Widow Rescues Cambodian Orphans

At 73 years of age, a former pastor’s wife wants her life to continue to count. She launched a mission in Phnom Penh to help widows and orphans.

Christianity.ca
by Emily Wierenga

Many of us dream of retirement as a time when we’ll no longer need to lift a finger. Not Saskatchewan native Marie Ens. When asked to retire from The Christian and Missionary Alliance in 2000, the widow decided to start an organization in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, called Rescue, which would allow her to keep on working.

“I didn’t want my life to consist of just sitting there, waiting to die,” says the 73-year-old author who spoke at MissionFest 2008 in Toronto. “I still wanted my life to count. Even after my husband passed away in ’91, I felt God say my missionary career wasn’t over.”

The former pastor’s wife and mother of four joined the Alliance in 1961. Along with her husband and children, she worked in Cambodia on and off until the country’s collapse in 1975, when they returned to Canada for a short while to plant a church, then headed to France where they worked with Cambodian refugees.

Whereas before she trained pastors and started churches, Rescue allows Ens to work with hundreds of orphans and AIDS victims at an orphanage called Place of Rescue.

“The work I’m doing now is more natural,” she says. “Now that I’m an older woman I want to be a grandmother.” With 12 grandbabies of her own and 140 at Place of Rescue, her desire has been more than realized.

When asked about her vision for the children, Ens replies: “That they soar like a kite. We [she works with a Cambodian director and houseparents] want them to reach their full potential. Whatever God has in mind for them we want to see fulfilled.”

Only four years old, the organization already consists of an orphanage, two large homes called “granny houses” for elderly women, another building for young pregnant factory workers and a transition house that assists the orphans with obtaining life skills and a job.

Following MissionFest Toronto, where Ens taught seminars on Third World countries and AIDS, she is returning to the land and people she has fallen in love with. “I hope to keep doing this for the rest of my life,” she says.

Emily Wierenga is a writer and artist based in Blyth, Ontario.