Dignitaries and Street Sweepers

The banner in yesterday's blog was a preamble to the preparations to welcome the dignitaries that we saw on our walk today. Cambodia sits in a very interesting position, there are about 15 million people in Cambodia, but you have Vietnam on one side with 90 million and Thailand on the other side with 67 million. They have learned the importance of trying to show respect to both of their bigger neighbors.

Today as we got to the Independence Monument there were a number of military officials in their dress uniforms. It was obvious that they were setting up to welcome some important dignitaries. As we walked down the park to the King's Father's Monument they were rolling out the red carpet and had their rifles standing in a ceremonial criss cross.

Phanna was given a number of assignments that Chad wanted completed this week after the Self-Reliance Manager Conference last week. For Phanna that meant they had to be done today, since he is taking tomorrow off and Friday is a holiday when the Service Center is closed. He asked for our help again today to finish the last report, but he did not plan on members dropping by that needed help finding jobs. By the time we sat down to work on it, he only had an hour and a half. We were all amazed we finished it just in time for him to leave.

We are also trying to wrap up some loose ends from being gone last week and moving forward with our responsibilities with Self-Reliance. We have our Missionary WebEx next week that we have to be ready for. We want to share as much as we can with the other Senior Missionaries so that they can help their managers. We have definitely learned that the sum of the whole group working together is far greater than the individual efforts added together.

It is raining hard again this evening. Cambodia has been blessed with more frequent rains than the heavy downpours that we had last year. Let's hope that the rains continue, last year's draught was very hard on Cambodia.

Our picture today includes more pictures of the street sweepers and someone asleep at the park with his motorcycle helmet on.