Winston Churchill once said, “we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” This is the heartbeat of why we created our MC Gives Back initiative, and we’re really experiencing this firsthand this week. For some, this week has been life shaping. It’s helped us focus in on important things, and appreciate all that we have.

Today was another day full of sweat and fun. Some of the team ran hundreds of feet of CAT5 network cables between computers at one of the high schools. Others painted the new computer room at the other high school, and upgraded and relocated each of the computers to their new location. But we all gave back in some way and lived a day that was not about ourselves, but rather about serving our new friends in Cambodia – and it was a good day.

The Cambodian Young Life leader, Pyneath, told our group today that students commented to him Monday after we finished teaching English class that he invited “giants” to spend the week with them. And we have been gathering quite a crowd at the high school while working hard moving, cleaning, and painting. Apparently, the locals are intrigued by a group from the United States who actually works so hard. We’re taking the comment in stride and considering it as a compliment

Our day finished with small group dinners at several of the students’ homes. These were very eye opening experiences, including canoe-only access to some of the rural homes due to recent area flooding. The food and hospitality were very authentic, and a great example of them giving back to us.

Thursday will be our final day of onsite work. If all goes according to plan, we’ll have networked nearly 100 computers at five locations, and have a brand new freshly painted computer classroom. This experience has certainly helped us all reinforce the idea that it’s better to give than receive. We hope it affects us and our new friends in a positive way for many years to come.

Our new friends from Young Life in Cambodia have asked for some help upgrading their computer centers, so that’s our primary goal for the week. Several hundred local high school students attend both on campus and off campus English and computer classes taught by the Young Life staff. Their computers are in okay shape, but need to be networked together and upgraded with better software to properly train the students with skills to be successful in life.

The principal from one of the high schools offered Young Life the use of a more secure room for the onsite computer training lab. So one of our team’s project today (and the next few days) was to clean up, paint, install new flooring, move computers, and set up a network at this high school. Another team worked at another youth center today installing software and configuring the network.

Students and staff from Young Life have been very gracious in making amazing Khmer-style lunch feasts for us every day. We came hoping to serve these new friends, but they go out of their way to make sure we are having a good time. A favorite of the team was a very unusual round, red, sweet fruit covered with spikes, and the inside having the texture of a grape – but no one knows what it’s called.

After lunch, our MC Gives Back team dove right in getting our hands dirty (literally) at the high school. The large donated storage room had not been touched for many years, so we sorted through and relocated piles of old TVs, computers, spiders, and plenty of dirt. We plan to repaint the walls tomorrow, so we spent several hours scraping paint from the walls and cleaning up.

We finished the day at the hotel enjoying Cambodian style pizza some of which came with hot dogs in the crust. And there was a very interesting seafood pizza which didn’t seem to make it to anyone’s top 10 favorite foods of Cambodia.

Great week so far giving back. We have our work cut out for us with three high schools and threes youth centers, but we have a great team who is eager to make an impact.