Mission search brings Alabama church into contact with Cambodian willage

About five years ago, people from Eastminster church in Trussville, in a rural area about 20 miles east of Birmingham, made the decision to get involved in mission with an “unreached people group” — working with people somewhere in the world who knew little or nothing about the gospel of Jesus. That’s all they knew. They wanted to do something. But they didn’t know how.

The hunger grew, Buckingham said, out of conversations that revolved around priorities — a sense that “the church spends 98 percent of its money on itself and 2 percent somewhere else” and that “if we’re all brothers and sisters in Christ, that doesn’t match up,” that how the congregation was spending its money wasn’t aligned with what its members professed to believe. So some mission-minded people from Eastminster decided “our church needs something that’s going to take us outside ourselves, that is going to be so big that when it happens, we’ll know it wasn’t us,” Buckingham said. “We’ll know God was in it.”

To get started, Eastminster looked for help from the Worldwide Ministries Division of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and from Cody Watson, the Alabama-based representative for Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship, which helps to organize evangelistic outreach around the globe. Buckingham talked and prayed with Watson, who told him: “Every church has a natural bridge to somewhere,” maybe “somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. Look for the bridge that God’s already created.”

And “sure enough,” Buckingham said, “right there in the church was Sovanna Thach.”

Thach was an immigrant from Cambodia, who at age 22 arrived as a refugee to the United States with his wife and small baby. The Thachs were sponsored as refugees by someone they did not know: Mary Marvin Peek, a Presbyterian and a member of Eastminster church, who introduced Sovanna Thach to Christianity and opened the door for a Cambodian family she’d never met to leave the devastation inflicted by Pol Pot and start a new life in the United States. Asked if he knew anything about Alabama, Thach answers: “I did not know where America was.”

During the Vietnam war, Thach’s father had worked for the American military. When South Vietnam fell in 1975 and the communists invaded Cambodia, Thach’s father disappeared; Thach learned years later that he’d been imprisoned and tortured. From 1975 to 1978, about 2.5 million of Cambodia’s 7.5 million people were killed through genocide and torture under the brutal regime of Pol Pot. “I just thank the Lord I’m able to talk to you today, because I survived the killing fields,” Thach said in a telephone interview. Thach, his mother and his siblings ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand. When he left in 1982, “I felt that was not a land to go back to,” Thach said.

Close to 20 years later, when the the Eastminster mission team approached him, Thach was reluctant to return to Cambodia, telling them, “I don’t ever want to go back” — the memories of what had happened to his family there were too painful, Buckingham recalled. “We said, ‘Well, pray about it.’ He did. And he came back and said, ‘Let’s go.'”

Thach said: “I just prayed, to see if the Lord would open my mind.”

In October 1999, Thach went to Cambodia by himself, paying his own expenses. He went to Phnom Penh, the capital city, where his family had lived. And what happened next, both he and others from Eastminster are convinced, was definitely God’s leading.

On his second day there, while riding a motorcycle with his cousin, Thach noticed two groups of people near the King’s Palace. The first, gathered near some lights, were carrying a banner; when Thach asked, his cousin told them they were protesters. But the second group was gathered in the dark, nearly hidden. Thach said he saw them for “just a split second. I feel like the Lord just turned my head 360 degrees,” and he asked his cousin to turn the motorcycle around and stop, curious about why people who might be protesters would be hiding in the dark.

Thach went up and talked to the people, and although they were nervous at first about talking with him, they finally revealed that they were from an impoverished village, they were in desperate need, and they had traveled to the city for the king’s birthday, traditionally a time when the king dispenses gifts. “Well, the king’s birthday came and went, and they got nothing, they never even saw him,” Buckingham said.

The people, from a rice-growing village called Kloung, had no money and had been sleeping outside on the ground. During the day, they begged on the streets. When they got enough money, they would send one person back home. Listening to their story, “I really, really felt like the Lord had led me to contact with these people,” Thach said. He brought them rice and dried fish. When an older woman asked for money, Thach asked her why she needed it. She told him she just wanted to go back home. For nearly 20 years, Thach had been gone from his homeland — he didn’t know how much it meant to him until he returned. Now, on just his second day back, an old woman stood before him asking for his help to go back home too.

Thach told the people he could not give them money, but said he’d return the next day to take them to Kloung — a promise, he said, the villagers greeted with considerable skepticism.

But Thach did come back the next day, with a van he had rented. He expected perhaps 20 people, but found close to 30 waiting. Feeling strongly the presence of God, Thach rented another van and the whole group drove to the Mekong River. Thach, who had never been in that part of the country before, had expected the journey to end there — he thought the village would be by the river. But when he asked the people where Kloung was, they pointed across the river and said they had several hours more to travel on the other side. The van drivers were very concerned — one told Thach the road on the other side had been damaged during the war and never repaired; that the journey would be long and difficult; and that to miss the last ferry back would be too dangerous. After dark, “people get robbed and shot. The countryside in that area was not safe at that time at night,” Thach said. One of the drivers refused to go.

Thach was uncertain, so he stepped aside and prayed for guidance.

“I cannot make it alone,” he said he prayed. And he sensed this answer strongly in his heart: “I feel like I cannot abandon them … I’ve got to cross the river.”

Thach got on the ferry, an act of faith, and talked both van drivers into coming with him.

As the boat crossed the river, a passenger — not someone with his group — became ill and collapsed. “He fell down on his face and had a seizure,” Thach said. “I didn’t know what to do” — people were afraid, so “they just stepped back. He turned blue. At that time, I cannot let that man die. I go down on my knee and try to help him.” Thach had no training in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, but he opened the man’s mouth and tried mouth-to-mouth breathing and chest compressions, over and over.

“I’m so scared, and people stood around me and watched what I’m doing,” he said. “I just looked up to the sky and said, ‘Lord, please give this man a chance. Show them that you’re the God of all gods and king of all kings … You can touch people, you can bring him back alive.”

Then Thach leaned back over, opened the man’s mouth, and as he breathed again “I can feel the air go through his lungs … I can hear him come back.”

“People were standing around looking at him wondering, `What in the world was this guy doing?’ ” Buckingham said. “He revived the person.” Buckingham, who’s a physician, said there’s no way to tell whether the man was unconscious or really dead, but “Jesus rose people from the dead” and performed miracles — and for Eastminster church, which was praying for direction from God in where to become involved, this felt like a miracle and sign enough.

On the other side of the river, Thach left the man, because the van drivers insisted on moving on. He told the man, “the Lord has healed you and blessed you,” and continued on with his group to Kloung, a journey of about two hours. There, he found people living with no electricity and no source of water, sometimes no shelter. Some had no food, “and the children were so thin.”

The villagers, grateful, tried to offer them coconuts from their trees: all that they had, something they could not afford to give. Thach took some coconuts, made photographs of the people of Kloung and their poverty, then raced back with the second van driver — the first had already left. They were the last two people to board the last ferry of the day.

When he got back to Alabama, Thach told the parishioners at Eastminster what had happened and what he had seen. He could not sleep. At night, when this father of four closed his eyes, he would see the faces of the children of Kloung. A few months later, he took a leave of absence from his job as an auto body technician and returned to the village. He spent two months, willing to cash in his only asset — a life insurance policy — to pay his mortgage and support his family while he was gone.

“Whatever I have, the Lord has blessed me with,” Thach thought to himself. “I know I’ve got to serve him.” He knew this, if nothing else: “Somebody’s got to do something.”

So he went, he helped dig wells and built huts and bought the villagers some cows.

When he returned, telling his story, the Eastminster congregation reimbursed him, and that began a relationship between the church and the village that continues to this day.

Thach has gone back to Cambodia every year since, reconnecting with his extended family, taking along his own wife and children. In 2002 and 2003, Buckingham and some others from the church went with him — including, one year, Eastminster’s pastor, Richard Gates — and they held a medical clinic and brought along Bible translators who speak the language. Buckingham brought medicine, he helped cure children with serious skin diseases. He cleaned deeply embedded wax out of the ears of a man who could not hear; when Buckingham was finished, the man pressed his hands together before his chin and bowed down, saying “thank you” over and over again. That night, the man could not sleep — all the sounds he could hear were keeping him awake.

Buckingham brought eyeglasses, and a woman picked through the pile, trying out different pairs. When she put one on, “her eyes got as big as teacups, and she smiled,” Buckingham said. “She walked out yelling, ‘I can see! I can see! I can see!’ ” to a crowd of about 70 people.

“What a witness,” he said. “The blind see, the deaf hear, and the dead are raised … It might not be a miracle over here, but it sure is over there, where a person has absolutely no hope and then they can see. They had no hope, and God has come.”

On one of their trips, the wife of the village leader came out to speak with them, Buckingham said. She brought out a book, wrapped in plastic, and said her grandmother had given it to her during Pol Pot’s reign, telling her: “Keep this, this is an important book. Don’t let the communists take it away from you. Don’t let anyone know you have it. Keep it safe.”

The woman had heard the Presbyterians talking about the Bible. So she brought out the book, Buckingham said, and they found it was a Bible in Khmer. “God had been there all the time,” Buckingham said. “He was just wrapped in plastic because he was important.”

One of the most exciting things for the Alabama Presbyterians has been to see the progression: how one thing they didn’t expect has led to another. On their next visit, made in November, the Americans found that that woman whose grandmother had given her the Bible had been traveling once a month to Phnom Penh to attend a Bible study, and had become a Christian. She had started a village fellowship that was meeting in her home.

On the trip in 2002, a 12-year-old girl named Kelsey Dunn, whose family attends

Eastminster, had given about $150 from her own savings to buy a cow for a family. The family given that cow had a girl just a few years older than Kelsey Dunn, a girl named Rihm. And they named the cow Kelsey in the American girl’s honor. Last fall, in November 2003, Kelsey’s dad, Chris Dunn, was among the group from Eastminster that went to Kloung. When he got there, he asked to meet Rihm’s family and to see Kelsey the cow.

When he spoke to Rihm’s parents, they told him they had so little money they’d been forced to send Rihm to Phnom Penh several weeks earlier to work in a garment factory in order to pay their rent. That very day, Dunn said, the family had received notice they would be evicted from their home. Dunn said he’d heard of those factories, “and they’re sweathouses. And when they finally wear them out, the girls are sent into prostitution.”

Dunn told the family he wanted to send someone to Phnom Penh to bring Rihm back. He asked how much money they needed to pay the landlord to buy their house. Their answer: $500.

Before Dunn had left the U.S., a young co-worker who had heard about his church’s work in Cambodia approached him twice, giving him money to help the people in Kloung. The first time, she gave him $250. Then she came back a few days later with another $250. The total of those gifts was $500 — as it turned out, exactly the amount that Rihm’s family needed.

With the help of village leaders, Dunn gave the money and the village purchased the house, with the understanding that Rihm’s family could live there as long as they wanted. According to Buckingham, the father told Dunn that if he could bring Rihm back, “we’ll follow your God, we’ll believe in your God. Because only a God like that can deliver us from such a situation that we’re in.”

Someone went on a motorcycle to get Rihm. When the motorcycle came back to the village later that day, with Rihm on board, the parents went running to greet her and “she’s a-wailing,” Dunn said. He felt in his heart “it was planned, God already set this up … It’s unbelievable to watch God’s hand working in everything, to make yourself available to do what God wants to do, not what you want to do.”

The family took down a Buddhist shrine, Buckingham said, and put up a cross.

Chris Dunn sends money every month to support the family. The family uses half of what he sends to live on, and half to pay someone to come at night to teach school and to study the Bible with the village children, Buckingham said. He said people from about 10 households in Kloung have professed faith in Jesus.

Buckingham remains amazed at all that’s happened — including how, on one trip, a retired fireman and elder from Eastminster ended up in line at the customs check-in at the Phnom Penh airport behind a PC(USA) staff member who happened to be arriving too, and who was able to help them in their work.

Asked what he’s learned from all this, Buckingham said that Eastminster is a fairly small church, with about 150 in worship most Sundays — but a small church with a big vision.

“God can use anybody, just go ask him to use you,” Buckingham said. “Every time I’ve asked God for something that obviously was his will, it just happened so far beyond my expectations, it’s just amazing. I wish that every Christian could have experienced what we’ve experienced over the last several years, of God working through us and seeing how God was already there. The Bible was already there … There had been no Christian witness of any kind and now there’s the beginnings of a church.”

Thach put it this way. God has never abandoned him. God has answered his prayers, showed him the way, walked with him when he was frightened. He has gone places he did not know existed and done things he could not imagine doing.