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What the "Heart of a Tiger" Looks Like—Part 2 of the Captivating Testimony of Survivors of the Killing Fields
Last month, BCN published Part 1 of an article by Dr. SreyRam Kuy, detailing her family's journey as refugees from Cambodia—out of the Killing Fields of Kmer Rouge. (Photo: SreyRam's family/courtesy-SreyRam Kuy) SreyRam's mother's courage and strength was what they clung to after escaping the genocide headed by Pol Pot, trekking through a jungle littered with land mines, and surviving the desperation of refugee camps. SreyRam's mother even received a miraculous healing in one of those camps, before her family was finally sponsored to come to America by a church group. Read Part 1 of SreyRam's riveting account of survival by clicking here. I asked SreyRam and her sister SreyReath a few questions regarding that amazing journey. I hope you find their answers as enlightening and inspirational as did I. BCN: You describe a time when your mother was recovering from her operation to repair what was injured when the RPG hit-- in the Red Cross refugee medical tent, and a Christian group came in to pray over her and lay hands on her. At the time she didn't know what they were doing or what they were saying. Did you or she ever find out what group that was, and did she ever make contact with them again once she was in America?
BCN: Can you describe how exactly your mother, sister and you came to know the Lord, and what difference that has made in your lives? SreyRam Kuy: Coming to know Christ has been a journey, not an overnight event. Some people planted the first kernels of faith, other people watered the seeds, and later, completely different people were able to see the fruits of those early seeds of faith. God worked in increments in our life, and over generations. As a young girl living in 1950's rural Cambodia, my mom was a stubborn child. She dreamed of obtaining an education and becoming a teacher. However, her spirited and rebellious nature was a contradiction to cultural norms and her old-fashioned father's ways of thinking. Her father believed that women should not be educated, as this made them "uppity" and insubordinate to their husbands. However, my mother stubbornly kept going to school despite daunting obstacles. Going to school wearing raggedly clothes, and lacking the money to pay for books and fees, she still excelled in school and became a teacher.
After working so hard to achieve an education, my mother now had to hide her identity as a teacher and my father's identity as a government official in order to save their lives during the four brutal years of the Killing Fields. When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, a lot of people gave up in despair. Among those who weren't executed, some even committed suicide to escape the horrors of the regime. My mother, however, stubbornly refused to ever give up. She faced the Khmer Rouge killers with the same steely resolve that helped her succeed in school. While everyone was starving during communist regime, my mother faced tigers in the wild jungle to find food for her family. When taken to be executed by the Khmer Rouge, she defied them, multiple times, and lived to tell the stories to her children. My mom has an incredible courage and stubborn will. I don't think my mother was fearless. Who wouldn't have fear living in the middle of a Genocide? However, she refused to let that fear win. She fought to live, and to save the lives of her family. My mom really does have "The Heart of a Tiger". After surviving the four years of the Khmer Rouge Regime, we escaped out of Cambodia. We spent 1 and a half years living in four different Cambodian refugee camps before we got visas to come to the US, through the incredible help of the Seventh Day Adventists missionaries. Arriving in the US, my mom held multiple jobs, working as housekeeper at Good Samaritan hospital, then on her evenings and days off cleaned houses for local doctors and professors. We worked in the fields with the migrant farm workers on the weekends and during the summers picking blueberries, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, green beans, and raspberries. But, on the rare Sundays that she wasn't working, mom would try to take us to church. When we first arrived in the US, we didn't speak any English. As a result, my mom often didn't understand the seemingly strange rituals we witnessed during our occasional visits to churches. She didn't really understand a lot about the Christian faith, and the customs of the church were even more confusing, but she felt compelled to keep trying to go when she could. In 1987, I was given my first Bible by Pastor Paulson at Grace Lutheran Church. It lay unread for years. We'd still intermittently try to go to church when we could, but we usually worked every Sunday. One hot summer day in sixth grade, while I was picking blueberries, a girl working on the row next to me, starting talking about the Bible, and how she read it every day. I don't really know why, but I went home and picked up that Bible I had been given years ago, and started reading it myself. Later, I began reading the stories from the Bible to my family in the evenings.
I look back at my life, and I see that while 2 million people died during the Cambodian Killing Fields, we survived. Among those who survived the Genocide, thousands of Cambodians tried to escape, and died crossing the landmines that pockmarked the border. My family and I made it across the border safely. Then, after the RPG hit the refugee camp, we were severely wounded, and would have died if not for that volunteer surgeon. I look back, and I am astonished and humbled. There is absolutely nothing I did to deserve to be alive, when so many other people were killed. I don't know why I survived, but I do think that I was picked out of that blueberry field for a purpose. I wrote the book, "The Heart of a Tiger," to encourage others. This book is a testimony to God's incredible love and amazing grace. He has brought my family through so much. We have seen miracles after miracles in our lives. My message in "The Heart of a Tiger" is that despite what obstacles you face, God is greater than any obstacle. Despite how bleak your circumstances, God's grace is sufficient to enable you to emerge victorious. My family lived through a Genocide where more than 2 million people died, either through execution, brutal torture, starvation, disease, or despair and suicide. However, God saved us time after time; from execution by the Khmer Rouge soldiers, from starvation during the inhumane conditions of the Killing Fields, and from the four to six million land mines that riddled the borders of Cambodia during our escape.
I don't want to live in fear. I want to have the courage to boldly go out and use every gift that I've been blessed with. That means making the most of every day I'm blessed to live in this incredible land of freedom. Being successful is not determined by how much wealth you amass, but in how many people you help along the way. BCN: Was it difficult for your mother to go back to visit Cambodia and the places where she experienced so much pain, and how did she deal with that? My mom was determined to share the blessings she's experienced. At age seventy, my mom rebuilt a crumbling church, leads worship services, and shares her testimony about forgiveness, faith, and God's incredible miracles in her life. BCN: SreyRam, as you hear of events such as the genocide against minorities by ISIS and Boko Haram in the Middle East, what message would you have to this nation's leaders, and also to fellow Christians, in light of the fact that you have lived through and have experienced similar atrocities? SreyRam Kuy: In surgery, we talk about "never events". These are things that should never happen, such as a retained sponge, a death in the operating room, or a wrong site surgery. But, "never events" do happen. And when they happen in medicine, rather than forgetting about it, we take pains to remember, discuss and analyze it in detail, learn from it, and create interventions to try to prevent it from happening to another patient. Genocide is a "never event". It should never, ever happen. And yet, we have seen it occur during the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide and during the Cambodian Killing Fields. It keeps recurring, like a metastatic malignancy. The healing of humanity is analogous to the art of medicine. It is imperative that we talk about these events and never forget them, so that we can learn from the mistakes of our human history and develop interventions to prevent future genocides. I absolutely believe genocide should, and can, become a "never event." Dr. SreyReath Kuy is a podiatrist, caring for patients with severe complications of diabetes and renal diseases. Dr. SreyRam Kuy is a surgeon, taking care of our nation's veterans. Dr. Kuy is Director of the Center for Innovations in Quality, Outcomes and Patient Safety at Overton Brooks VA Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Surgery at LSU - Shreveport.
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