Post from the Penultimate day in Poipet before Persevere on my Progress to Pandemonious Phnom Penh

Hello to all the people that I like to pretend are reading my blog,

Believe it or not, I have reached my second last day in Poipet! Yes I know! At 6.30 am on Monday morning, I will get on a bus for Phnom Penh, and say goodbye to CHO, Poipet, and the Church for the far foreseeable future. I know it sounds clichéd, but the time really has flown by. I have been here for close to four months, but I still feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the town I am in, and the people I spend every day working with, and often socialising with in the evenings as well. They say that wherever you go, it doesn't matter how crappy a place is, it's the relationships that make it, and I can definately see that at play here. Poipet is not a nice town. It is full of mud, crime and casinos, but you can look past that when you have real solid friendships built with people there.

We had our goodbye party with the 60 odd CHO staff last night. We cooked them all english food - mash, friend potatoes and beef stew. If you ever want to know what it feels like to be insignificant, try being a fork being used to mash potato for 60 people. I like to call it a 'memorable' task, as 'frustrating' is a nasty, negative word :):). The food and games afterwards went down a treat. First of all we taught them some english party games, and then a couple of Scottish engineers who are also there taught them Scottish dancing - kinda hard, as even the barangs attempting to demonstrate the dance barely had any idea what to do. The evening then progressed onto Khmai dancing, follwed by a last minute game of musical chairs. I have never laughed so hard in my life. Literally. It just descended into chaos, with adults turning into complete kids, and cheating being the way to win (well it was for me anyway ;)). I have not had such a fun evening in my entire life, and it has made me realise how much I will miss my friends at CHO.

The last few weeks at the building site have been mostly good but frustrating at times - some days we have worked right until 5 or 6, some days we kick off at 3 - literally - the moment you stop work the football comes out. But I have learnt to accept their culture. Basically it boils down to something like this 'if you try to plan for every eventuality, you will stress yourself out trying to think of everything that could go wrong. Best not plan at all, to save yourself uneeded stress and work.

Also, looking back on my time here, I realised quite how much I have come to learn about the Cambodian psyche, and the way it has been scarred by the Khmer Rouge - the trip to Phnom Penh, written about in the last past, was the turning point for me, but you see it every day, in little habits, gestures, and eccentricities that almost every Cambodian, and to a greater extent those over 40, have.

I am doing my last preach tommorrow on the exhortations at the end of 2 Thesselonians. As it's our last preach, I'm doing it with Ed and Mark, as a way of saying goodbye and thankyou for listeing to our inexperienced ramblings for the past 16 sundays.

My internet time is about to run out, so I can't really carry on. So I will sum up my time here in 27 words. My time in Cambodia has been unexpected on the spiritual front, upliftng on the friendship side of things, disturbing in many aspects, but most of all, unforgetable.