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| Regents with Fr Totet Banaynal (PHI) in the newly-built Church in Pailin. |
Every quarter, the regents of the Cambodia Mission gather to break bread together, share stories, and check up on each other. While the primary purpose of the meetings is peer support, a secondary objective is educational and formative: the meetings afford the regents a chance to visit priests and missionaries in the communities they serve.
Last September 2-5, all seven regents – Su-yun Park, Ki-Hyun Kim, Hyung-sik Jo (KOR); Tran Van Dien, Bahoc Pham (VIE); Arbind Beck (IDA) and Mark Lopez (PHI) accompanied by Fr Taejin Kim (KOR) – journeyed together to the hinterlands of Rattanakiri. This province is the least accessible area of Cambodia, lying in the northeastern border with Vietnam and Laos.
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| Regents pose before crossing a hanging bridge on the way to visit village schools in Rattanakiri. |
The group was hosted by Ms. Sun Park, a lay Buddhist missionary from Korea. Ms. Sun has been living in the farthest-flung areas of Cambodia for some years now, managing an NGO program which builds primary schools for the faraway villages. She graciously accommodated the group in her home, and also allowed the group to join her on a monitoring trip into the indigenous communities she worked with. In some of these communities, picture taking was strongly forbidden, as the local peoples believed this brought bad luck. Visiting tourists were uncommon to the villagers, and so we knew the exposure we were getting there was beyond what the regular tour-guides could offer.
Other memorable parts of the trip were swimming in the Boueng Yeak Loam (“The Giant Loam’s Lake”) – a huge, emerald-blue crater lake surrounded by pristine forest; seeing the infamously vast tracks of deforested areas which are now rubber tree/ cashew nut plantations of military officials; and experiencing a 2-hour traffic jam in the middle of the jungle (on the way back from the villages, a truck had broken down in deep mud, blocking off the road and eventually causing about 40 other vehicles to have to wait it out.)
Prior to Rattanakiri, the regents had visited Chnouk Trou and Pailin for previous meetings. In June they visited Fr Totet Banaynal (PHI) in the new Church that he and Msgr Kike Figaredo (CAS) had just built in Pailin.
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| The Church in Pailin. |
This province of Cambodia was one of the last strongholds of the Khmer Rouge and on what was once a minefield now stands a beautiful Cambodian-styled Church building. The church there houses a fast growing faith community. Since the first mass was held last Easter, attendance grew rapidly from a small group of about 15 people to over a hundred in only a few months time. Striking for the regents was the fact that majority of the mass attendees were not even Catholic, but were drawn to the place and the celebrations of prayer.
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| The Church in Chnouk Tru. |
In February, the regents visited Chnouk Tru, one of the sub-parishes under the Battambang Prefecture. Chnouk Tru is one of the floating villages on the Tonle Sap lake where large, displaced Vietnamese communities live. These are called “floating villages” because all the houses there are literally adrift on the water. Likewise, the lives of these families are considered afloat and precarious. They are unable to return to their motherland for having fled its many years ago, and are refused any rights to land or property by the Cambodian government. Some therefore regard the Vietnamese communities on the lake as among the most marginalized and prone to abuse and exploitation by Khmer society.
Many of the regents said they are thankful for the opportunity that these meetings give them to see Cambodia’s frontiers. Other than temporarily taking them away from the daily grind of their work and giving them a chance to commune with friends and nature in remarkable places, the last few meetings have especially broadened their horizons and deepened their understanding of the work and the invitation for the Church and the mission in Cambodia.
Contributor: Sch. Mark Lopez, 15 September 2010