Women's Retreat

This weekend I participated in a retreat for women in leadership of Christian organizations here. We went to a place called Kep, which the French built as a resort town during colonial times and called Kep-Sur-Mer. The Khmer Rouge destroyed their huge beach houses, but their skeletons are still standing and give ther impression of great elegance. The King also had a beach house (read that mansion) out on a point of land there that was also abandoned about the time of the Khmer Rouge. It hasn't been destroyed--just abandoned--and I can well imagine some developer coming in and making a very elegant restaurant and hotel there. Today Kep is a quiet, little known beach community. Even my Cambodian student friends have never heard of it.

We stayed at a guest house next door to the home of an amazing couple, in whose home we met. Ling is a dynamo of a little Cambodian woman and is the most gracious and giving hostess you''ll ever want to meet. She is married to a French man, Jean Luc, who teaches in Singapore, one month on and two months off, and writes in his off time. He is laid back, funny and totally charming. Ling had the vision to build a retreat center in Kep, and bought a lovely plot of land on the other side of the mountain from where they live. We saw plans for the retreat and these two people are a couple of the most imaginative, creative folks I've ever met. They are trusting God for the funds to start building and for the people to whom they will minister there. The Lord has already provided a friend who teaches architecture in England, who brought his class to survey the property and do elevation drawings. I expect that the Lord will continue to provide in unexpected ways.

Meanwhile their house was just finished in November. Ling and Jean-Luc let their imaginations run wild when designing the house, a U shaped structure with a wall of windows behind the balcony overlooking the Gulf of Thailand. They have used tropical hardwoods native to Cambodia, native stone of various sorts, various bits and pieces from France, from Bali from all over the world. And they open up this fabulous structure to groups of Christian friends, treat them like visiting royalty, feed them wonderful food, including exotic tropical fruit that grows on their property and bless them copiously.


My Bible study with them went well. I decided to do Jesus' encounters with women and focused on the Samaritan Woman at the Well, whom I consider to be the first women missionary, whose testimony brought her whole village to Jesus. I only needed to do one session: we galivanted and played for the rest of the time. Ling, who is very task oriented, took us to task on Saturday afternoon when she said, "This is supposed to be a retreat and you are having a vacation instead." My instructions from Donna Rudy were to make sure that these women relaxed and stopped working. I think the time was well used with these workaholic women

We ate food that I''ve never had before. Local cuisine is flavored with bunches of green peppercorns, which grow there and/or is served on a bed of them. We ate fresh seafood, including a lot of squid, of which I''m very fond, and tasted exotic fruit that I never dreamed existed. I don''t even know the names of much of the stuff we ate, but it was fabulous. I do remember durian fruit which grows on a tree in quite a large pod, sort of like jackfruit, but with a spikier pod. The fruit is inside and looks like huge beans, that you lift out of the various compartments of the pod. The pod, quite frankly, stinks, so you prepare it out of doors. (Jean Luc refused to allow any of it to be brought indoors.) Anyway, the fruit is the consistency of pudding, creamy and soft and sweet with an unusual fruity flavor.

The best part of this experience was having fellowship with these extraordinary women. All of the Cambodians present had to flee during the Khmer Rouge regime, all of them spent time in refugee camps, and some even came to faith in Christ while there. ( Keing, my roommate for the retreat, said that before she got to the refugee camp she had never even heard of Jesus, but there someone shared the gospel with her and she believed. She also said that in the largest of the camps there was a church of 30,000 people, so God was at work in the midst of adversity.) All of them have been through horrifying experiences and all have had to build new lives in other countries. The amazing thing is that none of them show any sign of bitterness. On the contrary, they are the most loving, gracious, giving people I have ever met. I felt honored indeed to spend time with them. They really ministered to me.