Vacation

A brief announcement: This blog posting comes to you from… my apartment. That’s right, the Internet saga appears to be over and I now have DSL in my own home. It’s terribly exciting. Okay, back to my other thoughts.

I’ve just returned from Cambodia’s seashore, Sihanoukville. The vacation was due to a few scheduled days off in honor of a Cambodian religious holiday: pchum ben. The Khmer take this time to travel to their home villages and visit pagodas (temples) to sacrifice to the ghosts and spirits of their ancestors. Then, the food they’ve taken for the sacrifice is shared and eaten by their family, though some of what is left on the ground around the pagodas. The sacrifice is made to appease the ancestors and bring good luck for the year.

From a Western perspective, it’s hard to digest the idea that our ancestors might hang out around the cemetery and want to eat dinner. Yet, for Cambodians, this is a very real, very important holiday.

I’ll be having my own personal pchum ben over the next few weeks. I’ll be back in the US, visiting (not my ancestors) my family, friends, and several of the partner churches I work with. I’ll also be attending our annual partnership meetings and an event called “Congregate” at WR Headquarters in Baltimore. I’m quite excited about the trip, enough that I don’t mind that I’ll be in an airplane for a very long time. So, hopefully I will see most of you soon. Until then…