I am Ouk Vuthy, a Cambodian, sixth son in my family. I live in the Chamkar Morn District of Phnom Penh City. I think I was born in October 1968 but I do not know exactly.
I am Ouk Vuthy, a Cambodian, sixth son in my family. I live in the Chamkar Morn District of Phnom Penh City. I think I was born in October 1968 but I do not know exactly.
I will tell you about my life, my orphan background and how I have surrendered to the Lord Jesus Christ.
It was in 1975, the time of the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge regime, when the Cambodian people, including my family, were forcibly evacuated from Phnom Penh to remote districts, mountains and forest areas. In that period everyone starved and the conditions under which we lived were terrible. We were forced to work from morning till night.
Two or three months after we arrived in a village, one evening at dusk a group of teenage Khmer Rouge forced my family to go outside the village to a place where they planned to kill us. They tied our hands behind our backs and then one of them hit me on the back of my neck with a hoe. I lost consciousness and fell into a dried-up pond containing decomposing bodies. By then it was dark and the Khmer Rouge decided they would kill my family the next day, but they saw that I was not dead and they allowed my father to get down into the pond and massage my neck. I regained consciousness and my father carried me back to the village.
At dawn the next morning my family decided that they would rather commit suicide than die at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. They wanted me to drink poison with them, but I refused and ran away. Later that day I returned home to find my family lying in grotesque positions. I tried to wake them up but they were dead and already stiff with rigor mortis. Our neighbours dug a common grave and buried their bodies. The Khmer Rouge planned to kill me, but then they changed their minds; I was so thin that they thought I would die anyway. For three weeks I mourned by my family's grave. One by one, other members of my wider family died under the ruthless, barbarous deeds of Pol Pot. I was now without parents, without relatives and without hope.
At first I stayed alone, but later I was forced to join a communal group of children who had to work in the fields but who were at least given food to eat. My job was to carry buckets of cow dung from the village to the fields from six a.m. until noon and from one p.m. till six. My food consisted of one small ladle full of watery rice gruel twice a day. Once or twice a month we might be given a small portion of meat or vegetables. My only possessions were a spoon and one suit of black pyjamas.
In 1979 the Pol Pot regime of genocide was overthrown by Vietnamese forces and the Cambodian People's Revolutionary and National Liberation Party.
At that time I came back to Phnom Penh and stayed at Onalom Pagoda with an old monk. When I arrived, I had to clear away the remains of a corpse from my room. I began to attend school, but with so many problems and terrible memories in my life, I did not do well. The old monk could not feed me and Cambodia had not yet started using money again following its abolition by the Pol Pot regime. I had to do small jobs to earn payment in rice, which had become our currency, but much of the time I could not earn enough to fill my stomach, let alone pay for my school fees. During the Pol Pot regime I had been fed and told what to do, but now I had to fend for myself and life was even more difficult.
In 1983, when I was 14 years old, I ran away thinking I might reach Bangkok and be accepted to go to the United States. I hitchhiked to the north-west of Cambodia and tried to walk through the forest across the border into Thailand, but because of injuries to my feet I had to turn back. The desire of my heart was unfulfilled. Eventually I returned to Phnom Penh.
The old monk died in 1985 and I had to face making my own living. The new monk with whom I now lived made life very difficult for me. I did all I could except stealing to get money for food and learning, working in bars and restaurants and selling bread. After completing secondary school I obtained a place at high school, but it was six kilometres from the pagoda where I lived so I had to work for one year in order to save enough money to buy a bicycle. At one time I worked in a restaurant and had to get up at 4 a.m. to cook soup. The chef who managed this restaurant spilled hot soup over me and once he put a hot iron on my thigh burning me. I have a scar to this day. He would do me any harm that he wished.
My lessons at high school alternated between mornings and afternoons month by month, so I would finish at eleven o'clock in morning or five o'clock in afternoon and then I would have to go to work to earn money to buy food. If I was sick and could not work I went to bed hungry.
A friend at high school had a relative who was a film director. My friend thought I would make a good comedian, so he introduced me to his relative who gave me a part in one of his films. I appeared in a total of five films and one karaoke video and life became easier. But I realised that if I stayed a comedian I could not study, so I gave up my career in films.
I wanted to teach English in a private school to pay for my studies but my English was not good enough. By 1992 I had decided that my life was not worth living. Five times I tried to kill myself, but each time I was unsuccessful. It seemed that God was keeping me alive for some purpose. Although I lived in a pagoda, was a strong Buddhist and could have become a monk, I was dissatisfied with my religion. When I was sick, I offered incense and prayed, asking that if there was a true God, would he heal me, but I received no answer. Then something happened that changed my life. I met a group of foreigners preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ at the riverside. I went with them to the Global Network church. What I heard made me wonder whether the God that these people were talking about was the true God whom I was seeking.
After a few weeks I got to know a foreigner, Mr Myers Cooper of Southeast Asian Outreach who worshipped at that church. We began to study the Bible together on Sunday afternoons and I tried to read the Bible in my room at the pagoda, but the monk with whom I lived became angry and he threw my Bible away. A pastor in the Church gave me a new Bible and I kept on reading it on my own and with Myers. I came to believe that Jesus was the Son of God and I decided to give my life to Him. I received Him as my Lord and Saviour in March 1993.
Immediately I began to experience persecution. The monk, the temple boys and the students at the pagoda all cursed me. They accused of turning my back on my religion and betraying my country. The head of the pagoda got me into trouble with the communist authorities and tried to get me expelled from school. I was afraid that I would be put into the prison near the pagoda. In fact I was detained at the local government office for two days without food, but they allowed me to go back to the pagoda and back to school. I asked Myers and the pastor to pray for me and life became easier for a while.
By 1994 life at the pagoda had become very difficult again. I had constructed a partition to make my own room, but the monk had torn it down. The monk's family had moved in and they were gradually reducing my living space. They were also assaulting me. Finally the head of the pagoda and the monks told me to leave. I had nowhere to live, no relatives to stay with and no money to pay rent, so Myers invited me to stay with him. When I was told to leave the pagoda I felt like committing suicide again, but I thank God that He put it in the heart of Myers to give me a home and so my life was saved once more. I wanted my relationship with Myers to be that of son to father so, with Myers' permission, I changed my name to Vuthy Myers.
I began to learn more about what it meant to live as a disciple of Jesus and trust God to meet my needs. I was baptised in a river and had many opportunities to talk to people about Jesus. I was not successful in getting a permanent job, but I learned to depend on God to provide for me.
When Myers returned to England at the end of 1995 I was very upset. God was testing me to see on what my security really rested. I kept on praying, reading the Bible and going to church. I found that even in my sadness God could be trusted. I was now living with Ka-Ming Au, a friend of Myers. Ka-Ming and other Christian friends encouraged me to persevere and keep trusting God even when I had no money. During the two-and-a-half years that I lived with Ka-Ming I worked as a volunteer in Cambodia's first Christian bookstore, I received no salary but God never let me go hungry.
In September 1996 I was invited to become the bookstore manager and I had a privilege of travelling outside my own country for the first time to receive training in Singapore. I had lots ideas for developing the bookstore but my employers could only afford to pay me a small salary, which was just enough to pay the rent for a room for me to live in after Ka-Ming returned to the UK.
It was at this time that I met Sokha, who was to become my wife. I found it very difficult to make up my mind whether to get married or not. I asked my pastor, my work colleagues and Christian friends for advice, and eventually we decided to marry. Our marriage did not get off to a good start. While Sokha stayed in her home village in Kampong Cham province, I continued to work in the bookstore in Phnom Penh, so for the first year of our married life we only saw each other at weekends. After our son David was born in 1998 I decided that I must go and help Sokha look after him, so I gave up my job and went to live with them in the village. There were tensions between me and Sokha's family because of our different religions, but God helped me to maintain my witness.
Some of the young people in the village were interested to hear the good news about Jesus. I brought them to church in Phnom Penh several times, but on one occasion just before an election the police arrested us because they thought we were going to an opposition party meeting. After this some of the young people were less interested because of persecution from their families.
In 1999 Sokha, David and I moved to Phnom Penh. At first Sokha was bored and homesick, and she frequently went back to her mother, but eventually she found a job and settled down. We wanted a second child and were delighted when Sokha became pregnant again in 2002. We had hoped for a girl but three successive scans showed a boy in Sokha's womb. David and I still believed that God would give us a girl so we laid hands on Sokha and prayed that this would be so. Our daughter Alisa was born on 24 April 2003 by God's grace.
After we had returned to Phnom Penh I was not successful in finding permanent employment but God provided me with three temporary jobs. In the first I was responsible for advertising the services of the Khmer School of Language, for which Sokha was now working as a housekeeper. The second job was as assistant to the director of an NGO newly arrived in Cambodia. The third and most fulfilling job was as administrator and interpreter in a programme training church members in providing home care to people living with HIV and AIDS. I felt I was doing something really useful for God as we shared the good news with people who were near to death.
Today I do not have a job but I run my own business providing a guide service to people visiting Cambodia. God has always been faithful to provide my family with an adequate income.
Since 1995 I have been praying that it might be possible for me to visit the United Kingdom. I have trusted in Jesus' promise: "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." (Matthew 7:7, NIV). Now, after nearly ten years, He has answered my prayer. I never gave up praying even though God told me to wait.
My father Myers now lives with my family and me for part of each year. In the future he will come to stay with us permanently and it is my desire to look after him as he grows older. I pray that God will give me a long life so that I can serve Him and care for my father. I believe that this is the purpose for which God has spared my life.
I thank God for all the friends of many nationalities that I have come to know since I became a Christian. I keep praying for them and I pray that you who have read the story of my life will receive God's blessing as I have.
