Katherine Parker in Nepal

What an incredible year. I can't even begin to describe what I have seen and learned. There is at least one new story at http://chad-cambodia.blogspot.com and on this site since I wrote last. And my fellow missionaries in the Community Health and Agricultural Development (CHAD) program and I just put out our Advent newsletter. You can download the PDF. I am back in the US for a month visiting churches in California, Virginia and Washington and catching up on a little sleep. But I am excited to get back to work next year. Plans for a water distribution system in Kandal are coming together, more rice banks are going up in Kompong Thom and Kompong Chhnang, credit and savings groups are working together in Svay Rein and new calves are being born in Battambong. Signs of trust and hope are everywhere. Thanks for your continued support. Katherine

Pastor Kieu Sophal came by our office this morning to help with lesson planning for our health volunteer training workshop that starts tomorrow. I was just sitting at my computer as she told this story, so I am quickly typing it up to share with you. A woman in Sophal’s district had been battered by her husband and received a back injury that caused her to be in bed unable to walk for about three weeks. Sophal , a new pastor since July, heard about this woman from one of her church members. But Sophal told us that she was worried and hesitant to visit the women: “I don’t have money, what could I offer to this woman.” Sophal doesn’t have a moto (motorcycle/scooter), but the church member took her to see the woman using her own moto. Sophal told the battered woman, “I don’t have money to offer you, but I have God, and I would like to pray with you.” She came with three other church members and they all prayed for the women. The members reported a sense of the presence of God in that ...

Life in Cambodia is a constant learning experience. My language is improving much slower than I would like, but step by step. My writing is good enough that I can create posters for workshops even though I can't understand many of the words I am writing. Tomorrow will be the first day of the level 2 lessons at the University, but I also decided to repeat level 1 since I didn't learn it 100%. We had a wonderful Annual Meeting at the end of August. The highlight was the ordination of 6 elders and 12 deacons, essentially doubling the number of ordained Cambodians. A president of The World Federation of Chinese Methodist Churches (one of our mission partners here), gave a stirring speech about celebrating 40 years of autonomy with the theme "self-proclaiming, self-governing, self-supporting". It really gave a hopeful vision to our goal of supporting the formation of an autonomous church here in Cambodia. I've posted a few more reflection here and at http://chad-ca...

This week we had our second foundational workshop with the pastors in the Battambong district. The new church at the district headquarters is just about finished being constructed with just some final cleaning to do (sorry no pictures). We used an upstairs open air porch for our gathering. The CHAD team was much better prepared this time and we were able to complete a full lesson in one day. The theme was “God’s extravagant love for the transformation of the world.” My personal successes focused around language. I asked Mr. Thy and Tola to pre-translate some of the discussion questions into Khmer and had them print out the questions for me (I still can’t read anyone’s handwriting, only the precise characters as printed by the computer). I then made big posters with the relevant questions for each section. Then, when we gave our oral explanations (which are translated in real time) people could be simultaneously reading the task. I only made one mistake of putting a line-break mid...

I am still low-energy as a result of having a cold last week. I stayed home for three days and rested since I was running a low-grade fever. If I were only a little bit sick like this in the US, I would just ignore it and plow on, so it is frustrating how debilitated I feel by being a little bit sick. Irene brought me by a mixture of herbs and roots and citrus that is a traditional Khmer treatment for flu. We boiled it up in a clay pot and let the smoke permeate the room. I stuck my face in it to breathe it in more and ended up with a bit of a rash. That plus some Benadryl and Robitussin seem to have got the cold mostly under control. I am also totally munched to bits by either mosquitos or spiders or ants. I can’t decide what has been biting me. I had this terrible night where I woke up and there were a dozen of these pin-head ants in my bed and then I couldn’t sleep again. No, I don’t eat in my bed, but I did go to sleep with wet hair and Ken said that sometimes the ants are attracte...

I met Pastor Kieu Sophal last month when she brought a young man (Chamrong) from her congregation into Phnom Penh to get his ears checked as part of the hospital access training that Irene has been conducting. My friend Treasa was visiting at the time and we all got to chatting and Pastor Sophal wanted us to come to visit her village. Sophal graduated from the Bible School in July and is just starting her first appointment. I tease Irene that we make a great visitation pair because all of the ladies love her and ask her for advice and all of the teenagers flock to me. Sophal has a young church and so she was excited to have us visit, emphasizing that I should give a testimonial. Treasa had left by the time we made arrangements, so it was just me and Irene. Giving testimonials in not a big part of my tradition, in fact I’m not sure I have ever done it before, so I only have a vague sense of what was being requested. The scripture lesson for the day was from Proverbs about learnin...

One of the highlights of my work is the opportunity to worship with various congregations. Last week, I went with Irene to Pastor Pok Kosal at Ch’mol d’asan church. Irene preached on the miracle of the loaves and fishes from Luke, relating it to stories in her childhood where her mother would pack a mango or banana for her to take to school and how she would hide to eat it so she didn’t have to share. The theme being that God does miracles with whatever we provide to God. We have been emphasizing this idea of Kingdom mathematics in all of our training and projects recently. God doesn’t ask us to do more than what we can. We are invited to give what we have and God will multiply it. After worship we all had lunch together. Another Korean missionary couple also joined in the service that Sunday and Irene thinks they were a bit shocked to see us sitting on the floor eating with everyone. Each of the lunch groups were invited to participate in a singing competition. The lead group wo...

From Katherine, a missionary from California to Cambodia , and Irene, a missionary from Zimbabwe to Cambodia , To our sisters and brothers in Bakersfield who have received a faith as precious as ours through-your relationship to our God and Savior Jesus Christ: May grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. We write to you today with the words of the Apostle Peter when we say: God's divine power has given us everything needed for life. While we have been eagerly preparing to write to you about the faith we share, we have also been busy hosting a Medical Outreach Clinic this week. We were visited by a team of volunteers from a Methodist church in Singapore who came to Cambodia this week to help us host a Medical Outreach Clinic. It was the first time for the people from Singapore to visit a Cambodian village and so they were shocked by the poor conditions of the people living there. But they were eager to share their skills and...

From Katherine, a missionary from California to Cambodia , and Thy our brother in Christ Jesus here in Cambodia , To the church in Bakersfield : Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ. We write to you again with the words of the apostle Paul when we say that we give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters. And this is right to do, because we know that during this time together of Vacation Church Camp your faith is growing and the love of each one of you for one another is increasing. Mr. Thy and I heard that you will be visiting a farm in Bakersfield this week. You will get to see how we grow food to eat in the United States . What did you eat for breakfast this morning? We had rice noodle soup. What will you eat for lunch? How about dinner? We will have rice with some stir-fry vegetables and fish, the same as other people living here in Cambodia . In Bakersfield , most people probably eat cereal and bread and pasta, but in Cambodia we eat ...

From Katherine Parker, United Methodist Missionary who has been sent from California to Phnom Penh in the Royal Kingdom of Cambodia in Southeast Asia. To the community of God that is in Bakersfield , to the children and youth and adults who gather this week for study and prayer and work and celebration, together with people from around the world who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and Jesus the Christ. I want to say hi to you with this formal greeting in the style of St.Paul's letters to the churches throughout the Mediterranean, to remind us that the church has always been more than a group of people in our own town with which we get together on Sunday. Rather, it is a community of people around the world who believe that we are called to love God and to love our neighbor. And, whether we see each other every day or every few years or we never get to meet, we are still a family, a community that suppo...

The Community Health and Agriculture Development program is richly blessed to be supported by so many people from around the world. Our staff of four people is made up of four different nationalities (Zimbabwe, Philippines, Cambodia and USA). In addition, we work with volunteer-in-mission teams from Malaysia, Singapore, and the USA. (And I'm not sure I can count all of the nationalities of the other missionaries and volunteer teams that work with other parts of the church.) For other partnerships, about 1/3 of our program funding comes from the 1000 member Methodist Church in Finland. We appreciate not only their financial and prayer support, but also their support for planning. We have been working closely with our contact in Finland, Catarina, to develop a 3-year strategic plan for our program. Here is a summary of our vision, mission, goals and focus that have come out of that work. The activity plan is too detailed to post. It has been a great exercise for our team, which has j...

Binn Im is the assistant pastor at Prekedai Methodist Church in a village about an hour down some dirt roads outside the provincial city of Batambong in Cambodia. Binn Im's story begins several years back when she received a gift-loan of a pig to raise through her participation in the Women's Association of the United Methodist Mission Initiative in Cambodia. She struggled to care for the pig and overcame several obstacles, including the death of her second litter and slow weight gain, to pass on piglets to another woman in her community. It was during this time that Binn Im was responding to the call to ministry in her life. She applied and was accepted to study at the Methodist Bible School in Phnom Penh, where her son was also a student. Last year she graduated and was appointed as assistant pastor to her current rural congregation. Four months ago, Binn Im welcomed a medical mission team to her church through the UMVIM (United Methodist Volunteers in Mission) partnership wi...

Saturday afternoon, March 15, 2008, I returned to Phnom Penh from four days in the field (my seventh week in-country), where Mr. Leng Thy (my CHAD program colleague) and I met with seven churches. I found the week's experience both sobering in the challenges and exciting in the prospects. Here are some pictures and my immediate reflections upon return to the city. Cambodia is a country still visibly struggling to rebuild community trust, stability and self-sustenance after many years of civil war and foreign occupation. There is a strong sense in the poorest parts of the country of needing "relief" and looking to the West for that relief. For individuals who are Christian in this predominantly Buddhist country, there is sometimes a disquieting hope that since "now we are Christians ... you should provide for us." However, the urgent solicitation of Western relief, on whatever rationale seems promising, is not limited to the growing Christian communities. A...

See the March/April 2008 edition of NEW WORLD OUTLOOK to read the story Toward Sustainable Development in Cambodia by Rev. Dr. James L. Gulley.

This last week I seem to have finally found a routine! I catch a tuktuk into work with Erica, an individual volunteer-in-mission at the dump-site orphanages. We join in morning devotions with the other staff and the young men who are studying mechanics for three months with the "Faith Engines" youth employment training program. Then I spend an hour studying Khmer with Jantein. Office work still feels like orientation as I work with Mr. Thy to streamline the process for receiving and processing project proposals. We have been making more trips to visit existing agric- and micro-enterprise groups. We are also planning for two big 2-day workshops in March on Wholistic Development (particularly using local resources for small projects) for the Kandal and Kampang Chhnang districts, and I am getting ready for some workshops on water quality and sanitation with a local church and a pastor group. This month we were also blessed by a Volunteers-In-Mission Team from the Louisiana Conf...

I arrived safe and sound in Phnom Penh during the Lunar New Year celebration, which was going on everywhere, including at the Independence Monument just one block from my hotel. The dragon dancers came to my hotel on Sunday. Almost immediately, I was plunged into a workshop about the organization and direction of CHAD (Community Health & Agriculture Development), where I will work as an Agriculture Development Advisor. We had 31 participants including District Superintendents and pastors (top) who are members of the Social Concerns Committee. My first week, I also headed to the rural countryside. Here's a church in the Kampong Chhnang Provence with a well and hand pump in front, reminding me of my time in Ghana where I tested well water. I've brought my water testing mobile lab with me to continue that work here. Rev. Ean Houn (left) invited us for lunch in the cool breeze of his traditional stilt house. We visited the church of Pastor Soeung Sopenh and saw the new cement ...

This is just a quick note about what’s happening with me as I enter the final two weeks of my preparations for going to Cambodia. I head from the family home here in Mill Valley to the San Francisco airport on Saturday evening, February 2. I will take an Eva Airways flight that leaves about midnight and travels through Taipei to arrive about noon in Phnom Penh on Monday, February 4, approximately 21 hours after departure. When I returned to the States from Ghana last June, I almost immediately commenced work on my application for a position as a career missionary with the United Methodist Church. By mid September I was in upper New York State for orientation and on Oct. 9, 2007, I was officially commissioned by the General Board of Global Ministries. My first assignment (nominally for three years) is as an agriculture development advisor attached to the Methodist Mission in Phnom Penh. I will be part of the effort there known as CHAD, for Community Health and Agriculture ...