Day 1 and/or 2 - by Grant

So we are approaching the end of day 1 or is it 2??? It wasn’t that long ago that we gave our final hugs to our families and friends who gathered at the airport to see us off but it feels like such a long time ago. So much has happened and so must distance has been created. The flight from YVR to Taipei was good if a 12 hour flight can be good. I think just about all of us slept and I got about 4 hours of sleep which is just about unheard of for me on a plane. We had a few hours in the airport in Taipei which was spent sitting, talking, working on the computers and thanks to Toph’s hunting, sipping mocha frappachinos from Starbucks for Jeff and me.

Then there was 3.5 more hours of flying until the plane began to settle over Cambodia and Phnom Penh. The landscape is so familiar to me and yet it is so foreign. Kit and I looked through the window wondering if we were seeing Svay Pak in the villages that went by.

Getting through immigration and customs was a breeze. Some of the team felt a little uneasy working through the process but having done it a number of times now it was great with no problems and all or bags arriving safely. We were met by Clayton Butler of AIM who is overseeing the development of Rahab’s House in Don Brewster’s absence. He’s a great guy and we are all looking forward to working with him. We had lunch together and then went to Tuol Sleng the prison through which 21,000 people were processed, tortured and killed.

This was my third visit to Tuol Sleng. It is in much better shape than it has been in my previous visits and I found myself thinking about what a beautiful school it must have been before it was turned into a torture prison. Then it hit me, we are doing something of the opposite – where a beautiful school was turned into something terrible, we are working at turning something terrible into a beautiful school and ministry centre.

By God’s grace we are “redeeming the land.”

Grant