Sua-sdey Chnam Tmey (Happy New Year)

Josh and I are sitting at the King Café in Siem Reap taking advantage of free wireless and the sweet sounds of Mariah Carey, Fastball, and currently a seventeen minute (and counting) Christmas music instrumental medley. A Christmas miracle indeed.

We flew into Siem Reap yesterday with a team of 13 from Medical Teams International who came from Oregon to serve for a week at one of our orphan homes in the Svay Rieng province. They put on a dental clinic that saw over 100 kids from 5 surrounding orphan homes.

Leading the team was a dentist named Dale Canfield who has been to Cambodia several times now to offer his time and skill and then return home to recruit others who might come and do the same. He is a phenomenal leader both in his professional and personal demeanor and it has been wonderful to see the benefits of this for a team comprised mostly of people who hadn’t known each other prior to coming.

Josh and I added our own skill and professionalism in the area of “sterilization.” I say this not to brag but simply to readily admit our very evident giftedness in scrubbing small instruments with a brush and placing them in a pot that will quickly steam them free of grossness and debris.

Ours is on-the-job training that not only keeps things clean but also gives us a pleasant (albeit false) sense of confidence in our dental abilities, eventually leading one of us to pull not one, but two teeth during the course of the clinic.

Notice the confident glint reflecting off of Josh’s protective eyewear, that look of sheer grit and determination that can come only as a result of a team of 3 dental students unrelentingly taunting you until you cannot refuse their tempting offer to pry a stubborn tooth from its snug enclosure within the gum line.

Their verbal affirmation afterward will be all the reward and motivation you need while going in for the second tooth. It is at that point that the aforementioned nearly-qualified volunteer will forever swear off dental school.

Hypothetically speaking..

Other exciting moments that took place outside of the clinic involved some gorgeous scenery, a temperamental one and a half ton flatbed truck, many many water buffalo, nearly hitting a number of farm animals including one very slow moving pig, and getting hit by a cow.

Yes, it is true. For those of you who don’t know, the cow is a fairly substantial animal, formidable in size and stature…occasionally slow in wit and reaction. The problem comes when all of these former factors occur together at once in conjunction with a moving vehicle.

This is where we come in.

Josh was driving along at a slow speed, honking intermittently as a warning to the surrounding people and farm animals (a Cambodian courtesy) and just as we were about to avoid the twelfth herd of cattle meandering alongside the road, a straggler from the left decided at the last possible moment to quickly (for a cow) make his way across the road.

Some slight swerving, some unsuspecting team members settled in for the ride in the back, and suddenly a startingly loud "Bam!" resonated against the driver’s side door, a hollow thunk that would be immediately recognizable by anyone as the sound of an oversized cow’s head making violent contact with a metal car door.

The good news is that as we reluctantly looked in the rearview mirror after the incident, we saw the cow effortlessly continuing to make his way across the road.

It’s a tale as old as time.

We now have a few more days with this team before they fly out and then we’ll meet up with another team currently in country. And before we know it, it will be February! This is the teams vortex we live in here :)

We wake up one day and realize that a month has passed. It’s wild, but a good reminder to be present, not simply letting the days slip away from us but being intentional about finding something within each day that will remain…whether that is a conversation, a moment that gets captured in a photograph, hearing the story of one of the kids in our homes, making a language breakthrough, having good, thought provoking conversations with my husband, sitting in awe at the sight of a sunset that seems to encapsulate a degree of beauty beyond what one can comprehend with colors outside the palette of replication, or something so silly and self-indulgent as really really good Mexican food at a little café in Siem Reap after a week of rice and noodles :)

There are so many layers to my days if I am willing to sort through them all.