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It started with a letter and the signing of an agreement. The letter was an Advent Pastoral Letter, a special kind of letter read out in all churches in a Catholic Bishop’s diocese on the first Sunday of Advent. Signed ‘Michael’, this particular letter invited everyone in the Diocese of East Anglia “to walk in faith and love with the small Catholic communities in both the Holy Land and Cambodia”. The Bishop’s full name was Michael Evans and the year 2003.

The announcement was that Bishop Michael had agreed with both the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Apostolic Prefect of Battambang, Cambodia, to be linked with them in friendship and solidarity for an initial period of five years. There would be links at diocesan level, but the Bishop hoped that links would also be established at deanery, parish and school level. The scheme was called Building Bridges and it felt very top down.

Still, our parish wasn’t twinned with any community and, after some discussion, the Pastoral Council decided to explore the feasibility of twinning with a Cambodian parish.

As it turned out making an approach to a Cambodian parish without a firm commitment wasn’t an option. It would be too dispiriting for the Cambodian parish. The Pastoral Council had to decide whether or not to link with a Cambodian community. It it chose to go ahead, then it would have to trust the two Bishops to find a suitable match.

We ended up in an unorthodox arranged marriage with two Cambodian communities served by the same parish priest. One was Battambang, now the third city of Cambodia and Chomnaom, a village 50 kilometers away.

One of the criteria for selection was that the Cambodian parish should have an e-mailing priest enthusiastic about twinning. However, means of communication in those days were not what they are to day and 2 years into the twinning we still knew very little about our twinned parishes.

So in 2007 Michael and I volunteered to combine a holiday in Cambodia with a fact finding mission: as well as visiting Angkor Wat, we would spend a few days in Battambang and check out the communities there.

We had no inkling that we would come back again and again and that the people we met in Battambang and Chomnaom would become so important to us. And that we would one day publish a book about them.