|
|
|
|
"Cambodia Report" And so we begin Lent and appropriate stances for entering into the forty days of Lent are sobriety, introspection, humility. These are attitudes that make us vulnerable to God reaching us. My recent ten-day experience in Cambodia prepared me for this year's Lenten journey because I returned from that small and sad country with a sombre sense of self-examination. Everyone requires some space and quiet afier experiencing Cambodia. The tourist perforce becomes a pilgrim and a penitent when confronted by the terror which turned that pacific people and beautiful place into the killing fields of irrational horror. From 1975-79 about one fourth of the population died because of the Khmer Rouge policy of genocide toward everyone with any education. Tens of thousands were systematically tortured to death, hundreds of thousands had their brains beaten out, and at least a half million died from the famine induced by the lunacy. An American visitor, like myself, comes out of Cambodia newly humbled because we are reminded, and often learn for the first time, the terrible contribution which America's misguided policy in Vietnam made to destabilising Cambodia and making it ripe for Marxist fanaticism. The secret bombings under Nixon and Kissinger in 1972 unhinged what little law and order the new nation had achieved in its first decade of existence. The middle could not hold and extremism took over. Except for the fortunate few who escaped abroad, the entire middle class was liquidated. All teachers, anyone who had spent time abroad (which included some 15 young Cambodian students whom I had known during two years as chaplain at California State University at LA in 1964-66), all artists, all monks, priests and ministers were rounded up and murdered. Just to have had a few years of schooling made one a victim in the suspicious eyes of the reactionary Khmer Rouge cadres who themselves were mostly illiterate teenagers from the countryside. Nancy and I were attending the annual meeting of pastors and their spouses from international congregations in Asia. After one seminar with four Cambodian pastors -all of whom are alive today only because they escaped as teenagers to Thai or Malaysian reftigee camps and eventually immigrated to the U.S. - we visited the ghastly Tuoi Sieng Museum of Interrogation and Torture, a high school in Phnom Peng, which the Pol Pot security forces turned into a centre for pre-execution torture. The museum has been left much as the Vietnam Army found it except that the last tortured victims, all suspect officers of the Khmer Rouge, have been buried in the front yard. Large photos of the final 12 victims are above the torture racks upon which their bodies were found. The various torture instruments remain with graphic illustrations of their use. Several thousand photos of the victims are on the walls, many of them being only kids and even small children. In the ghastly way of totalitarian regimes there are pre -torture and post-execution photos of each victim. I've also visited Auschwitz and Belsen Belsen, and Tuoi Sieng Museum, though on a smaller scale than those places of genocide, gives a more graphic view of what went on inside. We also visited the provincial "killing fields" a few miles outside the capital - each province had its reserved execution site and several in our groups walked through human bones and clothing still coming to the surface after each rain. The Cambodian people has resumed the inevitable population growth of the poorest countries and now number about 14,000,000. Every Cambodian we met was friendly and welcoming, but there are as many children begging on the urban streets as in India. And because of the landmines, amputees everywhere. Cambodia is among the poorest of the poor countries and it's major source of income are the funded programs of the more than 400 private helping organisations, many of them Christian sponsored, which are engaged in rural and urban renewal programs. We visited a half dozen programs helping orphans, amputees, prostitutes, drug abusers, and simple farmers. We attended Sunday evening worship at the International Christian Fellowship whose large congregation is made up almost entirely of the staff of the helping groups. Around 1982 only two Cambodian pastors were alive in the country, three Protestant congregations were open, and there were no foreign missionaries since the governments which succeeded Pol Pot continued suspicious and restrictive of any foreign religious presence. But Cambodians trained abroad have returned as pastors and leaders and in just the last two years or so the Church has experienced an extremely fast expansion so there are over 700 Protestant congregations now. The Roman Catholic Church which was closely identified with French occupation and the Vietnam minority, who were the very first to be liquidated, has also re-established itself. The result of this abrupt growth is as one of the pastors told us that "The church is a mile wide but still only an inch deep." Recently established Cambodian bible schools are working hard to contextualize the faith and produce a next generation of leaders. I had been in Cambodia once before-in 1962 as a student. Phnom Peng is ten times larger than it was then though Sien Reap seemed about the same - a very sleepy town on the Sapp River. There's a radically different field of vision at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom because they were ignored places seldom visited by tourists then and the sites were profusely overgrown by the huge Banyan and Silk Cottonwood trees. It was jungle exotica. The spreading roots of the trees were destroying the sites and now all those huge trees have been cut back. The visitor can now appreciate the architectural detail much of which is being restored by various expatriate and local teams. Cambodia is struggling to rise again.
Pastor Gene Preston
|
|
|
|
The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
This page has been visited
times.
This page hosted by
Get your own Free
Homepage