Stateless Persons

One source of great joy in my time in Cambodia has been to teach an English class for some Vietnamese teenagers at a local church. The kids are a real delight: bright eyed, eager to learn, conscientious about doing their homework, and when they talk about their faith in Christ, they radiate joy.

Their lives, however, are not so very happy. They are "stateless persons". The Cambodian government does not recognize them as Cambodian, and for reasons I cannot understand, they cannot return to Vietnam. There are about a million Vietnamese in Cambodia, some living in house boats along rivers and doing subsistence farming on the river banks, others who live in slum conditions in the cities. They have no passports, no birth certificates, receive no government services or health care, nor are their children permitted to attend school. They live in poverty, despised by the rest of the population. They are the garbage pickers, who eke out an existence on a very low level. In the midst of such crushing poverty, vices abound: alcoholism, gambling, other addictions. To survive, families often sell their daughters into prostitution, sometimes at a very young age. Brothels in this country are staffed by a great number of underage Vietnamese girls, many of whom have been sold by their parents in order to support the family.

The Christian Missionary Alliance, which has worked here for many generations, has been reaching out to these people, trapped in poverty, trapped without a state or identity. They are convinced that the answer to the situation is the gospel, applied to every area of life. They have established Vietnamese churches and the churches have established schools to educate the children so they have a chance of getting a better job than picking trash. In fact, we have been teaching at a CMA church school.

The other day I met one of the moving forces behind this ministry, a Vietnamese Canadian woman named Kim Bui, who was herself a stateless person who went to the United States, then to Canada as a refugee. Now that she has Canadian citizenship she is no longer stateless, and she has come back here to work to see that Vietnamese children in Cambodia get a chance for a better life. Kim is passionate about what she is doing. She told us about other schools that they have established, such as the floating school on a houseboat near one of the "floating villages" along the river.

So many times in this trip my heart has been broken for the children of this country, many of whom do not have an easy life or a hopeful future. I'm so encouraged to meet people who are willing to work to bring about change and give a reason for hope. What great sense it makes to deal with the conditions that cause poverty, applying the gospel to bring redemption to every area of life!