via Khmer NZ
By Mike Harris
A two-week missionary trip to Cambodia has left Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church Pastor Randy Buecheler, and his wife, Nancy, with a deeper appreciation for the basic things of life, and for the strength of the human spirit.
“Many of the people we met and cared for were very poor,” Pastor Buecheler said. “In one small church, a very poor church, we brought the members food, clothing, bedding and clean water. Most churches we visited were very simple structures: a slab of cement with a roof, no walls and no toilets. Some were nothing more than a shack used to store rice, an open-sided hut, or an old house.”
Nancy Buecheler said the trip brought home how “blessed we are.”
“Going to Cambodia, I knew I would be going to one of the poorest countries on earth, but to see it first hand is a whole different thing,” she said.
“We traveled for days around the country and saw the same conditions everywhere,” she continued. “We saw people with no sanitation, no reliable water source, little or no health care, and very few opportunities for education. It really brings it home how blessed we are in this country. There are so many people in the world living without the things we take for granted everyday.”
Buecheler's missionary journey was part of his advanced leadership training through the Pastoral Leadership Institute, a virtual campus of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
He and Nancy were scheduled to be in Cambodia during the last week of July and the first week of August. The trip got off to a rough start.
“Nancy and I were scheduled to leave from Los Angeles International Airport on late Sunday night, but the airplane had maintenance problems and the flight was canceled,” Buecheler said.
After a 24-hour layover in Los Angeles, the Buechelers finally arrived in Cambodia's capital city of Phnom Penh at 11 a.m. Wednesday morning, a 20-hour flight, including a stop in Taiwan to change planes. The two Lake Arrowhead residents quickly saw some of the horrors Cambodians experienced at the hands of the Khmer Rouge during the late 1970s.
“We visited two very important sites relevant to understanding the country and to our mission work there,” Buecheler said. “The first was a high school that had been converted to a prison and torture center, now the site of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Of the 12,000 people who arrived there, only 12 are to known to have survived.
“After interrogation and torture, the men, women and children were then sent out to killing fields around the country,” he added. “The museum preserves the site including the cells, torture instruments, graves and pictures of some of the people who passed through the center to their deaths.”
The Buechelers then traveled outside of the capital to one of the “killing fields” that was the site of 30,000 brutal executions, including murdering entire families.
“Even today, human remains continue to rise to the surface of these grounds,” the pastor said. “A large memorial filled with the clothing and bones of those murdered in the fields rises up three stories high.”
Civilian deaths during the Khmer Rouge period, caused by executions, disease, exhaustion and starvation, have been estimated at well over two million, from a total population of only seven million. Bordered by Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, Cambodia is less than half the size of California.
TRAVELS THROUGH
THE COUNTRY
“Armed with this understanding of Cambodia's recent past, we then began our travels with our local Lutheran missionary, the Rev. Dr. Fungchatou Lo,” Buecheler said. “We traveled with his wife, their 1-year-old adopted son, a 12-year-old daughter, two local Christian translators, and a Canadian pastor and his wife, Dean and Laverne Hautz, in a packed 15-passenger van.”
Lo understands Cambodia well, Buecheler said, because his family was exiled from neighboring Laos. As a young man, the war forced him and his family from their home. They were hunted in the jungles and finally taken to the U.S. as war refugees. His family was cared for in the Midwest by Lutherans, and Lo later felt called to become a Lutheran pastor, eventually returning to Southeast Asia.
“His main job is training a new generation of pastors throughout Cambodia, with his wife supporting this work in training people in health care,” Buecheler said.
The trip Lo planned for the Buechelers and the others was a normal mission trip, one he regularly took himself to train and help local churches. As he told them, “this was not a vacation trip, it is a mission trip.”
“We traveled around the country for a week, often traveling 12 hours a day, staying in the type of hotels in which the missionaries would normally stay,” Buecheler said. “Our rooms were very basic, costing $12 a night. We ate in local restaurants and traveled the back roads to visit groups of Christians that Lo supported. Most of the roads to these churches were dirt roads.
“One of the areas in which we worked required a drive of 12 hours,” he added, and of that, four hours on dirt roads with one-lane wooden bridges. “One of the churches we ministered to was located on the other side of a bridge, which was out. We had to have church members take us on motorcycles to get to this site.”
Each day the group visited small Christian churches, teaching, praying and caring for the people who were there.
“We were accompanied by our two Christian Cambodian translators, called Naomi and David,” Buecheler said. “The other pastor and I spent special time training the leaders of the different churches. We also met a young couple, from Milwaukee, Wis., who were Lutheran teachers, working as lay missionaries for two years. We also helped with social work to help meet people's basic needs.”
One of the families the Buechelers visited had a special meaning to the missionary's 12-year-old daughter.
“The parents of a young baby had contracted the AIDS virus,” Buecheler said. “The pastor's daughter collected money for baby formula for the child, and to help them buy back their house which they had pawned for food.”
Reflecting on his journey, Buecheler said it had been a good trip but a very tiring one, with most days starting at 6 a.m. and ending late in the evening.
“We saw most of the country and met many of the Cambodian people in the countryside,” he said. “We found those we met very loving and caring. Some of the people were eager to learn about our Christian faith, as it is a very different theology than the Buddhist message of earning and paying for their own sins.”
Nancy Buecheler sees a lot of hope for the future in Cambodia.
“They are quick to take advantage of technologies that work for them,” she said. “Almost everyone has a cell phone and the coverage around the country is better than we have on the mountain. The people are hard working and resourceful. It is a country with tremendous human potential.”
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