Camp Adventures!

Day One and a half:

(Side note: I LOVE Cambodia… but the camp life is hard! So please just know I’m making light of how different things are and partially revealing me as an Americans and my prissy little ways about things. Ha.)

Wednesday evening we arrived at the camp which is about 2 hours outside of Phnom Penh. We had to honk a few cattle out of the way, but we safely made it. =)

Do you ever watch Lost? If so-then you can clearly picture what our camp looks like. John Locke should jump out of the jungle at any moment. It’s just like the Dharma Initiative except bigger…. And prettier… and maybe hotter? I’m pretty sure that we could combust at any moment due to extreme temperatures. I mean… when I took a shower the first night at the camp I could not stop the heat from radiating off of my body. Even while standing under cold water. It was unbelievable.

But enough of the heat. The campers are super excited to be here. We had an opening service where they did great in leading worship and Stephen Burton shared the opening message that focused on our theme “Reflect”. The group at camp this year only consists of Christians because they are wanting us to really focus on disciplining them.

The food is…. Interesting to say the least. I’m pretty sure Jen just found a chicken foot in her “soup”. Man cannot live on bread alone, but maybe rice? So far-rice gets an A+. But the hot dogs for breakfast…. Eh, maybe a C-? I opted out of that.

All of the girl leaders are in one big cabin where we have pretty little pink mosquito nets hanging over each one. The girls slept great the first night with not a site of one bug. But the boys-apparently they chose to leave their door open which welcomed the mosquitoes. One of our gentlemen got into a swatting match last night with all the mosquitoes, although I’m still confused how they all got under his net?

We also received our sleeping items when we got here which our one top cover is a fleece blanket. Yes. I said fleece. I barely sleep with fleece blankets in Tennessee in the winter, none the less the hottest place on earth! Therefore, I slept with nothing on top of me which I can probably say was the first time I have ever done that. I decided that I do have a blanket on top of me…. A blanket of humidity. Who needs fleece when you have a steam bath 24/7 upon your body?

After the morning service we met in small groups and really broke down the message and made sure the campers understood what it was about. Honestly, they know more than you realize and it’s refreshing to hear their stories of salvation.

We had lunch again… which was, of course, rice! And some type of meat stew stuff. I will confess that their fruit is top notch! Something about it makes it way better than ours… their pineapple, watermelon, and oranges (but the outside was green?) are ridiculously good.

We played team games and all of the campers decorated flip flops and made journals. The Mt. Paran crew brought all the supplies for that which was super cool.

A few random things…
-a kid got stung by a YELLOW scorpion today! How crazy is that?!
-Their smiles are worth a million bucks.
-The first night of camp, the girls actually got up at 2:30 to start taking showers. This is no joke.
-They do not drink near as much water as we do so the staff had to go out and buy like a truck load of water just for us Westerners. Are we high maintenance or what?