Did you ever wonder what a thousand kid party looks like? Come to Poipet, Cambodia!
This last week, Kingsland Baptist Church sent us a mission team to work do a VBS (Vacation Bible School) here in Poipet. About three times a year we hold a community wide children’s party! It last four days and the kids here love it. Over four days we teach Bible stories, play games, do crafts, sing songs and worship Jesus. This year we also fed lunch to all the kids. Feeding nearly a thousand kids is quite a chore (like trying to count them. . . we estimate the number of kids to be around 950). We had 40 workers to help manage the staff, with more than half of them under 16 years old (they are from our other children’s center). Together with 8 ladies from Kingsland and their fearless mission leaders Omar Garcia we had a whole lot of fun (We had a child-teacher ratio of about 50 to 1).
Imparting Smiles Community Kids Party!
They kids heading home, crowding the small street!
Each day, when feeding the kids we would get interesting feedback. Our “Chomteo” (the wife of a Naval Admiral) led our cooking team which worked all morning to prepare the food. Each day she made different well-balanced dishes. The last day I saw the children were having trouble eating all the pork we had in the food and I asked one of the mothers why they didn’t like pork. She said, most of the kids being squatters, have never had much meat in their food because they families are too poor to afford it, so they were not used to eating meat. When I asked the kids how many times they ate each day, more than half responded that the food we gave them at lunch was the first food they had eaten all day. We let them take as much as they wanted until no food was left. No hungry kids in Poipet this week!
Good food!