Sometimes I wonder if Cambodia is in a different universe. Far away from all other know countries and kingdoms. Maybe Cambodia lies in some sort of Bermuda Triangle, a dimension where the know laws of physics like action/reaction are singularly special, where one plus two equals four. For example, in the US, if there isn’t a guardrail along a walkway, someone is sure to slide off. In Cambodia, there are never any guardrails and it seems there is never a problem. In the US, babies generally sleep in cribs, yet there is an occasional death in that padded environment. In Cambodia, babies sleep in hammocks that hang two to three feet above the floor. Cambodian mothers swing it once in a while, but the baby is generally neglected. Yet, I have never seen a baby injured by falling out of a hammock. These oddities go on and on.

My Car accident is good case to my point. I was driving along the road yesterday night, when I came upon a place where the road divided at a bridge. It was a small bridge, only thirty feet in length, but it divided the road, to where it actually became two bridges; one lane coming and one going. Between the two bridges was a space of only a few feet. At both ends the bridge it was buttressed with two large cement columns, one on each side.

As I was crossing the bridge, I heard a tremendous crash, a split second later a human body dropped in snow flake like fashion from the sky in front of my moving vehicle. As I slammed on the brakes, I heard another large object banging against the side of the car. I wasn’t going very fast, so I stopped suddenly. I got out of the car to see if I ran the falling person over. I didn’t. He got up, dazed and walked to the side of the road and sat down. Looking behind me, there was a crumpled up motorcycle next to my car, beyond that, a motorcycle tire, and beyond that and person laying unconscious in the road. I was in shock to see so much mayhem, yet not sure how it all came about. Another motorcycle came up, scooped up the unconscious person draping his limp body over the seat, and drove off. A crowed of people began to form around me, so I walked to the side of the road and called my friends for help with my cell phone. The police came and took my statement and I went home not sure if one or both of these people had died.

Apparently, two twenty year old boys were late to a wedding. Driving a great speed on one motorcycle (no helmets, no protective gear of any sort) they decided to pass me. Unfortunately for them, they tried to pass me at the bridge, not seeing the cement columns in the dark. At full force, their motorcycle hit the foot of the column, sending in spinning like a slingshot. The driver was flung into the handlebars and thrown abruptly to the ground. The boy on the back was catapulted into the air. So much force was placed into this, now airborne body, by the cart wheeling motorcycle that he flew ten feet in the air vertically and three times that horizontally, easily clearing my moving car. The driverless motorcycle continued it’s acrobatics, spinning in mid air and banging it’s self against the side of the car, finally coming to rest when I stopped.

The miracle of the story is this: no one died. Not only did no one die, but their injuries were minor. The driver suffered a broken clavicle.

Truth is said to be sometimes stranger that fiction. I believe that. The chances of those boys walking away from this accident would be the same as someone winning the lottery. Mathematically, their bodies should have been thoroughly broken on the road, yet they landed just right, touching down in such a way where their heads didn’t hit the cement, or get run over by my car. Amazing? Yes. I believe the hand of God is working in ways that are not yet known to us. However unlikely it was they survived; angles or Providence was on all our side that night and we all lived to tell about it.