The Broeckert's home and the church

That Sunday morning (2/1/2015), we all attended church and participated in various ministries. Chad preached while Hubert translated into Khmer, we sang special music, I played a song on the piano, the women taught the children's Sunday school lesson, and several of us gave our testimonies of salvation. I in particular enjoying hearing Phuong's testimony, as she grew up Buddhist and was saved a few years ago while in medical school. Being saved from a Buddhist background and living for the Lord in spite of the fact that her family is still Buddhist is something I think the Khmer could related to in their culture.

Special music by one of the missionary's daughters, Abby

Sarah giving her testimony

Chad preaching and Hubert translating

The ladies teaching children

Children with their crafts

Kids are cute no matter where they're from, huh?

After the service, we all headed to the ocean to baptize seven new believers. We all loaded up into a fishing boat and headed a ways out, and then those who were to be baptized gave their testimonies of salvation and then were baptized by Hubert. 

As you'll notice, those being baptized had life jackets on, as the ocean was deeper than most of them were tall. This led to a joke or two from me regarding the difficulties of baptism by immersion when wearing a life jacket...

It was so neat to see new Christians obey the scriptural command to be baptized after salvation in order to show others that they're a follower of Christ. There were unsaved family members present, and this was a testimony to them. It is exciting whenever someone accepts Christ and is baptized, but it was especially exciting that seven Khmer did so! It often takes a Khmer quite a while to come to Christ, as they have plenty of family/sociocultural barriers to deciding to do this. A few in the church are close to accepting Christ, but are afraid of how their family will react. In spite of this, we are praying that they do accept Christ.

One of the things we did as a team that while in Koh Kong was visit a Buddhist temple, and this was quite an experience. Seeing the joy in the new Khmer believers with their new hope in Christ contrasted with the hopelessness of the lost and their attempts to find meaning in life was heartbreaking.

These experiences furthered my joy for those coming to Christ and my burden for those who didn't know their Savior as we headed into the new week with more clinics and more opportunities to talk to others.

We spent the next two days visiting different areas of Koh Kong, learning more about the Broeckert's ministry, and spending time with our Khmer friends. One of the things that we did was get a tour of the hospital in Koh Kong where Mary works. It was definitively different from a hospital here in the U.S.

Ambulances

The hospital had some resources like here in the U.S.- meds, ultrasound, xray, and was capable of doing some lab studies, but lacked many of the other resources we have here in the U.S. For example, the ER was an empty room except for maybe eight plain beds and IV poles.

Seeing a patient in the emergency room who tried to commit suicide by ingesting a pesticide

Not only did Mary give us a tour of the hospital, but we also rounded on patients there with her and discussed with the doctors the plan for treatment.

Seeing  a patient who was robbed and beaten

Seeing a patient in the intensive care unit

Discussing differential diagnoses with a Khmer doctor regarding a patient with stroke-like symptoms

The laboratory

Operating Room

That weekend, we also went to the market. What an experience! I went looking to replace my flip flops which tore, but Hubert laughed when he learned I wore a U.S. size 12, saying I wouldn't find anything that large there. I did find lots of other things though...

Shoes

Shark

Fish

Chicken

More fish

Squid

FDA approved meat (FDA= Flies Desire and Accumulate)

Veggies

Eel (alive, but not well)

Yep, it is what it looks like. Don't eat it all in one sitting, ya pig.

There was a lot more there than just meat, but that's mostly what I took pictures of.

One of the nights we had supper at a restaurant at the Thailand-Cambodia border, where we ate on the shore of the Gulf of Thailand while the sun set. Our U.S. currency went very far as usual- we ate for a couple bucks each.

The restaurant

Squid anyone? The tentacles are extra chewy!

What's up, docs?

We weren't the only ones enjoying the sunset

.....

.... Rough stuff.

 We spent that Saturday night preparing for the church service the next day.

We spent the next day preparing and organizing for the clinic we would be having the following day. Mary had a decent amount of medicines and supplies there herself, and the team brought over more meds and supplies too.

Counting and packaging meds

We also met and got to know some of our translators, who were mostly teenager/young adult English students from Hubert's class. Hubert, on top of pastoring the church there, has about 20 Khmer students who he teaches English to, and he uses this as an opportunity to tell them about Christ. Several of the translators were Christians, but some weren't, so the opportunity for them to translate not only helped them work on their English, but also hear the gospel. Hubert had us share our testimonies of salvation with his students, and he then quizzed them on language comprehension to see if they understood what we were saying.

Hubert teaching English to some of his students

Making friends with some of our translators

The Khmer there weren't the only ones who were working on their language learning though! Our team had a language session where we went over some basic Khmer greetings and useful phrases, and our Khmer friends taught us words too. The Khmer language is very different from English; the letters look nothing like English letters, the sounds are very different, and all words are not divided by spaces. To help us learn how to pronounce words, we wrote out different word pronunciations in English.

This isn't how the words are written in Khmer, but this is how we wrote them out phonetically in English to help us learn

One of the many things I liked about the Khmer culture is how friendly and respectful everyone seemed. When you meet someone, regardless of how well you know them, you greet them with a Khmer phrase saying hello, and as you do this you place your palms together in front of your face, smile, and nod slightly. Not only this, but nearly everyone I met said "thank you" whenever something was done for them. We Americans can definitely learn a few things about being more polite!

The next day, we loaded everything up and traveled by van on dirt roads to a village about 2 1/2 hours away to do our first clinic. Our clinics were all done working with local health centers, which were small buildings in some of the villages staffed by a couple people with very basic health knowledge (basically, they had some meds they could give you if you needed them, and they could help with child-birthing).

One of the health centers we did a clinic at

Each clinic would begin between 8-9am, and would go until about 4pm, with about a 45 minute break for lunch. When we would arrive to each clinic site, usually a crowd of people would already be waiting there. At the beginning of each clinic, a Christian man named Lalin preached the gospel to the crowd and gave Khmer tracts to everyone.

One of the crowds hearing the gospel

Many of the people had never heard of Jesus before, or what He did for them. Upon learning this, I was very burdened, and couldn't help but think of Romans 10:14: "How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?"

My heart ached for these people, who are dying without ever hearing about their Savior.

After the preaching, everyone was registered and then waited patiently to be seen by a physician. No one ever complained about waiting. Our doctors were usually in two or three rooms, and each had a translator with them. The patient would tell the doctor what complaint they had, and then the doctor would obtain a history and physical, and explain the diagnosis and treatment to them. Resources were pretty limited; we could do blood glucose checks, malaria checks, urinalysis, wound care, etc., but if the patient happened to be sicker than what we could take care of with the given resources, we would tell they what was wrong and then tell them they needed to go to the nearest hospital.

Doctors seeing patients

Witnessing to patients

After the patient was done being seen by the doctor, many times the translator would then share the gospel with them. Also, while people waited to be seen by a doctor, we would witness to them. After each patient was seen, they would go to the "pharmacy" we had set up, where we would dispense any prescribed medication to the patient and explain how it was to be taken and why. Not that they believed our medicine to be magical necessarily, but we were told that they believe medicine to be very effective, so we made sure everyone left with something- if nothing else, a daily multivitamin.

At each clinic, I managed traffic flow, obtained vitals on patients waiting, obtained blood sugars, checked people for malaria, did wound care, got things for the doctors, and other miscellaneous tasks.

Me checking vitals

If I wasn't doing anything else, a Khmer young man named Somphors and I witnessed to people waiting.

Somphors and I

Somphors told me he was saved near the end of 2014, so he'd only been a Christian a couple months. This being said, he would actively walk up to people and begin witnessing to them. This was very challenging for me to see, as I have been saved for 19 year and don't witness with that level of boldness.

Most of the patients had fairly common complaints, but a few were very sick, including a young man with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a serious disease where the immune system attacks the peripheral nervous system, causing ascending paralysis (this becomes a problem if it reaches the diaphragm and you can no longer breathe). This is one of the cases where we had to tell the patient and family that they had to get to the nearest hospital ASAP because we didn't have the necessary medical equipment there.

Patient with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, who could no longer walk at the time of this picture

This and other experiences I had yet to have on the trip developed a deep appreciation for our health care system here in the U.S. Many of our patients came by foot, and one woman came by boat on a three hour trip, and showed up right when we were closing the clinic down for the day. Needless to say, we saw her anyway, and she ended up having malaria and receiving treatment.

In total, the first day we saw 103 patients, and all heard the gospel. Needless to say, we all went to bed early and slept well that night.