#46 - Rewarding Experience

For the past two months, we have been busy with our new initiative working with Gateway Cafe Ministries, a Christian cafe with a mission to reach university students. The cafe has been invited by a new English institute to start a kiosk in their front yard, so that we can witness and share the Gospel with their students and other customers. This opportunity came up a few weeks after we agreed to be part of this cafe ministries' leadership team early this year. It is always very excited to see God's timing in everything. 

Although Gateway received a one-time grant to support the setup fee, we cannot find any good and affordable outdoor furnitures, so we ended up purchased some used furnitures for the new cafe kiosk. We have few of our students from our dorm, Gryphon and Joelle helped to refurbish the furniture on one Saturday. We worked from 9am till 4pm until all 11 chairs and 3 tables look like new!

After waiting almost a month, the coffee machine and the counter finally arrived.  Amy and I and our volunteer designer from Singapore are very disappointed at the poor craftsmanship of the counter (if you take a close look!). We are still putting our heads together and see what can we do to make the counter look more attractive. 

Matthew - the cafe manager from Canada is behind the new machine.

A refurbished 3-groups espresso machine.
There are very limited choices here (for everything) in Cambodia
and a new espresso maker will cost 4-5 times more.

Joelle is holding a tray. She is putting on sticker to "mark" the cafe assets and took picture of them.

The vendor was installing our brand new outdoor umbrellas. While he was installing the 2nd umbrella, he found out the package was missing all the nuts and bolts. He had to return to the shop and get them.

Tables and Chairs have yet to arrive at that time. They were still in our house waiting to be painted

This is what it looks like now, ready for customers even though it is still a work-in-progress.  Based on the report from the cafe manager/ Canadian missionary, they shared the Gospel with three customers in the past week.

Dormitory and Discipleship Program

Rewarding and Exciting!!

Our focus is still our dorm and our students and as you may know our theme since Nov 2014 is "Life of Christ". Amy has been doing many of the week night bible study, she is now using the ERV (Easy-to-Read Version) of the English Bible to read through the 4 gospels while teaching English.  It is the first time in their lives to read thru the Gospel (in any language).  Reading is not part of their normal lives so it is a great accomplishment for them to read in English and also reading and learning the Bible.  

On the other hand, I have been focusing on the Saturday fellowship and preaching through the gospels on most Sundays. We are now teaching on the final week of Christ in preparation of Easter. It is very hectic for both of us but very exciting and very rewarding indeed. We are seeing good progress in our students’ English and their enthusiasm to learn God’s Words.

Fellowship

Building Repairs

Only 2 weeks after fixing the leak on the ground floor (kitchen / toilet) area -- it was a big mess for almost 2 week. And now all the concrete, and dirt returned to the dorm again! Because we have some water leakage issue from one of the toilets.

After almost a whole week of on and off repair and testing, the workers finally had to rip out all the floor tiles and some wall tiles to find the water leak. The water leaking into the ceiling in one of the boys' bedroom underneath this area.

We were negotiating with the contractor to install a new FLUSH toilet and an extra stand-alone sink for the girls on this floor. The old toilet has no flush. We also bought another flush toilet for the boys on the top floor!! Every one has a flush toilet now!! Yeah!!

New toilet installed. We also bought a new sink to be shared by all the girls (currently 6 girls shared 1 of the toilets), so they can get ready for work and school in the morning faster!

Another "need-to-fix" in the dorm is the door to the main girls' room was also broken and was fixed. The surprising news is, we were told it was broken again yesterday!! Sigh!

   

Student Fellowship

We were reading the story of Esther on March 7th, the day before the International Women's Day --- we found out it is quite a big deal in Cambodia and many will celebrate this Women's Day.

We normally start our Saturday fellowship with worship music, the last few months we have been focusing on games related to a character building, and time for bible reading / story telling. Then we will have fellowship dinner.

Communication skill - Each student rip the paper based on the instruction given by the "leader". 

It turns out each student's paper was rip differently even with the same instruction.
This proven that communication can be interpreted by the listener differently!

We were practicing communication skills as part of the fellowship activities.

Prayer time

This night, our theme was we are "One in Christ". They are doing a team building exercise with some wood blocks.

The students are very exciting when they have simple competition. And you can see they never have toys as basic as wood blocks to play with when they are young. They enjoyed it so much and we have to extend our games.

Gryphon and Joelle enjoy the game time with the students!

There's always so much to share with the students but never enough time. May God grant us the energy, the patience, the love, the wisdom on how to best teach and love our students and other young people in Cambodia.

There are many "headaches" and "heartaches" too. There are always some personal problems or family issues with our students and most of the time it is something we cannot just "fix". We are only there to listen to their problems, offer some advice, and pray for their needs. 

Please continue to pray for us and our ministries in Cambodia. We will have more picture of the nightly classes at the dormitory next time!