We made the arduous drive to Kampong Thom to begin the planning for the open house for the meetinghouse being built there. The drive takes 4 hours of driving constantly dodging potholes, trucks and over rutted gravel roads. The road is under construction the whole way. The traffic is heavy so the road gets worse every time we have to go that way. We went up in the morning and began meeting with the missionaries and the Branch president, Nuth Yi, about 11 am. We had the write-up of a previous open house to help them see what was involved. The branch president doesn't speak any English but we had Sophal with us to translate for him. All 4 missionaries can help with that as well. Pres Yi had been to another open house so that should help him but the first question the missionaries asked is "what is an open house" so we had some educating to do to help them understand. We do an open house to invite the community to come see the new building and it is also a chance to help them learn more about the Church. This event could be extra work for us as we help them prepare as there doesn't seem to be a lot of experience here to help put it together. Hope for the best! We think the next time we go we will hire a car and driver for the day. We can go up and back the same day and still have time for meetings. If we have a driver with a car we will save the terrible wear and tear on our own car. We hope to be able to sell the car for a decent price when we leave to recoup some of the cost.
The meeting went well and they should have their committee together in a couple of weeks and then we will go back. We went to lunch with everyone before we left and that is always fun.
We are also working with the missionaries there to help them put together a benefit musical event. Three of the four missionaries are very talented musicians so they should come up with something very nice. We hope to have a good community outreach with this event to help create some positive feelings in the town. There has been a few problems with some city officials coming to tell the contractor they had to stop and they might have to tear the building down because they didn't have proper permits. Of course they did have the permits and were able to continue after some discussions with the city. There has been some bad feelings there because the construction firm is Vietnamese and most of the workers are Vietnamese. The Cambodians do not like Vietnamese.
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