A Meeting With The Prime Minister

We have mentioned before that Cambodia is a Buddhist nation, but in many ways they do try hard to make room for the other religions, which they refer to as cults.  They especially appreciate when those other religions are willing to help the people in their country.

We started our day with a meeting at the largest auditorium in Cambodia in an area of Phnom Penh referred to as Diamond Island.  Originally we were told to be there at 7:00 a.m., but when we were given our tickets we were told 6:30 a.m., so we split the difference and got there about 6:45.  We were shocked to see that there were already others there, including President and Sister Christensen and Elder & Sister VanBrocklin.  We could see them on the front row but we decided to sit down about half way up.  It wasn't long before the Under Secretary of Religion was coming and telling us they had a seat for us down front.  We ended up on the second row right behind the others.

The meeting was to call for disseminating religious moral vision for harmonization in Cambodia to celebrate the day of prayer and action for the children.  The Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, was the featured speaker and he arrived about 8:15.  About 25% of the auditorium was filled with Buddhist monks and their three main leaders had seats of honor on the stage.  Even the Prime Minister went over and bowed to the Buddhist Priests when he came in. The Prime Minister spoke about forty-five minutes, about fifteen minutes from a prepared text on the subject for the meeting and a half hour on politics.  After he left they had to have several other speakers.  It got through just before 11:00, we were grateful that the seats were soft.

We made it back to the office and were able to actually get some of our real work done.  Elder Oveson had some correspondence to do for the stake.  Sister Oveson helped him get his notes from yesterday's meeting pulled together so that he could send them to the others in the Stake Presidency. We also helped with some reports for the Perpetual Education Fund, it is year end and the area has to report to headquarters. We were plenty busy so we were tired when we headed home this evening.