FCOPI President, Sonny Weimer, looks at the canal digging progress.

So, allow me to tell you about yesterday. Sonny Weimer (FCOPI President) and Errol Faulkes (Advance for Randy Clark meeting) decided to go to the rice farm with me, in order to be out of town for King Sihanouk’s 4 day funeral. We are extending our canals to the river for a year around water supply, which requires miles of ditching and a lot of levees. We went there to; check on the follow up program for the 700 new believers from our Christmas program, close a few land trades, lay out canal work, get six tons of milled rice headed for Phnom Penh, and give some instructions on how to handle new equipment.  Nothing went as planned, but all was accomplished.

People often ask me, “What do you do?” This was a rather typical “untypical” day. No two are ever the same. We do a lot of praying. First, there was the large sum of money to fund our upcoming conference that is lost in cyberspace.We pray! We still need to lay in the supplies before Chinese New Year which begins Friday, more prayer.

I’m at the rice farm, and the rest of the staff are doing the real work, when the new replacement engine in our excavator lost the flywheel, big problem! (more prayer) We decide to pull out a tractor engine for the excavator, that means three days of modifications. The hydraulic pumps are shot, so, off they come to be rebuilt in Vietnam before Chinese New Year.  Next, two of our employees are caught stealing diesel fuel. It turns out that they are two of our orphan kids. What do we do? More prayer, mostly under our breath, in the Holy Spirit.

One of our pastors decides to get greedy on a piece of rice land which we’d agreed to buy. Pray again. An equipment operator cut his foot two days before and did not say anything; it is now infected and red streaks are forming up his leg. We clean , treat, medicate, and pray. The bearings go out on our disc plow.That’s so common we just fixed the dumb thing. The clutch went out on the truck used for follow-up training on the new church members. Nothing new there!

Then six large dump trucks, with 40 tons of road fill each, get stuck in the one lane road to the rice mill. They are right in front of my car, coming in the opposite direction, just in time for the transmission of my SUV to lock up, if I attempted to reverse. I could only move forward. There we are, nose to nose, and I can’t back up. It’s getting dark and we’re 40 kilometers from town. We pray. A Bulldozer manages to get one truck free enough to dump a load of fill in front of my busted down vehicle, push a path for me to get around, and we limp into town to stop one foot in front of the repair shop. The transmission completely locks up. The next morning we order the replacement transmission from Phnom Penh, 400 kilometers away, for $800US, as we travel toward the Vietnam border via Phnom Penh with the hydraulic pumps in search of our new excavator engine.