Rich and Ronda Dolan

Let me introduce you to 4 of our students. On the left is Khim. He is 27 years old and became a Christian in 2004. He has 5 brothers and 2 sisters; he is #6. Both of his parents are deceased. On the right is Soktee-a. He is 23 years old and has been a Christian since 2004 as well. He has 3 brothers and 2 sisters and is child #2. Both of his parents are still living although not Christians. On the left in this picture is Saleem. He is 33 years old and from Pakistan. He became a Christian in October of 2004. He has one younger brother. His father is still living in Pakistan. He likes to listen to the news and also likes to be alone. On the right is Sokpee-a. He is 22 years old and became a Christian 2 years ago. He is the oldest and has 4 brothers and 1 sister. All of these guys have really great smiles, but get all serious when I get ready to take a picture. And, you will have to come and listen to them sing; it is great! I wish they could sit and sing with our youth gr...

OK. This is your first khmer writing lesson. This is the word, (my phonetics) 'kan-yom'. It means "I, me, mine". The 's' shape in the middle is the 'cah' consonant. The squiggly line under it is the subscript for the consonant 'ny'. Then the circle at the top and the line at the bottom is the vowel sound "om". That makes the word 'kanyom'. As this word is very short in writing, most are not. A couple of the preaching students do their tests in English. When I asked why (because I would think that is much harder), they said it makes it shorter because English is shorter than khmer. The picture below are just to show that they get MUCH more in and on their vehicles than we do! The first is a van, but the rest are motorcycles. The pictures isn't clear, but on top of the stuff on the van are people riding. The 2nd picture is a load of garlic. Notice that in the 3rd pic, the girl is sitting on barrels of cooking oil. And the l...

This is our moving van. We are loading our furniture to get it to our house. If you can see, the cushions are in the seat of the tuk-tuk. Rebekah and I both got in there as well! So much fun! Do you know what this is? The picture isn't very clean, but those are Pepsi bottles (l ltr). Inside of them is gasoline. These little stands are everywhere and, provided that you want gas that is a 'little watered down', you pull up and they sell gas. The green barrel is behind the stand. As you can see, it is selling for 3,500 riels; the gas stations sell for 4,100-4,400 riels. So it all depends on if you want cheap gas or gas that is better for your vehicle. Language school is plotting along. We know our consonants and, for the most part, our vowels. Now we are starting to put words together. One little problem...yesterday, he tells us that the sound the consonants make can depend on if the consonant is with a vowel or if it is the last letter of a word. Great!! Just what we needed!...

This is a common sight in Phnom Penh - the entire family on one motorbike. Actually, this is not nearly as many as you see, but it was an easy picture to get. We got a motorbike from Tawn, who I will introduce to you later in this note, so we are learning to ride. Rich takes it most of the time, but I get a change to practice riding occasionally. This is a holiday and no one is out on the street, so I did take the opportunity to practice. The main thing for me is that, like I have told you in the past, traffic here is fluid; they don't actually stop. So, if they get to an intersection and need to turn, either right or left, they just pull out. I'm not used to people pulling out right in front of me. If you want to turn left, but don't know if there is an opening in traffic, you just take a tight left, drive toward oncoming traffice until there is a break to get over. It is quite exciting. So we are learning; but I still come to a stop at an intersection. Rebekah started le...

Hey, friends: Thought I'd update you on the school a little bit. I have been teaching the Gospel of John for about 3 hours every day (starting September 11th). Yesterday I gave the students a test over John 1-11. It was 10 pages long, plus they had to write out their memory verses. (Those verses are John 20:30-31, John 1:1-5, John 1:9-14, John 1:29-34, John 3:1-5 and John 3:16-19). The questions were fill in the blank or essay type questions. All the students did well. (Maybe the teaching was great or maybe they studied hard.) It also probably means I did not expect enough of them. That will change. October 1st we added an Old Testament overview/basics class. It's held in the afternoon and taught by Tawn, my Khmer co-worker. It only goes an hour and a half, but is needed by several of the students. Many stories that we take for granted, these men do not know. George Carman is coming at the end of October to teach Hebrews in the morning class. That will allow me to focus on my l...

Whenever you think you have a cruddy job, remember this picture! This guy sits by the side of one of the busier roads everyday, as does his fellow workers, straightening out bent up rebar. I'm not sure you could pay me enough to do that all day long everyday. Going to language school is even better than that. Remember the Big Chief tablet and huge pencil days? Well, back in kindergarten - that is where we are. I so feel like I need a Big Chief tablet as I try to write their letters. (Except in order to write their letters correctly, their paper is in squares, kind of like graph paper) I know I have told you some of this, but just as a brief overview: there are 33 consonants (all of which fall into 2 groups - the 'ah' group or the 'oh' group) and 28 vowels (or "wow-alls" as our teacher says) that each have 2 sounds. Then, instead of having 2 consonants side by side (ie. cl, sl, st, etc.) you have the first consonant and then the 2nd consonant is c...

This is just a sampling of the traffic. Lots of motorscooters andbike. This is just one side of the road. As you can see, there are cars and motorbikes going both directions in the same place. They aren't aggressive, but they are 'fluid'. They don't really stop; they just keep moving around whatever. Rebekah and I did splurge Saturday and went to the beauty shop and got our hair washed and dried. It was about a 20-30 minute experience that involved a lot of head and neck massaging. It was great. Our splurge...$1 each. Pretty sweet, huh?? When you come, ladies, we'll make a point to go! Right now, we are having a beautiful rain! Outside, above my washing machine, there is a tin awning, so the rain sounds fantastic! You'll have to come and experience it with us. Today we start at the University with reading/writing language school. So far, we have had a month of conversational khmer. Nothing like going back to kindergarten and learning the alphabet...