, so I read a lot of written accounts of the Holocaust. Then, in 1997, when I was closing in on thirty years old, I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. just a few years after it opened. I stood in a boxcar that had transported victims to Auschwitz. I looked through a gas chamber door. I stared at a huge pile of shoes, clothes and suitcases whose owners no longer needed them.

When we left the museum, I couldn't speak. For about an hour, I could not form words. It wasn't sadness or anguish; it more resembled shock, and the condition of being entirely overwhelmed. Those written accounts had supplied me with dates, facts and figures, but the material reality, close enough to see, unmediated, in the same room with me, gave it power I could not have foreseen.

I've read a lot about the Cambodian genocide over the years. I know a great deal about the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. I've seen the film and worked through several books on the subject. But today we visited Tuol Sleng prison and the Choeung Ek mass grave. They didn't hit with as much force, because I think you can only lose your innocence once, but they were sobering.

And I don't think there's Scripture that can do justice to the whole affair better than Jeremiah.

Cambodia, Day 10

Today was the last of the interior travel days. In the morning, we visited Angkor Silk Farm, where they grow, dye and weave silk. Here are some silkworms. 

The looms were fascinating. I could've stood by for hours, watching people weave silk thread into fabric.

 

Angkor Artisans takes young women and men on as apprentices, then keeps them as interns, then sends them out as skilled crafters who can earn money and keep Cambodian textile culture alive and well. In addition to silk, they do stone carving and a number of other regional arts. The patterns they made with tie-dying were remarkable.

Right after a slightly early lunch, we hopped on a Giant Ibis bus for the six hour trip from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. We're back in the big city, and Pastor Troy chose the last hotel to give people a look at inner city Cambodia. I already made a new friend.

Tomorrow we visit Tuol Sleng prison, and a mass grave. Jesus said this about the world's ending, and tomorrow is going to give me a benchmark for just how bad is bad. I'm trying to brace for that.

Monday starts the intense phase of the work we came here to do. Everything until now has been adjustment and overture, and it's almost time to get to work. Now would be a wonderful time for you to keep us in your prayers.
 

Cambodia, Days 8 & 9

Would've posted this yesterday, but a storm knocked out the power and the WiFi. The power came back on almost immediately, but the WiFi stayed unavailable until about fifteen minutes ago, give or take.

Tuesday, we visited Rapha House. I went in expecting to have Habakkuk's question on my lips, and Paul's instruction for my entire to-do list, and that was about right.

We started by joining the staff devotional. We sang "What a friend we have in Jesus" and "Shout to the Lord," with some singing in English and others in Khmer. It felt a little like this; our words were different, but the message was the same. Afterward, the associate director talked us through the center's work, fielded questions, and took us to meet the kids. The males among us held back, and the women took point in playing, singing and doing crafts with the girls. "Down by the banks" and "duck-duck-lobster" broke the ice pretty thoroughly, but I have to say that they once again found the song bewildering. We all worked on the craft, which was a cross made from beadwork. Joe helped me out several times when I got confused about which way to thread the cord back through to get the shape right.

Nothing about the girls gave away what had happened before; they were cheerful and friendly. But each of them is on a long road to mitigate the effects of the unspeakable, and needs prayer and safety. The center's work is complicated by its relationship with the Cambodian government, as well as the entanglement of trafficking and prostitution with the poverty and cultural norms of this community. Providing care and counseling isn't an undertaking with a simple beginning and end; the goal is to engineer options that make more sense than returning to sex work, which, sadly, is not straightforward. But better to show up, plunge right in, pray every step of the way, and not get discouraged.

In the evening, we went to watch Cambodian dance, so I don't have to end this day as a pure wall of text.

Wednesday, we visited a place I first decided almost twenty years ago that I wanted to see before I die: Angkor Wat. We actually stopped at the Angkor Thom south gate, Bayon, Ta Prohm, and Angkor Wat, in that order. The artisanship was incredible, and the vandalism and tourist shenanigans were pitiful. We watched the sun rise over Angkor Wat at 5:41 AM, and I saw hundreds of people take the exact same picture. That rubbed something in me the wrong way, so I made up my mind on the spot that I was going to spend the day looking at the site, not composing shots of it. I didn't take a single picture, but I saw some beautiful things. Good day.

Tomorrow, we get back on the bus for Phnom Penh. Pray for safe travel, if you would.
 

Cambodia, Day 7

Today was a travel day: Battambang to Siem Reap. Ordinarily, we would make the trip by boat, but Cambodia is suffering from a drought of history-making intensity  and the river is too low, so instead we traveled by mini-bus. Disappointing, but a lot more comfortable and energy-conserving.

 

What I've seen so far on this trip resembles what I've seen on all my previous short-term mission trips: the group is growing more and more cohesive. In part, that's because we have long hours to kill, so we chew over what we're seeing, and we tell stories, and we play games, and uncertainty reduction theory says all that verbal exchange coupled with nonverbal warmth should reduce uncertainty and increase liking. And it does, plainly. But I think a bigger part of it is the shared work: we come to each other's aid, we pitch in, we feel satisfied at what we accomplish together. I think, and have thought for years, that shared work is sadly underappreciated as a way to tighten and strengthen relationships of all kinds, especially in American culture.

I arrived at NCU in the fall of 2007, and I was one of seven new hires that year. On a faculty our size, that's a big infusion of new faces. At new faculty orientation, there was an icebreaking game that I've blotted out of my memory, an effort at using planned, scheduled "fun" to jump-start collegial relationships. It didn't accomplish much. But right after that, we had a work session, in small groups, to mark up part of the school's strategic plan and suggest changes. It was fairly unengrossing work, but at the end of that hour, that's when I first felt some recognition and some closeness with my new colleagues.

Something like that is happening here. My curmudgeonly opinion of "kids today" is that they too often put fun and enjoyment at the focus of what they do. They do that in their down time, and many of them expect it during work time as well. I don't think they're lazy or childish to do so, but I do think they're missing out. Fun for fun's sake is like a meal of cotton candy: nice flavor, but too insubstantial. Doing meaningful things, and weaving in fun as a by-product, is a far more effective and sustainable strategy. It works the same way being liked works: people who set out with being liked as their goal are often the least likable, while people who proceed from integrity and comfortability with themselves find themselves popular as an indirect, not direct, outcome. The harder you try, the more it eludes you, but the more you turn your focus to what really ought to matter, the more good luck you seem to have as a fringe benefit. This, in other words. 

All of the above is my long-winded way of arguing that we're growing closer in large part because we're working together, and I'm thankful for that opportunity. And may God continue to bless and establish it!

People are getting sick; no emergencies, but some moderately scary developments. Sarah spent a couple of days fighting off fever and nausea, and today Sway and Calvin both took to their beds. Sway was up and around in a few hours, thinking it might have been a reaction to a bite, or a scorpion sting, or something similar. But for Calvin, we had to call a doctor: he was having enough trouble keeping anything down that dehydration became a genuine possibility. He's better, but we're still watchful. We've done some focused, no-nonsense praying for health, and it would be wonderful if you kept our health in your prayers as well: for Sarah and Sway and Calvin to be restored to complete health, and for the rest of us to be protected from illness.

Tomorrow, we visit Rapha House. No photographs allowed, so the day's blog post will be even more of a wall of text than this one.