We drove to Kampong Cham this week to meet the District president and his counselors. They have done a really good job preparing for the groundbreaking ceremony. They had the program all arranged with a few changes made as we met with them. We took the flyers that we had printed along with the invitations to take to the VIPs. One of the men there has already had contact with the provincial governor and talked to him about coming to the ceremony. That 's where things started to get interesting. The Governor's office said that they would have to pay $300 for a special tent for the governor. I guess the usual tents that are available for such events are not quite right for the governor. So we had to get that special request approved which we did. Then two days ago they were told that the tent was being used for something else and not available so they could make arrangements the regular way which is a lot less expensive. That was a blessing! The next request that came was that they would have to give the governor a gift and it should be $500 to $700 cash! Unbelievable. We told the mission president about that and he said that would not happen. We are not sure what the deal is with this guy. When we had the governor of Siem Reap come to the dedication of the meetinghouse in Siem Reap he did not ask for anything. Neither did the minister from Phnom Penh who paid his own expenses to get there. The poor guys in Kampong Cham are worried about offending the governor because the new building is right in the middle of the city and is across the street from the provincial offices. We hope he will not cause them any problems but there is no way the "gift" of that size will be given. Always interesting in Cambodia! They will take the official invitation to him this next week along with articles about the Church policy of neutrality and a letter explaining how much money LDSC has put into his province in the past few years - 1.4 million dollars. Hopefully they will have a good meeting with him. We told them that if they were uncomfortable explaining about Church policy to him that we would come up and explain and be the bad guys. We don't mind doing that but always try to have the local people take the responsibility. They are so capable and do a very good job but working with the government here is hard.
One wonderful thing that the President Lim told us is that when he saw the picture on the flyer we took up there, he recognized the building. He had seen it in a dream a while ago. They have been waiting for a building for quite awhile. There are quite a few members there and they use rented buildings. He knew other cities with fewer members had already had buildings built for them and so he wondered why they had to wait. By waiting they will now have the largest church building in Cambodia so far. It will be a beautiful building right in the center of town. We were so touched by his story of his dream. He is a very good man and obviously has been prepared for his calling.
We enjoyed the time we had in Kampong Cham and look forward to going again. Once we got off highway 6 which is under construction and terrible to drive on, the rest of the way was on a good road and through beautiful countryside. The only bad part there was a flat tire! We got a staple in the tire somewhere along the way. We were blessed however that it went flat in a place where there was a good place to pull over and as we were getting the spare out a young man went by on his moto and saw us and turned around and came back and changed the tire. We know that was a blessing as we arrived in time for the meeting in Kampong Cham and Richard was still clean because he did not have to change the tire. We know we have been blessed repeatedly in these small ways that help us to get our work done.
The pictures below are the current rented buildings in Kampong Cham and a architectural drawing of the new one to be built.
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