Visitors

On Sunday afternoon our Team Leader & her hubbie visited Poipet for the first time. We followed a sort-of schedule: Adults' Football Tournament on Sunday afternoon, visit Pre-School children at school on Monday morning and help teach an English class on Monday afternoon. In between, my attention was taken up with a guy with a broken arm, a woman who is mute and a child who got bitten by a dog. In all three situations I had the familiar feeling that I don't know what I'm doing.

Do you get that feeling? Being stretched? Trying to respond in love but not sure if you're doing the right thing? Being out of your depth? Wondering how people think that you are somehow qualified to make decisions that affect their lives?

Anyway, the broken arm incident happened at the first game of our Adults Comp on Saturday morning. (I guess these things are going to occur from time to time...) The referees stopped the game, bandaged the left arm with a splint, made a sling and sent the young guy to hospital. By the time I got back from a weekend retreat, the young man had already been to Emergency in Battambang, got his arm x-rayed and put in a cast, and visited his football team at the field on Sunday just to let everyone know he was okay. I called him to our office, talked with him, made a copy of his medical receipts, wrote an incident report, gave him money for his expenses and prayed for him. Pretty simple.

Two hours later we were about to start teaching an English class when a young girl was bitten by a dog on the grounds of the church. There were two deep puncture wounds and gashes across her chest. She was crying, hurt, afraid. I ended up taking over the class while Teacher Heng took the girl to the doctor for Rabies & Tetanus shots. We finished the class with a prayer/ blessing for the students. I felt awful for the girl... prayed a silent prayer after class that we'd be wise & that the other kids would be protected from being mauled by crazy dogs on the church grounds!

Earlier in the day while we were walking down the street I saw a woman, about my age, who is mute. I saw her a couple of weeks ago in the market across the border. Someone was asking her about her baby. She replied in clear mime: I was pregnant. I didn't have enough food to eat. I gave birth. The baby died. (Not hard to imagine why her story and her face made an impression on me...) On Monday we bumped into each other again when I gave a push to a disabled guy whose cart was stuck in the mud. The woman saw that a guy had already come to help, smiled at me and through hand actions said: 'You don't need to do that!' We were walking in the same direction so we started something like a conversation. It seemed like she could understand my Khmer... in any case I tried to face her directly in case she was lip reading? I also tried pulling out a pen & a notebook but the Khmer letters that she scrawled didn't form any meaningful words. Towards the end of our interaction, I pulled out my business card. I pointed to her pocket and said, "Here is how to contact me. Keep this." It was a bit weird. Saying to somebody who cannot speak, "Call me." But I didn't know what else to do in order to invite a relationship.

So the Team Leader visited some projects. And I think she saw my stumbling attempts to try to love people. God knows I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time. But that's what happened in the midst of our nicely scheduled program visit.