Seiha sat in his rented house in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, eager to talk with fellow LDS Church members, Chelsea and Tiffany, who were in Cambodia from Utah for one month to work in orphanages teaching English and helping the people in any way they could.
Seiha, his mother, older sister, her husband, their son and Seiha’s cousin/adopted sister, all members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, share a small, wooden-planked, one-room house that sits on stilts over murky water filled with refuse in a poor part of the capital of Cambodia. A Third-World country, Cambodia is recovering from the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge — the Communist party of Kampuchea — in power from 1975-1979, responsible for a genocide that left 1.7 to 2.5 million people dead and depleted the nation’s population by 21 percent.
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A guide for Global Outreach Foundation, an organization that sponsors Americans who go to Third-World countries to help improve people’s lives, Seiha, his sister and brother-in-law are all returned missionaries. Once young people convert, it is their hearts' desire to serve missions, and without fail every LDS young woman Chelsea and Tiffany met was a returned missionary.
This day, as always, Seiha was eager to talk about the church and especially about temples. In Cambodia today, the LDS Church is seeing great success. In Phnom Penh alone there are four branches, and missionaries are not only baptizing individuals, but they are seeing whole families join the church. There are about 10 baptisms per week in the capital, and each ward has three sets of busy missionaries.
Tiffany and Chelsea noted that the Cambodian people, since Pol Pot, innately care for one another. The brutality of the Khmer Rouge left the nation shattered. And while there are still individuals who were part of the regime and remain brutal and callous to human misery and suffering — sexual trafficking in women and children is a serious problem in Cambodia — the majority of the people were victims of the Communists. As society rebounded from the horrors perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, the way people treated each other changed. They are more caring; they cherish relationships and look out for one another.