If we look back over our last 11 years, this month has been our fullest party month ever. Besides two family birthdays, Passion Week, Easter, and Khmer New Year, we had four weddings, a birthday party, and two goodbye parties. Most of these include morning services and a lunch. We had two weddings for youth from our church. Weddings – ceremony and meal – are usually done at the bride’s home. The family rents a tent and sets it up right outside their house. Josh preached at both weddings. Also the brother of one of our translators got married – we just sent the boys, since we girls were tried of parties and the weddings was not in our village.
At the wedding meal, you have to wait until the table fills up with 10 people before they start serving the food. This is a problem for our family, since we already take up 9 seats, and it’s hard to find a single person who wants to join our group. Thankfully at most of the meals they took pity on our children and let us be a 9-person table. Our kids usually enjoy the food, though if you look closely enough you can see Micah suspiciously eyeing the fish. What our kids really love is getting their own can of soda and then being handed multiple cans of soda as we leave!
We had two goodbye meals; one for Plin (which was just a lunch) and one for the Crowleys. The Jarai churches gathered together to have a Thank You Celebration for the Crowleys. It was a nice time – JD gave a challenge and then church leaders gave testimonies.
We also attended the Quey boys’ joint birthday party. The kids had a great time playing water games, and Maria was very tired when we got home.
And let us not forget our 3-day Khmer New Year celebrations. This year the kids decided to decorate the front of the house. Clara made a great drawing of the Cambodian flag and then made copies of it for everyone to color. Later Ezra decided to make one too and spent a long time drawing his flag, using Clara’s as an example. We enjoyed our Cambodian Cola as we celebrated Khmer New Year (Josh was gone for the week at Bible School).
