In January 2017, eight students from Bishop Tyrrell Anglican College along with Mrs Demmocks, College Librarian, and Mrs Moulds, College Counsellor, ventured off to Cambodia on a Service Trip for three weeks. They started in Phnom Penh, the capital, to learn about some of the Cambodian history and experience the culture. Two sites they visited were the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge and the Tuol Sleng Prison, where the group met two of the seven survivors.
The group then travelled for two hours on a bus to Kampong Cham where they worked with the Youth Development Centre (YDC), which is a part of YWAM (Youth with a Mission). As a team, they worked with their children’s ministry during the day and then divided into groups of three in the afternoon to teach four different English classes for a fortnight.
In the children’s ministry, they played games, performed puppet shows, painted faces, made balloon animals and shared the love of Jesus with the children who ranged from infants to teens. They spent one of the days at Cham Island where YDC is building a new relationship with the Muslim village children in order to start another ministry. “This was loads of fun as we needed to cross a bamboo bridge and then our tuk-tuk broke down!”
The donations from the Bishop Tyrrell Anglican College families were a true blessing to the YDC, as pencils and pens were handed out as gifts to the children to help them with their schooling. The other gifts of clothes, toys and toiletries will be a blessing to the YDC throughout the rest of the year as they distribute them where they are most needed.
The group spent the last week of the trip in Siem Reap at the YWAM base where they continued to do children’s ministry at they did in Kampong Cham, this time in a village called Mo-Meang.
As a group, they stretched out of their comfort zones and experienced many challenges both personally and as a team, as we they were able to overcome these challenges it became an amazing, rewarding experience that none of them will ever forget.
