Korenglish

So, before I start, sorry that the last blog wasn't very long. Anyway, another week has gone by, as crazy as that seems. This past week Dan and I were asked to play in the worship band at Moriah Presbyterian Church. The church was planted by Korean missionaries, but they have a Khmer pastor. They were having a youth conference for Khmer people aged 15 - 25 in and around our area. I thought it was weird that they would pick such a wide age range, but it seemed to work in their culture.

Back to Dan and I playing music, they asked us to play with a couple of the Khmer guys from their church(who were pretty good for how little they had been trained). We had to go to a couple of practices to get ready for the conference. We would practice these 20 different songs, of which, Dan and I didn't know the melody or the words(being that they were written in Khmer). There were a couple American worship songs that we knew the melodies to, but the words were still in Khmer. Trying to follow and play along with a song, in which, you can't read the words can be pretty tough.

Now the guy coordinating our multi-nationality worship team was a Korean missionary named Lee. Now, Lee is a very calm and relaxed individual, that is, until you put him in charge of a worship band. While we practice, he starts waving his arms making air guitar motions to what he wants our guitars to do or air piano motions to what he wants the piano to do. And on almost every song he would yell in his thick Korean accent, "fastay, fastay" which would mean play faster. And every once in a while, he would throw in a "so fastay" which, of course, would mean play a lot faster. Dan and I thought it was quite hilarious. In all seriousness though, Lee was an incredible man.

He speaks English(Korenglish), Khmer, and Korean and he's such a nice guy. He would always tell me that my Khmer pronunciation was better than his. Anyway, aside from playing we also got to attend some of the lectures at the conference. The speaker was a Korean man who was introduced to me as Pastor Cho. He was also a really nice guy. He speak, read, and write in 9 languages(german, english, new testament greek, spanish, hebrew, khmer, korean, chinese, and japanese)!

Every time before he would speak we would sing God Bless America, but instead of America everyone would put in Cambodia. It was really good. Pastor Cho spoke on "how to love God" and faith. I am still trying to process what he said, but as soon as I do I'll try to put some of his points up on the blog.

Well, I have to go home and pack because, tomorrow, we are heading down to a beach town called Sihanoukville for a couple of days to say good-bye to one of the teams that is leaving. I will blog again soon probably within the next couple of days. Talk to you soon.


God is good. All the time.
Dan