Where am I...?!?

Good mooooorning Cambodia! What? We're neighbors with Vietnam. Cut me some slack!

Where am I?

It's your first question in the morning after you wake up with jet lag. What is jet lag? Well, until recently, I had no idea. I now know.

Open your head, pour in sand and gravel, swish it around a bit and get really dizzy, and then jump rope with 2 little girls right after feeding them a cup of sugar - each - and it comes close. I didn't know where I was. Worse, I didn't know when I was. The answer was something like 'a day ahead of everyone else you know'. You remember all those movies? How cool time travel was?

See my comment earlier about gravel. :)

Beautiful home.

Well, here's where I live now. In this huge mansion/villa thing you see on my left. I promised you I would show you what I meant by how different this place is from the rest of Cambodia, and I will.

First, a word about the house. This 7 bedroom villa houses not only myself, my wife, and my son, but also my in-laws, their work office, and my wife's work office (I'll get to jobs in the next post or two). There's also areas for mission teams to come and have meetings and spare rooms if we need to put someone up. My wife and I help pay rent (you cannot own property in Cambodia unless you are a citizen). I tell you all this, because I want you to understand a bit about my in-laws ministry. It's not one of the ones you've read about or seen on T.V. where all this money comes in, and the people use the money to pad their pockets. No, the money spent for this home was well purposed.

Okay, on to the other residences...

The house is the thing with the awning.

Yes, rust is in this year. Every year. Sadly...

These two photos are from my balcony. Yes, these are our neighbors. 'Rustic' isn't quite the right word, is it? No, I think 'poor', or 'yikes' more hits the spot. I'm not making light of their situation, just putting things into perspective. You see, Cambodia is a place of polar extremes. You have your filthy rich, and you have your... everyone else. There is no middle class. There's poor, and there's live-next-door-to-the-palace kind of stuff. We'll talk more about this as time goes on. I'll show you the ministry, and what it's doing to help people. You'll also get to see me blunder through things and make a fool out of myself at least once or twice (I'm a nerdy dude in a third world country! What did you expect?). Oh, before I forget... you see the motobike in the left picture? This is the primary mode of transport, along with a tuctuc.

What's a tuctuc? THAT'S a tuctuc!

Well, I made you one more promise... Aidan's school! Well, here you go:

Yup! Aidan goes to school in the house. Who is his teacher?

How do you think he had access to my (wife's) computer? You're looking... er... listening to his teacher now!

Hey! What do you mean I am long winded for a teacher? Be nice!

Anyway, He'll be attending homeschooling in a special classroom setup on a landing between 2 sets of stairs (no space is wasted here!) and, as you can see, he'll be accompanied by some angsty avians (copyright thing again).

Alright, well, it's time for dinner. I'll try to give you guys another post before tomorrow. I guess that's the day after tomorrow... for you...? Time travel is confusing.