The Healing Fields

Setan Lee cried every day of his first weeks back in Cambodia in 1990.

He and his wife, Randa, had finally made it to their native country 10 years after fleeing the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge regime, and now they were under house arrest, suspected of being CIA agents. They couldn't leave their room in Phnom Penh without government permission.

But it wasn't their detention that made Setan cry. That was "minor," a frustrating roadblock, he says. He and Randa expected authorities to figure out eventually that they weren't spies.

Their mission was personal and spiritual. They had left their two young children at home with friends in Colorado so they could search for Randa's family and begin to make good on the vow they had made in a refugee camp - to help their country recover and to spread their new Christian faith.

Setan cried, not from fear, but from grief at seeing a homeland that he and Randa barely recognized. "We wept for our people," Setan says.

The grass and weeds around the rundown airport terminal were as tall as Setan. The planes were leaking hulks, remnants of better days in Russia.

So many beautiful buildings had been destroyed. Randa learned that her family home in Battambang had been burned to the ground along with nearly all of the others.

The capital city of Phnom Penh had no electricity, no traffic lights, little food, hardly any medicine and few jobs. A handful of dilapidated Russian-made cars traveled the dusty, potholed roads. Homeless orphans roamed the city. Nearly all of the able-bodied men had been drafted into the military, so it was mostly women who walked the crowded, filthy streets. Many lived out in the open. Schools had reopened, but few parents could afford to send their children. So much poverty. So much despair.

Yet the Lees found joy, too. Randa reunited at last with her grandmother, her mother, two brothers, her sister - "the one after me" - and another sister. Thanks to the kindness of one of the guards, several even managed to visit Randa while she was under house arrest. They didn't recognize one another at first - they had all been so young when Randa left. Her mother wasn't working. They had very little to call their own. "They had lost everything," she says. "They were so poor."

But Randa couldn't do much to help them. Because they had stayed in Cambodia, it would be nearly impossible to bring them to the United States. Her mother was the exception. The U.S. was still accepting parents of resettled refugees.

After two months, the authorities freed Setan and Randa, giving them no explanation. "I think they just got tired of us," Setan says.

A ravaged homeland

The couple set out to see more of their devastated country. Randa, as happy as she was to have found her family, felt overwhelmed by what she saw on the city streets. Young prostitutes everywhere told her their stories.

"A lot of girls had been kidnapped and sold into prostitution. A lot of parents were so sick they sold their daughters to be prostitutes. Or sometimes the girls just did it to get money for the family. It made me so sick to hear that. It was a shame on the country. They were so young, so desperate. I felt so sorry for them."

Randa thought how, barely more than a decade earlier, she was desperate and alone, too.

"I was homeless. I didn't have anybody. I felt hopeless. I just wanted somebody to love, a place to stay. What if something had happened to me? What if I had been kidnapped or raped? Even though I would have fought back, I never would have forgiven myself. My life would be so different now. But I never became a prostitute. It made me feel so lucky."

She promised herself that when she returned home, she would ask God to guide her to a plan to help these women. Aid was available for children, but there was "not much help for the women," Randa says.

"I wanted these girls to have an education, self-esteem, a better life, so they could become part of society."

Randa and Setan stayed in Cambodia another month. When they returned to Aurora, they made a decision that would change the course of their lives.

Setan would quit his job - by then he was working at the Colorado health department - and return to Cambodia to train Christian leaders and look for ways to help their people. Randa would stay behind, get a job, raise the children, and support the family and Setan's work.

It was a formidable prospect, but they could not ignore their calling.

"This is our mission," Setan says. "We didn't choose it. But who would do it if we didn't? We sacrifice for Cambodia."

There were many unknowns, and the Lees realized it was risky. But Randa gave Setan her blessing.

"You go," she says she told Setan. "May God be with you. I will pray for you."

Setan's parents and the rest of his family, who had all become Christians, supported his calling, although they feared for his safety.

"I didn't trust the people," says Setan's father, Chan. "I was afraid they would kill him . . . But he always says whatever happens, happens."

Setan traveled throughout Cambodia, organizing Christian churches, hoping to eventually open a training center for ministers and church workers. To earn a little money, he taught English classes at a university. He saw a great need for young people to receive job training, and the seeds of an idea for a trade school began to sprout. He and Randa emptied their small savings account to finance his work.

In Phnom Penh, he found a small office, where he slept.

He stayed for three years without once returning to Aurora. The trips cost too much. And he feared that if he left Cambodia, he might have trouble getting back in.

Couple share enduring bond

At home in Aurora, Randa learned how to do most things on her own. Still unsure of her English skills, she took jobs at factories, making computer cabinets and doing other electrical-assembly work. She worked long hours, nights and almost every Saturday. Sometimes she worked from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m.

When the Lees' daughter, Sandra, was older and begged for piano lessons, Randa rushed from work to pick her up, took her to her lesson, took her home and rushed back to work. Randa's brother was a faithful and trusted baby sitter.

Randa paid the bills, mowed the lawn in summer, shoveled snow in winter. She cooked, did the laundry, called the plumber, shopped for groceries, got the oil changed in the car.

"It was hard," Randa says. "At first it was a big panic for me. I had depended on Setan. Now I don't."

She relied on her family and friends for support, to help the kids with homework when she didn't understand.

The separation took its toll on the lonesome husband and wife, but not, they say, on their marriage. They wrote to each other - Setan about his progress, Randa about the children - sending letters back and forth with their friend in the Red Cross who traveled to Cambodia. Setan telephoned when he could and when their meager finances could handle it. "We got depressed once in a while," Setan says. "But God kept our marriage strong."

Randa took the children to see Setan during a few summer vacations. But the trips were long, expensive and difficult. They'd all crowd into Setan's tiny office. There wasn't much room after four beds were jammed in.

Randa and Setan talked about moving back to Cambodia, but they worried about the unstable government and the tenuous school system. A private international school would have cost $7,000 a year for each child - far beyond their means.

They talked about relocating to a country nearby, Malaysia maybe, or Singapore. But they loved the U.S.

So they kept at it.

Randa's prayers led her to a brick-and-mortar dream: She would build a center for women who wanted to escape prostitution. Here they would be housed, fed, clothed, educated, given medical care, trained for jobs. The center would house 100 young women.

"My dream was a big dream," Randa says. "I wanted all fancy things - electricity, indoor plumbing, a really nice dining hall. A clinic. I wanted a traditional school, but I wanted to go beyond that to teach English, technical classes, computer training."

Randa began to save, stashing the money from her overtime pay.

Setan returned home for brief visits once in a while when they could finally afford the airfare. With his ministry growing, he needed to spend time in the U.S. and other countries to raise money and spread the word.

In 1995, he founded Kampuchea for Christ, a nonprofit organization incorporated in Colorado with an arm in Phnom Penh, to serve as an umbrella for his various projects: the churches throughout Cambodia, the Christian training programs, the planned women's center and the trade school that the Lees decided to build in their hometown of Battambang.

He and Randa had poured their own money into these projects. Now it was time to share their message with Christian, humanitarian and service groups in hopes that others would follow suit.

"My dad always taught me, before you invite anybody to join with you to become a business partner, you have to show them you are serious. You have to invest your own resources first," Setan says. "When they believe in you, they will come."

A secret stash pays off

Randa remembers the call.

She was at home in Aurora, and Setan was telephoning from Cambodia that day in 1996: "Randa, I've found the land for the women's center. The owners want $3,500. Do you have enough money?"

"I don't know," she told him.

Randa hadn't wanted to know. For six years, she had worked overtime and weekends, squirreling away the extra money.

She hid her overtime pay - sometimes as much as $300 at a time - throughout the house: in a vase, in a pillowcase under her bed, in an envelope between the mattress and the box spring, between the pages of books.

"I was worried that if I put it in the bank, I'd borrow it if we needed it and I'd never pay it back."

She never counted it, tried to forget about it.

Now Randa raced through the house, collecting her stash. "I tried to make sure I had them all." She ran into her bedroom, shut the door tight "to be safe" and sat on the floor, surrounded by her makeshift piggy banks. She dumped out each one. The bills were big: 50s and 100s.

To Randa's delight, she counted out $6,000 - more than enough to buy the 2 1/2-acre site outside the provincial city of Kampong Chnang, 55 miles north of Phnom Penh.

She sent the cash with a trusted friend to Setan, who bought the women's center land, plus another plot in Kampong Chnang and a piece of property near Battambang.

On her rare visits to Cambodia, Randa made a beeline for the women's center property. "We'd always go out there," she says, "and we'd look at it. We just kept looking at it."

That's all they could do at first. They didn't have money to build anything. And there was dangerous work to do.

War's deadly legacy

Before construction could begin, the property - located in a tangle of dense jungle outside the city - had to be cleared of land mines.

Cambodia has one of the worst land-mine problems in the world. About 40,000 Cambodians have lost limbs and nearly 18,000 have been killed in land-mine explosions, according to the Landmine Monitor Report, compiled by the Cambodian government and several nongovernmental organizations.

Clearing the mines is arduous and nerve-wracking. Trained crews - often widows of land-mine victims - lie on their stomachs and use a thin blade to probe the ground inch by inch for buried objects. Each mine is uncovered and destroyed, usually by blowing it up where it sits.

Two years after Setan and Randa bought the land, an anonymous donor from New Zealand contributed $25,000 for the first building. Construction got under way in 1998 on a two-story, tan concrete building to house the center's operations: offices, a kitchen, and rooms that would double as classrooms by day and sleeping quarters at night.

Setan oversaw the work and began to hire the staff, including some of Randa's relatives. Randa stayed home to support Setan and their two children.

The women's center, dubbed the New Development Center, opened in 1999 with 12 women, all prostitutes who had been rescued from brothels by Setan and church workers in his organization. The women received shelter, three meals a day, medical care, help with personal hygiene, counseling, Christian training, sewing lessons and cosmetology classes.

Randa's first visit wasn't until 2000. She went again in 2001. Ever the pragmatist, she was, she admits, a little disappointed at first. The building wasn't all she had dreamed. The cosmetology classroom, for example, "didn't have any sinks." There was no running water or electricity. But she adjusted, as she always had.

"I realized we had to do it little by little."

Anger and tears

Randa and Setan soon began tripping over obstacles that couldn't be cleared nearly as easily as the land mines.

Few of the women knew how to read or write.

They had little respect for scheduled times for classes, dinner or prayers.

They were suspicious of everyone.

The center wasn't the instantaneous salvation the Lees had envisioned. For Setan, it was a troubling initiation.

"Before we started this project, I had a judgment spirit," he says. "A lot of them are nasty. Nasty verbally. Nasty physically, the way they dress. But they have to be to do what they do, to survive.

"After I got to know them and learn about them and why they became prostitutes, why they felt so desperate, I don't have that anymore."

Like Randa, he came to realize that "they could have been one of my sisters."

"They could have been my daughter, if they had been in that kind of situation," he said. "Thank God, they're not."

The women needed medical attention. Most had worms and yeast infections. Tooth decay. Lice. They knew how to put on lipstick, but not much about basic personal hygiene.

Some were addicted to yama, or yaba, a cheap form of methamphetamine that made them unable to eat or sleep - all the better to service more men.

Some - more than the staff anticipated - tested positive for HIV. But retrovirus therapy was out of reach financially, and the government provided no assistance programs.

As severe as the health problems were, they were overshadowed by the women's rage - a rage the staff was ill-equipped to handle.

"They were full of anger," Setan says.

Some went back to the brothels "so they could have sex with as many men as they could, so the men would get AIDS, too," Setan says.

When the women got too sick to work as prostitutes, they went home if they could. Some had no families or their families refused to let them stay. One woman was cared for at a Buddhist temple near her village.

Setan found one of the women on the street, dying. "She was so sick she could hardly move." The staff took her in.

AIDS began to take its inevitable toll.

Meng Chu Lee, the center's first director, nursed two of the women at her home until they died. She built crude coffins, stoked the fires and cremated the bodies herself.

She buried their ashes in graves she dug by hand in a field behind her house and made small wood crosses to mark them. Another woman's ashes were buried at the edge of the center's grounds.

Of the 12 original students at the women's center, all died of AIDS.

It is Setan's greatest sorrow. "After you get to know them and love them and care for them, you know they're going to die," he says. "It breaks my heart."

Randa laments the loss, too. "There are so many," she says. "You can't do a lot. You can't help them all. You have to do it one by one."