We are very busy now with many assignments going. One of the big things is arranging for the Young Ambassadors concert here in May. We have decided to advertise it as a benefit concert for Smile Village here in Phnom Penh. This is a community that is being built by a French NGO along with Habitat for Humanity in Phnom Penh. It will be apartments and schools, clinics and hopefully businesses that can provide the families some employment. The families have been living in the dump and recycling garbage to make money. The dump in Phnom Penh was closed so these families have moved to even worse circumstances near the sewers. Awful. The French NGO called PSE (Means for the smile of a child in French) started feeding the children of these families a few every day and now it has become thousands every day. They also provide schools for the kids hopefully to break the cycle of extreme poverty. Anyway, we have decided to try to raise extra money through sponsors and make the Young Ambassadors concert a benefit for them. SO - now it is a very big job to create power point presentations and advertising materials to approach potential sponsors to donate money. We are pretty much finished with that part thanks to some help from a couple of sisters that are Church members that have their own business doing concert promotions. We surely do appreciate their help. Richard prepared the power point presentation with input from them and next week they will begin approaching potential sponsors. Hopefully they will find what we need and we can all sleep a little better! Then we have to produce flyers, banners, posters, etc. to start selling tickets. Anyway, it seems a big job!
The other big job is preparing for the 20 year anniversary of the Church being in Cambodia. That will also be in May and will be a countrywide event for the members. Our part is to arrange for an open house in all the church buildings in the country. We are not even sure right now how many that is! We will also help with the celebration event that will be in a big theater in Phnom Penh.
We also have groundbreaking ceremonies in the next 2 months for new buildings to be constructed in 2 cities here. One of the buildings will be the largest Church building yet in Cambodia and will be 3 stories high right in the center of the city - Kampong Cham. The other one is a small building in Kampong Thom. Things are always a challenge because we don't speak the language and the culture is so different. We don't always understand what they think is appropriate because of the culture thing. We have translation help but it doesn't always help too much. Somehow it will all get done.
We went to Kampong Thom this past week to make arrangements for a tent and chairs, etc. for the groundbreaking and it is a grueling 4 hour drive there and then 4 hours back again. The accommodations there are not too great so a one day trip was best. The roads are unbelievably bad! They are like Swiss cheese with holes everywhere. The drive is exhausting but the countryside is so interesting. We have to laugh because when there is an especially big hole in the road, they put a tree branch sticking up in it so you can tell that is an especially big hole. Sometimes they fill the hole with sharp chunks of rocks - don't smooth it over! As we have said before - every day in Cambodia is an adventure.
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