In early 2013, Colin Conroy spent a month interning with the Servants team in Cambodia.  Colin is actually a member of the Servants team in Southall, England.  As with all of our missionaries serving on teams in the West, we ask them to spend time with one of our Asia-based teams within their first three years.  This, in part, helps our teams in the West remember that two-thirds of the worlds poor live in Asia.  The following is a brief reflection from Colin about his internship in Cambodia:

Earlier this year I said goodbye to my teammates on the Servants Southall team, made the short trek to Heathrow Airport, and hopped on a plane destined for Cambodia.  Within hours, I had gone from the cold and wet weather in the UK to the very hot, sunny, and mostly dry climate in Cambodia.  There I spent a month living with a Cambodian family in a slum community in Phnom Penh.  Living with a host family was a primary component of my internship with the Servants Cambodia team.

Rather than going to ‘do’ some job or project, or to ‘give’ something to people living in poverty, the main purpose of going was to learn from the people I was living amongst. My days started early, with breakfast at 6.30 or 7am. Three days a week I went to a language school in the city to learn the local language, Khmer. Most of the rest of the time was spent hanging out in the community – watching the local guys play volleyball (I never got to play as they always play for money and I didn’t want to be responsible for my team losing), sitting on the doorstep chatting to the neighbours, practising my latest phrases of Khmer or just sitting in the house with the family.

I learned a lot during my month – about poverty and brokenness and living in cramped conditions, yes, but also about community, about celebration, about depending on God and about the importance of language learning (even during a very short visit). Nearly all of what I learned was only possible because I was living in the community, as part of a family. If I had been living somewhere else, in a comfortable flat or hotel, and visiting every day, I think I would have come away with a very different, and far more incomplete picture of life in an Asian poor community.

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