Mar 24, 2014 Sunday Morning Rain is Falling

 A few days ago I had a very interesting breakfast. Not so much what we were eating or even what we were talking about. All three of us at the table were bilingual: one spoke English and Vietnamese, the other spoke Vietnamese and Khmer and I speak Khmer and English. Not a problem right? I can speak with either of them, but the moment we started having a discussion about the upcoming District Conference things got a little hard. If you want to say something you have to say it to one of them or the other because we don't have any languages in common. For example, if I asked who would be speaking at the Sunday session in English then only one would understand. Then he would translate into Viet because the other guy's Khmer wasn't super good anyway. Everyone should speak a couple of languages or we should all learn one. And that one should not be English. It was a funny little conversation that was a little hard to follow sometimes because we had to continually be repeating things and backtracking and such. Funny though. Just a funny little situation really.

From approximately November to March the monsoon winds in Southeast Asia switch direction and it completely stops raining in Cambodia. We probably get about as much rain as y'all do in Odessa. Ok, that might be a little bit of an exaggeration but it gets cool and sunny and it's great. Then in late January early February it starts getting hot again. March isn't blistering but it's pretty warm. Warm enough that when it started raining for the first time in months this last Sunday we were relieved. The heat will continue to build for another month and a half or so before the rain really starts drowning the heat out, but hey, that means that mango season is coming into full swing!!

We went looking for a lost member the other day. His name was Vichet and his house is in a really messy and rundown area near an old hospital.  The map to his house was pretty good except that it got really vague as we got close. Houses around that area don't really have house numbers and things like that so all we got was "it's near the end of the little alleyway on the right". So in we go with a 10 year old black and white picture and a name just asking people if they know this guy and no one does. After asking pretty much everyone in sight about this guy we were getting a little discouraged. However, we recently set a goal to be super thorough in our searching for old members so we somewhat halfheartedly were continuing to finish out the alleyway.

We showed the paper to one guy and he was looking through it disinterestedly and asked, "Is there a phone number?" Of course I had already called the phone number (it wasn't in the system) but I pointed it out to him anyway. He looked at it for a second and then his forehead furrowed. He started mouthing the numbers and then looked across the alley to a door covered in rust and spray paint. He pointed to phone number on the door and said, "Oh nevermind, I thought it was this one but I was wrong." The phone number painted on the old door was one digit off from our phone number on the sheet. So, I called it and almost immediately our lost member answered and told us he had moved and gave us directions to his new house. That was a bit of a miracle.

Sorry guys, my computer is being weird. I'm outta here.

Love, Elder Vore