Remembering Cambodia, Part 1

Posted by Liz July 13, 2021

Remembering Cambodia, Part 1

It was ten years ago today that I headed off to Cambodia to take part in two different English Camps there. I would spend three weeks on this trip, and it would take me first to Phnom Penh and then on to Siem Reap a week and a half later. I had never owned a passport before I went to Cambodia. I didn’t travel much outside of the great state of Minnesota growing up. In college I took a few spring break tours with a Christian singing group. I saw an ocean for the first time when I was 46 years old, at the end of a tour of Highway 52 with the family. The point is, I didn’t have any real frame of reference for traveling to far-off Cambodia. So much was so different, and by the end of the trip, I was different as well.

My first passport and accompanying official paperwork

Me, showing off my bandaid from my first round of vaccinations.

The prayer card my daughter Laura and I had, as we both went to Cambodia
(though she arrived later than I did and did not travel there with me).

First, you need to know that God called me to go on this trip. It was His gentle urging a couple of years before that affirmed the unspoken desire that I had to join one of our teams going there. At that time, our church was sending a group of short-termers to Cambodia every summer, to help with English camps and learn about the mission field there. I was (and still am) part of a prayer team that met monthly to pray for some of the Christian and Missionary Alliance international workers in the field in Cambodia. In praying for those folks, I felt as though I knew them, and in fact we had actually met some of them when they were back in the States. That connection was so important to me, as was the training that our group did for months in advance of our trip. We learned about the history and culture of Cambodia and heard from others who had traveled there before us.

Our team of short-termers who went to Cambodia in 2011.

I was ready to go, but nothing prepared me for LEAVING. It was so hard to leave my family, particularly my husband. It was the plan from the start. God had called me to go, not him, and it worked well for him to be at home managing things while I was away. It made sense, but it hurt like crazy. We do all our big things together. He is part of me and I use his lens to help focus mine when I am doing big things. Plus, I just like him and enjoy having him with me. This was the biggest thing I had ever done, and I was going to do it without him. I was a jumbled-up mix of really big emotions: excited, anxious, terrified – you name it. I was ugly-crying by the time I walked through the gate at the Rochester airport.

My family and me at the airport

Although we had a large team, I was departing with only one of our team members, my dear friend Marti Ogren. We were going ahead of most of the team. I figured I was 51 years old and chances were pretty good that I wouldn’t be able to repeat this trip, so I wanted a full 3 weeks in Cambodia rather than the week and a half that much of the team was doing. Once my goodbyes were said, I was ready to take a deep breath and focus on what was ahead, which at that moment was at least 32 hours of travel time.

Message board at Tokyo airport

Beautiful flowers in the Bangkok airport

View from the plane as we arrived in Phnom Penh

There were no major travel hiccups, and we arrived in Cambodia with our luggage. My ankles were swollen for a day or two, and I only managed to sleep a handful of those 32 hours that we traveled, but other than that everything went amazingly well. I was in Cambodia! I remember saying that over and over again during those first days: "I am in CAMBODIA!!" Every one of my senses was working overtime to absorb every detail of this world so different from mine. I will write more in the days ahead, as I remember this amazing journey. For now, I will close with a sentence I found in one of my early blogs from Cambodia: God is remarkable in His persistence, and I am so very delighted that I didn’t let myself be scared out of being obedient. (Here are some first-day images from my arrival in Cambodia.)