Cambodia
Hello all you beautiful people.
Our journey is coming to an end and time is really flying by fast! Cambodia was a time of lots of mixed emotions. Like Andrew, the missionary with whom we work here said: “In Cambodia you can go from hopeless to hopeful in less than an hour”.
Andrew is a missionary from South Africa. He is married to a Cambodian woman and gives English classes as an additional source of income here in the Capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. He took us to all the interesting places here in and around Phnom Penh. We stayed on the 3rd floor of the Cambodian Bible League’s building. We pitched our tents on the deck.
We kicked of our time here in Cambodia by visiting the Genocide Museum and the Genocide Camps and mass graves. During the seventies Cambodia went through a terrible time. The Khmer Rouge was a communist movement that took over Cambodia in almost a day. They evacuated all the people out of the cities by telling them that the USA was going to bomb the city. They took all the people to concentration camps where they brutally murder over 2 million Cambodians, almost a third of the population in less than 5 years time. They used horrible torturing techniques on the people before they brutally murdered them. They killed babies by hitting them against trees while their mothers stood watching in terror. The Khmer Rouge took the children and used fear techniques on them to do this dirty work. They would kill the children if the children would kill the babies and other people. By using this technique, they forced the children into becoming heartless killers. It all eventually stopped when Vietnam military entered Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge disintegrated and the UN prevented Vietnam from taking over Cambodia. In the museums are thousands of pictures of all the people that were killed and also pictures of a lot of the killers. They have discovered mass graves near the camps, some with more than 450 naked bodies in them. This is a country with a lot of physical and emotional scars, a country desperately in need of the love of Jesus! This is the sad and depressing history of Cambodia.
The other very sad thing about Cambodia is that more than 90% of the people are very lost in Buddhism. Almost every house has an altar in front of it. There are a lot of monks and temples as well and the people will have no hope if they don’t have a relationship with Christ.
That was some of the harsh realities of Cambodia. It is now time for some stories of hope.
We had the privilege of visiting a few of the small churches in and around Phnom Penh during this week. It is amazing how all around the world you can immediately see the hope of Jesus in the people that know him. The same Spirit lives inside of all of His children. Most of these small churches are very small in size and also very poor. They rely on people’s donations. Some of the churches also serve as schools. We played with the kids and in some of the schools we even gave class to them. Cambodians are very friendly people. The children are beautiful and it does my heart good to see that there is hope for them in Christ. We also visited Daughters. Daughter’s is a daily workshop for ex-prostitutes where volunteers teach them life skills such as sewing, cooking, working as waiters etc. This place also gave me a lot of hope. A lot of the girls there are still in their teens and they have experienced some of the worst things in life. Here they also get the opportunity to hear the Gospel of Jesus and just to be loved without being judged. Another place we visited was a children’s home where lots of rejected children stay and are fed and loved by different organisations.
We met a lot of amazing people that really taught us so much about what it is to give up your life to serve the Kingdom of God. These people love and care for the abandoned and rejected. They don’t stay in big fancy houses and sometimes they don’t even have electricity in their homes, but they serve the Kingdom with diligence. They are bringing hope to the hopeless by telling them the Good News about Jesus Christ and His love for them.
I had a very special time in Cambodia and again got to experience the goodness of Father first hand.
We are now on our way to Bangkok and then Hong Kong and after that Johannesburg, die Republiek!
Thank you very much for all your prayers and please pray for Cambodia as well and for the missionaries serving here.
Blessings in the name of Jesus.
Franna :)