Tuesday, Chinese New Year arrived, with a lot of firecrackers!

As the title says, today we were welcomed with a Chinese celebration of New Years. A truck about the size of my grain truck stopped on the street in front of the hotel. It was loaded with people who started coming down a ramp on the back of the truck and they were carrying drums and costumes and then it all began. There was a clown like character directing and two human dragons dancing and jumping around all to the beat of drums and cymbals. Then there was a thunderous roar of fireworks right at the entrance of the hotel-they apparently have not yet heard of OSHA or DNR. The air was full of smoke and the paving brick was littered with burnt fireworks. I got close up for some video and then the clown started sprinkling water from an urn and I decided it was time to duck into a hall.

We had a hard time deciding this morning whether to go to DTS and hear more about listening to God's voice, which is very worthwhile, or help Laura with "Kings Kids". Once a week Laura goes into the slum and takes kids to the youth house and reads them a Bible story and then do a craft. We went into the slum with Thera to gather the kids while Laura was getting supplies. Today we ended up with 20 kids and the craft was finger painting. I learned that there are actually kids more artistically challenged than me, and that's not good.

After cleaning up the floors and our hands from the paint we had a meeting with Krissy at base 2 which is where the business office is. We finished the morning with the last part of the lecture and then the usual rice lunch.

We wanted to get a light attached to Mary's bike so the 2 of us headed out on our bicycles for an adventure. We biked out over the river to the other side of town where there are bike dealers and found the same place where we had purchased the bikes and he had no lights that worked so we finally with sign language persuaded him to mount a portable head lamp that we had purchased earlier. He had no drill so took a pair of scissors and bored a hole thru the plastic and put 2 bolts thru and mounted it to her basket. He worked on it for probably a half hour and charged us a whole dollar for the bolts and his time. What a deal. Actually we kinda had fun communicating with the man at the bike shop, he is trying to learn English so he kept asking us what is this "bolt"  "nut" etc in English and then he would tell us the Khmer word. He asked for our phone number so he could continue to ask us words. We went grocery shopping on the way back and stopped at the White Rose for some ice cream, actually fruit shakes and cooled off a bit before coming back by way of the bakery for some bread.

This evening, after our supper here at the hotel (fresh bread w/peanut butter and jelly) and some yogurt we got a tuk tuk and took Phally & Samphas out for ice cream and a visit. They are the only married couple that live on the base so have a huge responsibility in that they are modeling what a Christian Khmer marriage should look like. As Samphas said according to the students and staff who attend they expect the foreign marriages to be different, but he and Phally want to model a Christian Khmer marriage.
They asked questions on marriage, we talked with them and encouraged them in their work and in modeling the Christian Khmer marriage. To us this was very special, this is why we are in Cambodia!!

And now after another wonderful day in beautiful Cambodia, we are in our room and ready for a night of rest so we can do it all again in the morning.

Ed & Mary