In November 2024, the MCC Cambodia team traveled out to the MCC field office in Prey Veng province to join the team there for some teambuilding and learning activities. This also served as an encouragement visit to the two YAMEN participants placed in the countryside this year.

Two members of the team were selected to share about their home culture and to prepare a snack that they enjoyed as a child. Crystal Conklin prepared Pão de queijo, a Brazilian cheese bread, as her snack and shared about growing up in Brazil as the child of American Missionaries serving with Mennonite Mission Board. Uy Doungchann prepared Ambok (អំបុក) with banana and shared about growing up in rural Prey Veng province. Ambok is a traditional Khmer harvest season food that is made by toasting rice on a wok and then pounding it flat with a large wooden mortar and pestle.

Chhourn Maly facilitated a Peace Club lesson on Empathy for the MCC Cambodia team. This helped them understand the work being done by the MCC Prey Veng team in Rural Primary Schools and introduced key concepts of empathy based peacebuilding.

In the afternoon, the MCC Cambodia team harvested/threshed rice using traditional methods at the farm of Ouch Sipha near the childhood home of our Office Manager Uy Doungchann. Ouch Sipha is a School Teacher who, like most people in the rural province, also grows rice.

After harvesting about 5% of the field Doungchann called us back to her childhood home where we threshed the rice the traditional way – with our feet!

Sipha estimated that we harvested about 30 kilos of unhusked rice. The next step, which we didn’t do, is to dry the rice and then send it to the mill. Rice farming is quite physically intensive and it was a good experience that let the team understand the kind of work that many of the people we support are doing.