Kentwood Construction Team

This is the team of men who descended upon the building project in Kratie. The team consisted of five men from Kentwood Community Church in Michigan, one National Superintendent of Cambodia, four national pastors, two missionaries, and of course two pastors and various members from the Kratie Church.


One of our initial projects was to prepare and pour the concrete flooring of the entire church. This project took several days of work.


One of the initial jobs was to carry buckets of sand to prepare the floor. Here you are seeing two of the men from Kentwood, Bob and Dick, working with the buckets that we used to carry the sand, the rocks, the cement, and the water all throughout the project.


After the sand, we covered the floor with rocks to fill in the floor. Here you are seeing Eric and Malachi preparing rocks to bring into the church.


Here you are seeing Bernie arranging the rocks after we brought them into the church. After the rocks were placed, we flooded the floor and began to pound the rocks into the sand. It was a big, big job, but we were very happy to see the floor brought to completion by the end of the second day of work.


The third day of work was our longest and hardest day. On that day, we began the day by mixing the concrete for the headers. Here you are seeing Jack standing atop one of the piles of gravel, rocks and sand, vigorously dumping the heavy bags of cement so that they can be mixed into the rest of the materials.


Because we did not have a cement mixer, we had to mix it all by hand. We mixed six large piles of material so that they could be used for the headers for the church. Each of these piles had to be shoveled and blended together, not once, but normally two to three times. This would take about twenty minutes of busy shoveling before the cement was mixed to the contractors specifications. After that, we could form the cement into the “doughnut” as we called it and flooded it with water.


After the “doughnut” had enough water, we would use hoes and shovels to mix the cement so that it could be then shoveled into buckets that were then carried to the upper levels using a pulley system. Here you are seeing the two “partners”, Dick and Kimsan, carrying the heavy buckets of cement to the place where they would hoist it to the roof.


Here you are seeing a picture of Pastor Vande, the head pastor of the Kratie Church. Vande not only amazed us with his work ethic, but also with his knowledge of construction practices. Many times during the week, Vande showed us all how to work, the smart way to do a certain task, and he lead all of the workers with true leadership and a servant’s heart.


The first night that we were in Kratie, I had the opportunity to attend the English classes at the School of Hope. As I entered the class, I was surprised to have Teacher Titus ask me to teach them a small lesson about whatever I wanted. I was glad that I had thought about this a little ahead of time, so I just led them through a lesson that I had taught previously to my class in Phnom Penh. The students at the school are great, and we are very proud of the job that Titus and Rolitess are doing at the school.


On Sunday afternoon, we had time to spend with the members of the church. I was very pleased to spend time with several of the youth group of the church, talking about their lives and helping them with their English. In this picture you see Tim and Nareth going through an English lesson, reading from Nareth’s book together.


This is a boat that was on the river outside of our hotel in Kratie. It was very pleasant to sit outside of our hotel, watch the boat and see the sun set over the river.


After our return from Kratie, we spent a morning working at the new Bible School. As a missionary, I have spent many hours working on preparing lessons and studying language. However, in these days with the team from Kentwood, it was great doing manual labor again, lifting and carrying, sweating and straining, it was a great break from the normal work of a missionary.