Day in the life of Xavier!

Living in Siem Reap, Cambodia has been quite extraordinary. After getting to know the city, I’ve been able to meet some interesting people and have had multiple opportunities to share the Gospel or start friendships with some of the locals. A day in Cambodia is very different from my typical day in the United States, so I will break it down. I share a room with three other guys who do ministry with me, so we wake up at around the same time for breakfast (which is normally 6:30). Breakfast here is the same kind of food we have for lunch or dinner- it is mainly noodles and chicken, or rice and chicken. After I eat breakfast, I get ready for ministry and my team leaves the house at 7:30 to go to seven-eleven. From there, our friend drives us to the learning center in his tuk tuk. Once we arrive at the school, we split off and go to our classrooms to assist our teachers. Some teachers have my friends teaching entire classes, but I only do that on Fridays when the students watch movies in English. My job is to show kids how to correctly pronounce words or to talk with them in English. When the first class is done, my team has a huge break until 3pm. We start with free time, then we eat lunch together and have “team time” where we give each other feedback and then do whatever is planned for that day. During my free time, I usually have a small task to do for my teacher, and afterwards I read the Bible and study or call someone. When 3 o’clock hits, I have two more classes- each an hour long. I then have another hour of free time before the team is done and we drive home by tuk tuk for dinner. We always get to eat dinner with the girls team (which is very nice because no other teams are living together). At the end of the night, I would normally practice guitar and sometimes have spontaneous worship sessions on the roof. The gate gets locked at 9pm sharp, so we aren’t allowed out past then. An hour later, we are encouraged to be asleep or at least in bed. This schedule is consistent from Monday to Friday, but on Saturday we practice sabbath, and Sunday is church and youth group ministry.