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Show Notes

-Iron Tribe Fitness President Jim Cavale narrates his journey through Cambodia — from the bustling cities and temples to the remote villages where they stayed with locals as they built water filters for families in the community.
-Jim learns and tries to relay stories and lessons he learned from a people who suffered from severe oppression in the not too distant past under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
-This episode is special because it highlights the work Neverthirst does in the region for both peoples physical needs and spiritual needs.
-Iron Tribe Fitness is proud to work alongside Neverthirst both overseas in places like Cambodia, as well as here at home with our Workout for Water events. Be sure to check out workoutforwater.com to find out how to give and find an event near you.

About The Trip

I recently returned from a nine-day Neverthirst trip to Cambodia with an incredible team of coaches and athletes from multiple Iron Tribe markets.

For me, it was a chance to go to a new place I had never been, in a poverty-stricken nation that experiences life in a much different manner. It was also a chance for me to grow my faith, through a growing dependence on God in prayer, that is much harder to have here in America.

In the United Nations’ most recent Human Development rankings, Cambodia was 144th out of the 188 countries on the planet (U.S. was 8th).

When you go to a place like Cambodia, you immediately dismiss your desire for “wants” and you start to focus on simply meeting your “needs.” Our group agreed to take things a step further, by agreeing to a theme of “flexibility” for the entire trip, knowing that we weren’t there to be served, but to serve.

The team embraced this philosophy, as we prayed about it repetitively, talked about it in our devotionals each morning, and we ultimately maintained this attitude as a unit throughout our trip abroad in a new land.

Neverthirst did a phenomenal job of planning this trip; establishing context for our work in villages, as we visited the nearly 1,000-year-old Angkor Temples near Siem Reap, and the Killing Fields in capital city Phnom Penh, where the Pol Pot Regime killed more than two million Cambodians in a genocide from 1975 to 1979.

These experiences set the stage for what we saw in the villages we visited and lived in for several days of the trip. It helped us understand the history of the Buddhist religion in Cambodia and the effects of the Pol Pot Regime, which killed the majority of the nation’s educated people in an attempt to force the country to “start back at zero,” just less than 40 years ago.

To quote a book I’m reading right now about Cambodia [Cambodia’s Curse], “you stand in these villages and look around knowing that these villages look exactly the same today, as they did 350 years ago!”

Neverthirst has united with multiple partners in Cambodia, to bring villages clean water through three delivery mechanisms; water wells, biosand filters and rain tanks, depending on multiple factors which determine the best option.

The work we were a small part of, with Neverthirst’s partners for each of these three clean water delivery mechanisms, allowed us to truly connect what you and I get to do with our annual Workout For Water event each year, to the exact latitude and longitude it affects on the other side of the world. It was powerful.

And to actually have our hands touch each of these three clean water delivery mechanisms, by helping to build and install them in these villages – that was more than powerful. It could even be eternal. Because we got to share our faith with so many who have never even heard the name of Jesus Christ, let alone the Good News that He came to save everyone, including them.

We stayed in areas all over the country, including the Vietnam border, where of course, I had to watch Apocalypse Now on my laptop before bed. The overall experience I had on this trip, is one I’ll never forget and surely try to repeat in Cambodia or another area of the world in 2017.