Neighbors

You may or may not have noticed that if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page there is a link that says, "More Pictures." I finally posted some Cambodia pictures on there, including pictures of our apartment and of the construction going on nearby. There are currently several big apartment buildings being built right next to ours, a couple of them literally a stone's throw from our back balcony, from which I took the photo above. Since our kitchen windows have only screens (no glass), there is construction noise echoing down our hall throughout most of the day. When I saw how closely the buildings are being built I thought, "Wow, we're going to have some neighbors living really close by." What somehow escaped me back then is that we already have neighbors living just outside our back door. I had noticed that people were sometimes washing clothes or rinsing themselves off back there, but it didn't occur to me that they were actually living there. Often building projects employ people from the rural provinces. Since these people have left their homes in the province they have to make themselves at home in the unfinished buildings while they are working on them. In this picture if you look down at the bottom, on the right side of the corner are a couple of cooking pots over an open flame. To the left of the corner there is what appears to be a kind of a cot for sleeping. It's kind of wild - we live so close, yet we live so differently from one another. It reminds me that entering into their world requires a lot more than just entering their country. God grant me the grace to continue work toward entering in.