Siem Reap

It's hard to believe that we're getting so far through our trip, but we're back in Cambodia for the last leg. We arrived in Siem Reap, and decided to pursue our Cambodian contact in the city. When I taught an English class to M.Div students this summer, one of my students was a Cambodian guy, Vannak. Vannak used to be a tour guide around Angkor Wat, and his family also lives in town. So we tried to call his sister (who allegedly spoke English) to see if we could arrange a meeting. Unfortunately, when we called, Vannak's family was clearly not expecting some American, English-speaking girl to be on the phone, so, though I managed to convey that we knew Vannak, the man who answered the phone didn't understand much else.

I hung up the phone feeling disappointed because I was looking forward to making a more personal connection. The whole tourist thing where your primary interactions with people involve making purchases gets old pretty fast. We were pretty bummed that our hope for meeting Vannak's sister just wasn't working out.

Later that night, after just exiting the shower, Ashley came into the room to inform me that we had visitors. I sat there looking dumbfounded because unless she was referring to Andy and Elijah, I couldn't imagine what she was talking about. It seemed that Vannak's family had called back to our guest house to get to the bottom of their mysterious English phone call. The guest house folk managed to explain who we were, and his family decided to come to the guest house to see us. We also discovered that the owner of our guest house is a member of their church ( a pretty amazing thing when my friend Sophear estimates that only .02% of Cambodia is Christian).

So Ashley and I rushed nervously down the stairs to meet Vannak's sister. Only when we got downstairs we saw at least 7 or 8 extended family members surrounding a very flustered Andy. Instead of just Vitou, Vannak's sister coming, we saw his mother, cousins, and even the pastor of his church.

After some minutes of heavily translated small talk, we were invited to church and told to prepare a song to sing. Andy and I can now proudly say that this is our second backpacking trip in a row where we ended up singing in front of a church service on Sunday. Thus, this morning we threw out our temple visiting plans, went to church with the hostel owner, listened to some kids sing the Cambodian version of "Father Abraham", sang "Amazing Grace", and had a great time. I even got to hold the cutest Cambodian baby--now I can see why Angelina Jolie took a Cambodian baby back with her. ^^

A surprising, but good Sabbath, all in all.