I cringed as I looked at the gaping wound on Harleem’s hip. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Raw, red bands of muscle, like strands of rope, lay completely exposed under an almost perfectly round opening in the skin. “That wound must be five inches across!” I thought to myself. I glanced at his other hip. It had a similar, smaller wound. “How can this guy live with such huge openings in his skin?” I wondered.

Later, I learned that Harleem had been involved in an accident in Thailand some five months before while working there to try to earn some extra money for his family. Some heavy goods had fallen onto him from a truck crane and broken his back and paralyzed him. After undergoing what looked like a rather feeble surgical attempt to help his shattered back, he had returned to Cambodia to live out his days lying on a mat on the wooden floor of his sister’s stilted house. The continual pressure of the hard floorboards against his hips had caused large ulcers to open.

Having grown up on a farm, I’m no stranger to the sight of blood. But to see wounds like this on a person was a little more than I had ever wanted to see. I was privately wishing Smeet, the man who had asked us to examine Harleem, had never introduced us. “If only we could have slipped out of this village before seeing him,” I thought. “It would have been much easier.”

But over the past few months as we have gotten better acquainted with Harleem, I have become very glad we didn’t selfishly slip away that day. His wounds are still hard to look at (though they’re slowly healing—praise the Lord), but I have seen another side of him. Harleem is no longer just a nameless sick person with grotesque open sores lying on a mat somewhere. He is a real, living
individual much the same as I, only with a much harder life. Harleem has become my friend. My life has been enriched as we have visited together.
Harleem is not the only person suffering beyond the sight of the tourists and casual passersby. The chief of a neighboring Cham village took me to visit a man who has a baffling leprosy-like skin disease that covers his right arm up to the elbow. Doctors have given him medicine to no avail. Molly and I ran into a lady whose legs became paralyzed after she had come down with something that seemed like a cold. While walking in the village one day, I came across a severely malnourished one-year-old whose face looked like an old man’s. All this to say that, besides becoming my friend, in my mind, Harleem has also come to personify much of Cham society—pain hidden from view. Not just in a physical sense, but in a spiritual sense, too. Thousands of Cham suffer in the snare of Satan. Much of this bondage is hidden, often even from the Cham themselves. Let me illustrate.

After arriving here in Levea Tome, I must admit I didn’t see a whole lot wrong. Sure, the people struggled with typical superficial things like smoking, chewing betel nut, the occasional outburst of wrath, etc. But nothing seemed much out of the ordinary. Some villagers seemed to be quite religious. Prayers were broadcast over a loudspeaker five times a day. Some people even invited me to worship with them. I began to wonder if Molly and I had more to learn from them than they had to learn from us. But as we have spent more time with these dear people in their homes and at their workplaces, we have begun to see some of their deeper issues.

Just the other day, I was sitting with several Cham men watching a blacksmith beat out iron tools on his anvil. As we talked, one of the men asked me if I had a sweetheart. I told him that I had a wife, and she was my sweetheart. He then clarified that he didn’t mean my wife, but a girlfriend. I again told him that I had a wife, and she was my only sweetheart. Finally, I asked him if he had a girlfriend. Without embarrassment, he said that he did indeed have a girlfriend in addition to his wife. This practice is very common in Khmer society. Now, we suspect it’s common in Cham society, too.

Another day, I was visiting in a friend’s house with several men, one of whom I had come to respect quite highly. Another village leader was also there, and he showed me his new expensive cell phone with a movie feature. I smiled and admired the little device. He took it back and started playing a movie on it. It soon became clear that this was no ordinary movie but hardcore pornography. As all the men gathered around, I felt sick inside and excused myself as quickly as possible.

Perhaps an even less visible way that Satan holds some of these people captive is through demon possession. We have been told that the Khmer people look upon the Kruu Cham (similar to witch doctors) as powerful healers. We have not yet encountered any overt demon possession, but we assume it’s only a matter of time. What has opened our eyes the most is the fact that many of these Kruu Cham regularly attend Muslim Friday prayers and seem on the outside to practice Islam.
Spending time with our Cham people is the only way to really understand them and help them with the deeper issues they struggle with every day in secret. Once they get to know us and understand how much we care, they will lower their defenses and share more and more with us.

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