So, how about a little background on my family, and how we ended up in Cambodia? In January 2001, my wife, Shirley, and I were accepted to serve with
OMF International, a Christian agency working in East Asia. We left the UK with our two children Lisa (then 8) and Martin (then 6), going initially to Singapore, at the end of October 2001, and we have been in Cambodia since early December 2001. After one year's Khmer language study in Phnom Penh, I was seconded by OMF as Professor of Computer Science, developing and teaching on a new Master of Information Technology course, at the
Royal University of Phnom Penh, and Shirley to be the OMF Team Centre Librarian. In August 2005, we went back to the UK for a year where, as well as deputation for OMF, Shirley studied counselling part-time, and I was Visiting Fellow in Electronic Systems Engineering at the
University of Essex. I also managed to take ten weeks out to study at
All Nations Christian College. We have been back in Cambodia since July 2006, with Shirley continuing as Team Librarian, acting as Listening Ear to the OMF Team, and also seconded part-time to the
Prison Fellowship Cambodia supervising a team of Cambodian social workers. For my part, I was seconded to
NPIC (National Polytechnic Institute of Cambodia) as Professor of Information Technology for two years, as well as a number of other roles for OMF. In the last year I have been increasingly involved with our Development Centre for OMF's IPS - Connecting People project, most recently acting as the Development Centre Manager for the team of six Cambodian programmers.
When we first came to Cambodia in 2001, Lisa and Martin were both a lot younger than today! Lisa was 8 years old, and Martin just 6. You can see the pair of them riding an electric car at "the world's most dangerous funfair," a place they were keen to go, but where we always worried about their health and safety! The electric car ride seemed to be entirely untimed, unlike in the UK - you could just go round and round forever. The cars were powered by a full-size electric car battery, and if it ran out, one of the helpers would just rush for a spanner and change it out for a charged one! The children would only stop riding around the small dirt track when they ran out of energy or the will to continue (the tropical heat and the need for a drink probably being key factors there) . The remaining four photos show Lisa with her cat, Cream, and Martin with his cat, Coffee. At that time the cats too were very small. Sadly, they both lived only two or three years (the cats, not the children), dying of hepatitis, but they were great companions for the whole family. The next photo shows the children looking out across the Sap River with their mother, Shirley. The final one is of Lisa and Martin with two friends, both of whom are also a lot bigger now, on the beach at Kompong Som.
