Scraping, a walk and reactions in Svay Pak - Grant

We were back out to Rahab's House to start our second week of work. Gone are the sounds of sledge hammers hitting solid walls and the crash of those walls hitting the floor. The sounds in RH today were the sounds of scraping and scrubbing and painting (true that is fairly quiet but one of the painters is a little chatty), pulling nails out of the wooden ceiling and other bits and pieces of renewing this place.

i was back to scraping the walls. We had rid the place of the horred pink paint last week but our test painting on the second floor shows that the paint under the pink paint is not absorbing the new paint well meaning we need to try and get everything back down to the concrete plastering. So the arms and shoulders continue to take something of a beating but it continues to be holy work. The strange point of the day for me concerned room 9. ARC decided to keep one of the old brothel rooms as something of a museum. Barb was in there today scrubbing the floor - probably the most disgusting job any of us have had to do so far. My job was scraping - as you already know - the pink paint in room 9 only goes as high as the interior walls which means there's about 4 feet of wall above the pink. So there I was trying so hard to scrape all the grey paint above the pink and leave the pink intact. The greatest temptation I've faced this week was to just strip all that pink off - but I didn't.

In the afternoon 4 of us went for a walk through the village - Kelvin, Paul, Marty and me. We walked up toward the highway and looked around. We went up to the two lane highway and walked along until we came to the next road in. We walked down it to see if we could get a view of the back of RH. We could see where it was but we would have had to walk through someon'e private property to do so - not a good idea in Svay Pak. On the way back I looked over at a group of men who were sitting and chatting at a cafe. I briefly made eye contact with one of them who puckered his lips into a kiss. I wasn't sure if he was looking to make a sale of some sorts or if he was telling us to "kiss off." Either way it was a little unsettling. Back in SP proper we turned up a sidestreet - a narrow alley really - and carried on to the end. We looked down a couple of even narrower alleys and had no thought of going down those. As we turned to go back to RH a well dressed woman smiled at us and beckoned us to follower her down the alley - she obviously had something or us she thouht we wanted - my stomach turned.

I've been in many different Cambodian villages in my 5 visits to this country. Svay Pak is like no other. In almost all villages Westerners are looked at with some curiosity but when you given evidence of care and concern the people - particularly the children - are very open and friendly. Not so in SP. The people here are way past guarded. The looks of some are quite hostile while others are merely cold. There are a few children who come around and are happy to laugh and play but they are always looking to see what they might get from us. SP is a cold unloving village where children are for sale and you can feel it in the looks of the people.

We carry on with our work seeing in it the "mustard seed" and the "yeast" of the Kingdom of God. We don't know all that RH will be to this place but we know that God is doing somehting with it. So I will carrying scraping (one more day) in faith.

Blessings,

Grant