Title: The Cambodian connection part 2
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Blog Entry: We have all experienced it before - the wide-eyed excitement of discovering something new, like a new hobby, acquisition or relationship. For me, it was my interest in Cambodia. I had to do something about it, so one of the first things that I did was to go to the university library and read books about Cambodia. I read tourist books, history books and plenty of biographies of survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime who had migrated overseas (I read plenty of really heart-wrenching stories). Like the spies in the Promised Land, I found out the good & bad about Cambodia. It is a very fertile land with plenty of rice and fish. Many people there live a simple life & are open to the gospel. But there was a dark and sinister side to Cambodia too. There is rampant corruption at almost all levels, crime & the abundance of firearms, poverty & miserable living conditions, disease & low life expectancy, landmines & the Khmer Rouge. To add to the list of negatives, the Khmer script looks like Indian script, unintelligible to read & the language didn't sound like anything I was familiar with. I am sure you notice by now the the bad list is longer than the good list (like Deuteronomy chapter 28). I was thinking to myself that if I didn't get killed physically in Cambodia, I would get killed mentally by the difficulty of the language. It was demoralizing, but the example of Jesus inspired me. He was the only person in the world who was born to die, and His challenge to all of us is to die to self. So I made the decision to die to my fleshly desires - I will stop having the mentality that having a good career, living in luxury and making big bucks is my automatic entitlement if I were to follow Christ. If I have to give up all these things in order to serve God in Cambodia, so be it. I found that after taking this step, my love for Cambodia & her people grew even as I found out negative things about the country. The biographies caused me to have compassion on the people. The next step I took was to get to know some Cambodian people in Australia. There were people who had migrated there as well as people who were sent there to study. I befriended a guy who taught me how to speak & write Khmer. It isn't really difficult to learn when you are motivated. I just wish that I can be in Cambodia for a prolonged period so that I can be more proficient in the language. At the moment, I can speak very simple sentences, but my vocabulary is still lacking. I can read Khmer words that are in the normal script (but not in the rounded script used in headlines). In my Bible reading plan, I would read the English Bible and at the same time listen to the Khmer audio Bible on the same passage. This helped me to learn more words from the Bible. I also learnt to sing simple Khmer praise and worship songs that were translated from English. Another thing I did was to listen to Khmer songs & try to pick up some words from there. I particularly enjoyed listening to the older songs (Sin Sisamuth etc) & to a lesser extent the newer songs (Meng Keo Pichenda is my favorite among the newer singers). But the problem about Khmer songs is that 95% of them are about love. So I have to be careful about apeaking the words that I learn from the songs. I can only say them to my wife! In my country, many people admire western countries & culture. So they become westernized. We call these people bananas because they are yellow (Chinese) on the outside & white (Caucasian) on the inside. I was also becoming something like them, except that I was becoming Cambodianized. When people ask me where I come from, I will tell them that I am a Chinese Singaporean on the outside & Cambodian on the inside. At the moment, I can't think of anything to describe something that is yellow (Chinese) on the outside & brown (Khmer) on the inside.
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