Four Years Later, A Reflection

These photographs were taken by Rachel Snodderly, who is now working with refugee children and their families on the Thai-Burmese border. She was born with a big heart that gets bigger every day.

In 2006, a group of us went to Cambodia for the first summer of the World Relief Cambodia-U.S. Church partnerships Summer ESL Program. We went to serve as English language instructors for the World Relief staff in the provinces of Kampong Cham and Kampong Thom. There were 10 of us from our church and at the end our Global Outreach Pastor and a video team joined us in Phnomh Penh to create a video storybook for our church back home.

Part of our journey that final weekend was to the Tuol Sleng Prison in central PP and then on to the Killing Fields Memorial site outside of town. The photograph you see is from Tuol Sleng- a former school turned detention facility that the Khmer Rouge army set up to imprison and torture people they believed to be traitors or enemies of the new regime.

These are children. Some of them were the exact same age as I was when they died (2-4 years old). Most likely brought here with their parents/family members. The KR took photographs of all detainees that came through their facility. Most of the people are believed to have died there, at the hands of the KR or by starvation, disease, and malnutrition. Those who died were then taken by trucks out to the site of the Killing Fields memorial, Wat ???, and buried.

Today, you can pay a small fee to have a survivor take you on a tour of either site. They will show you pictures and tell you stories in graphic detail about what one human being did to another, in the name of some fabricated ideology.

That day we went by van outside the city on the bumpy dirt roads, we encountered a young boy, one who looked like the many children in this photo. He was trying to sell us soda, all in Khmer of course. He had no shoes on and was very thin. But, he was smiling. At one point, one of the team members suggested we form a prayer circle. This young boy came up behind us, staring quizzicly, when two of the team members quietly unjoined hands and rejoined behind him and then we prayed in English for this boy. Another woman on the team, who had survived that period in Cambodia with her family and made it to the U.S., slid off her sandals and gave them to the boy who smiled at her.

We then headed off home, my teammate rode piggy back across the field on another teammate, smiling at the young boy, sharing the bit of Khmer that we knew with him.

This photo and this memory are what came back to me this morning and prompted me to write. For it is in those moments of connection, of looking in to the eyes of another person, and knowing that we are joined together, we are unified, sharing a common bond despite all those things which seemingly separate us. And, in the simplicity and quietness of our connections, we are powerful beyond measure because we have the one who created us all holding us together, connecting us, unifying us.

May we continue to seek to be fishermen, who go about their duties with familiarity and loyalty and consistency and know that the one who first loved us loves all of His creation. He even loves that which was in those KR soldiers that was not corrupted, that part of their heart no matter how small or broken.