Cambodia

One of the coolest parts of my year has been Cambodia.  It's kind of a long story, so bear with me!  To start, at the end of the book Radical, the author recommends a series of steps to follow for the next year (confession, I didn't do most of them).  One of them is to pray for the entire world - a bit of a daunting task.  Enter Operation World, a handy website that will send you a daily e-mail with information about a country to pray for.  Easy enough for me.  The day that I got to Cambodia, I had this... feeling.  I didn't really know what it was, I just felt a special connection to that country, I guess.  I started googling things like "help Cambodia" and came across the International Justice Mission website.  They do a lot of work in different countries, and in Cambodia they have attorneys that do work with human trafficking.  Oh hey, I'm married to a lawyer!  So I tried really hard to convince the hubs to take a year-long unpaid internship with IJM in Cambodia, but for some reason he was hesitant to suspend his law practice for year and haul our whole family to a random Asian country we know nothing about.  Hmmph.  :)

After that, I sort of sat on the whole thing for a while.  We were in the home-buying process and I was wondering if it was all my imagination that God might have something for me in Cambodia.  Then in a study at church one day, I mentioned it and to my surprise, in that tiny room of maybe 10 people, one of them had been to Cambodia 4 times and another had started a church for Cambodian immigrants in Louisiana several years before.  Oh, and had just gotten in touch with the Cambodian pastor the week before.  What are the chances?  So now I'm really paying attention!  But again, nothing really *happened* so Cambodia is still simmering away in the back of my brain.

Over the next few months, Cambodia would continue to pop up every now and then.  And then one night I was searching on Pure Charity (a pretty cool social media-esque website for giving) for Cambodian charities, and the one and only one that popped up was Rescue Her, and where should they be located but Euless, TX, not far from me at all!  Their purpose is to fight against human trafficking, so they are partners with a rescue home in Cambodia (yay!), they work with local girls who are at risk of being drawn into the sex trade, and they are working to build a new safe home in India.  My first job is to help with their 5K walk/run that will go toward building the new safe home for rescued girls in Chennai, India.  I'm excited to see what God is going to do through this organization, and what other Cambodian adventures he might have in store for me.  :)

And since this post wouldn't be complete without a request for money (!), if you would like to donate to Rescue Her's efforts in India, here is a link to my fundraising page.  I'm also including a video that gives a little more info about human trafficking.  Rescue Her also sells locally roasted coffee, t-shirts and other goodies that all goes toward the fight against trafficking.