The Healing Fields

A 12-part series about a couple who survived the Cambodian killing fields and returned years later to help others. The devistation of genocide is revealed through their own journey and that of the women they seek to rescue fro a life of prostitution. Originally published in the Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO) in June, 2004.

KAMPONG THOM, CAMBODIA - She heaves the full force of her body against the padlocked door of the cramped room. Her fear takes over as she runs back and forth, back and forth, screaming, sobbing.

Son Put has been held prisoner for a day and a half in a ramshackle brothel outside this small Cambodian town.

The woman who owns the brothel has tried coaxing Son into low-cut tight blouses, short skirts and makeup, promising an easy life and plenty of money. Son has refused.

But the 19-year-old virgin will fetch a fine price, at least a hundred times the usual dollar or two for a prostitute. So the owner has turned to threats, slapping Son across the face over and over, shrieking, You won't do this? Do you want to die?

Still Son has refused. And her panic is rising.

Suddenly, a merciful hand unlocks the door. A prostitute in the brothel has taken pity on her.

Run, the prostitute says, before it's too late.

On the street, Son hears that Christian pastors have come to town, promising prostitutes a new life at a place across the river, a women's center where they will be fed, sheltered and taught job skills. Look for a gray truck, she's told.

And so she finds Setan Lee, who will change her world.

Setan, a Cambodian-born minister who now lives in Colorado, knows about slavery, and about hope.

He and his wife, Randa, escaped a prison of their own nearly 25 years ago. They survived the killing fields, where millions of Cambodians lost their lives to one of the 20th century's most brutal regimes, the Khmer Rouge.

Setan and Randa were just teens when they were torn from their families and forced into slave labor camps, working endless days in leech-infested rice fields. They endured beatings, torture, hunger and illness. They saw friends hacked to death, suffocated, shot. They ran through the jungles, defying capture, stumbling over rotting corpses, dodging gunfire.

After more than four years in hell, they made it to a refugee camp in Thailand where they found each other and a new guiding force - a Christian faith that led them to forgiveness and peace.

Before leaving for a new life in Aurora, they made a vow that would take a decade to fulfill. One day, they would return to Cambodia to comfort those left in the ruins.

They could have been content with the American dream, their two children, their nice house in the suburbs. Instead, with money squirreled away from fast-food jobs and factory overtime, with patience and personal sacrifice, they kept their promise. They have built a growing Christian ministry, a small patch of healing fields, in Cambodia.

And they are reaching out to women like Son, whose desperate stories make Randa remember her days alone and give thanks that, by the grace of God and her own resolve, she was spared a life of prostitution.

Not all of the women at Setan and Randa's center make it. Many are sabotaged by AIDS, drugs, family needs, self-hatred. The obstacles are overwhelming.

Yet Randa and Setan persevere. They are survivors of the killing fields, where every hour meant finding a way to stay alive.

Today we begin their story.


Into Darkness

At first, 18-year-old Setan Lee didn't notice the trucks full of armed soldiers rumbling into the Buddhist temple square in his hometown of Battambang.

On this final day of the Cambodian New Year, music and noisy celebration filled the packed square in Cambodia's second largest city. Children played in the warm afternoon air. Revelers sprinkled perfumed water onto the temple statues in a blessing ritual intended to bring good luck, long life and happiness.

"We were celebrating," Setan says. "We were having fun."

Setan didn't understand when he saw the grim, black-uniformed soldiers pouring out of the trucks, aiming their rifles wildly and shouting "enemy" over and over.

Setan's best friend didn't understand, either. He approached one of the soldiers.

I'm not your enemy, he told the soldier. Why do you call me your enemy?

The soldier's response was swift and irrevocable.

"Just like that, they shot him and killed him."

Setan froze in disbelief and terror. He went numb.

"Right away, I know he's not going to make it. He's already dead."

It was April 17, 1975, and in one terrifying moment, Setan Lee - son of a wealthy businessman, youngest student in his medical school class - lost a world of promise and possibility.

Setan (pronounced SEE-tahn) was no stranger to gunfire. The country had been in turmoil for decades - civil war, American carpet bombings and incursions from the Vietnamese.

For the past five years, Khmer Rouge communist soldiers had kept up insistent guerrilla attacks against the Cambodian army, which answered with rocket fire and shelling. The fighting had battered the country's cities and villages. Lately, it had even disrupted Setan's studies in the capital city of Phnom Penh, forcing frequent closings of the medical school he attended.

But it was, at most, an inconvenience. In the shelter that privilege affords, Setan's family had remained largely untouched. His father made sure his 14 children wanted for nothing. Each child had a nanny. Expensive clothes. The best toys. Setan had two mopeds and a brand new red Suzuki pickup truck, a reward for having done well in school.

Thanks to a superior education and private tutors, Setan had graduated from high school at 14 and entered medical school at 15.

As long as he could remember, he had wanted to be a doctor.

"It was my dream to open my own clinic," Setan says. "My older brother was going to be a pharmacist. He would have the pharmacy next door. We would see everybody. We would see a few rich people so we could make a living and help the poor."

His father, who had grown up in poverty and carved out a fortune in the import-export business, insisted that his children share their blessings with less privileged friends and classmates. He taught them "not to look down on anybody," Setan says.

He learned his father's lesson well. Setan often used his allowance to buy food, clothing or medicine - even a bicycle once - for needy friends in Battambang.

Setan knew that to make good on his dream of becoming a doctor, he would have to finish his education, and he feared that the ever more persistent fighting would interfere.

So Setan and his 22-year-old brother, Monthy, the pharmacy student, had hatched a plan to head to Paris where they could continue their studies uninterrupted. Monthy would leave immediately. Setan would follow when he finished the school year in June.

Their parents refused. Setan, not quite 18 then, was too young to travel by himself. Better that Setan's brother wait for him, and the boys could leave together. It's only a couple of months, they told him.

Monthy was furious. He blamed Setan for making him stay behind.

Setan saw it as a temporary setback. He and his brother would be in Paris soon enough.

It was something to look forward to during the New Year's festivities on this bright April 17 afternoon as Setan, in his new red truck, picked up his best friend and drove to the square, eager to celebrate the holiday, carefree and unsuspecting.

And now here was his best friend, as inseparable from him as a brother, lying dead on the ground.

Briefly, Setan thought, "Could I just go get a gun and fight back?"

But before he could catch his breath, the soldiers began to shoot, hitting dozens of people as they scattered, screaming and scrambling over walls to escape.

"I thought, 'No, no, this is not real. This is unthinkable,' " Setan says.

His mind went to his family. They had planned to visit relatives at the Thailand border, and he prayed they had made it safely. Yet that meant he was alone. Panic replaced the numbness.

"I can't run. I can't do anything. So many things come into my mind. But I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say."

Finally, the soldiers stopped shooting and, still aiming their rifles at their captives, ordered those who remained to raise their hands above their heads.

"So I thought, OK. OK."

Randa

It started just after lunch.

Randa Yos was settling in for a lazy holiday afternoon with her stepmother and her sisters and brothers at home in Battambang. Her father, the president of a university in the city, had called his driver to take him to his office as usual that April morning in 1975. The family was Buddhist, but not particularly religious, so there were no plans to join the festivities at any of the temples.

Perhaps 121/2-year-old Randa (pronounced RAHN-duh) could talk her sisters into letting her style their hair into an "up-do," her specialty.

Suddenly gunfire and shouting erupted outside, and in the next moment, one of Randa's cousins burst into the house, shouting that the Khmer Rouge had taken Randa's father. They heard voices from loudspeakers ordering residents to evacuate the city immediately, warning that American forces would begin bombing Battambang at any minute.

"They said don't take anything," Randa says. "Just go. Go several kilometers for three days. The old people knew to grab something to eat."

These were not the usual riots and shelling that had grown almost commonplace and that sometimes forced Randa to stay home from school, though she was too young to understand why. Her father hadn't talked about it much to her.

"It was scary," she says. "But when you live with it, sometimes you just learn to ignore it."

Young Randa had more personal pain and confusion to live with. Her unending source of shame was the divorce of her parents when she was 4.

Her mother had returned to her village outside Battambang with the youngest child. The oldest three lived with Randa's father in the city. Randa was allowed no contact with her mother. And nobody would talk about it.

"In Cambodia, when you're divorced, sometimes one side of your family won't let you see the other side," Randa says.

Her father, who traveled frequently, entrusted her upbringing to her grandmother and an aunt until he remarried when Randa was 9. He and her stepmother, a university professor, had three children of their own.

"I was depressed sometimes. I wasn't like the rest of my friends, because my father was divorced. They would tease me. I wanted to call somebody Mom, and I didn't have anybody."

She eventually grew close to her stepmother, "but she wasn't my mother."

Despite her sadness, despite her father's hectic schedule, it was a good life. "We weren't spoiled, but we had more than a lot of people."

Randa's father, having lived through lean times during World War II, taught his children to be grateful for what they had, cautioned them that if the war pounding Cambodia came closer, they might not have much to eat.

It was an apt warning for finicky Randa. She stubbornly refused to eat vegetables. The fat on pork disgusted her. She hated the bones in fish. "I didn't want to touch it. I was crying all the time. I like to eat something that can go smooth in my throat."

She gave thanks for her younger sister, "the one after me," who would eat whatever Randa discarded. The sisters, only a year apart and as close as twins, were united in a solemn promise to each other: They would go to college, become professionals. And they would stay single. "I would have my own life," Randa says.

College was a priority for this university president's family, even for his daughters - even in the 1970s, when many Cambodian girls were allowed only to learn to read and write, nothing more. "They'd stop after junior high," Randa recalls.

She had set her sights on becoming a dentist, undaunted by the obstacles she knew she would face.

"I wanted to be the first woman in history to open a dental clinic. I saw so many children who could hardly take care of their teeth. I wanted to help them."

But in an afternoon, Randa's dream disintegrated. Her stepmother gathered the family and headed toward Preakh Noren, the village outside Battambang where Randa's father had been raised. They didn't know what had happened to him, but they hoped he would look for them there.

They walked until nightfall. Hungry and exhausted, they finally stopped to rest. They prayed Randa's father was safe.

They had no way of knowing that after the Khmer Rouge had stormed his office at the university, he had been ordered, like hundreds of others, to put on his school uniform to celebrate the triumphant return of King Norodom Sihanouk after years of exile. But there was no return. The "king's request" was a ploy to identify and round up unsuspecting professionals, teachers, administrators, students and government workers - all members of the educated elite classes, all enemies of the Khmer Rouge blueprint for a utopian communist peasant state.

Randa's father was among hundreds of people loaded into cars, buses and trucks by the Khmer Rouge. The soldiers took him to a building he didn't recognize. He had no idea what was happening until he saw a man who had once taught school with him.

"He told my father, 'Don't go with the Khmer Rouge. You must escape and find your family. They're going to kill (all of) you,' " Randa recalls. "The man was with the Communist Party. He knew what was going to happen."

With the man's help, Randa's father escaped.

Randa's family, after a night of fitful rest, continued their trek the next morning - still hopeful they would find her father. The narrow road along the Sangke River was jammed with people heading out of the city when Randa saw her father in the crowd.

There he was, riding a bicycle, searching faces as he rode by, calling out the names of his wife and children. Relieved and grateful, the Yos family found each other, and continued on their way, together.

The rest of Randa's family would not be so lucky. She learned later that the Khmer Rouge killed every other member of her father's extended family on that first day. "One of my cousins, they killed the whole family - 10 or 15 members in just that one family, even the babies. All on my father's side. His sister's son. Even my grandmother who took care of me.

"They killed them all."

Setan

Setan's instincts took hold. The Khmer Rouge had ordered him to change into his school uniform. But why should he believe these soldiers? They had just murdered his best friend right in front of him.

"I hate to say this, but it's a good thing I saw my friend get killed," Setan says. "If I hadn't witnessed that, I'd probably be fooled just like everyone else. I'd have put on my college uniform, and I'd be dead. I no longer trusted anything they said."

Instead, he ran home and put on dirty clothes so the Khmer Rouge wouldn't know he was from a wealthy "enemy" family. He joined the throngs streaming out of the city, soldiers' rifles trained on them.

In the middle of the road, a young soldier stopped him and asked him how long he had owned his shoes. A couple of months, Setan said. Well, you've had them long enough, the soldier told him, now let me have them.

Setan took off his shoes. He kept walking, his feet cut and bleeding, until he couldn't feel the pain anymore. Until the sun went down.

The next day brought new horror.

About 28 miles outside the city, Setan watched uniformed students, teachers and military officers being unloaded from a long procession of vehicles. Mechanically, soldiers lined up the prisoners, marched them into the rice fields - and shot them to death, one by one.

Sometimes the soldiers made them kneel. Sometimes they shot them in the back of the head. Or where they stood. Or while they were walking.

In an endless stream, the cars and trucks and buses disgorged the passengers, the soldiers killed them and the vehicles returned to the city for another round of victims.

The fields became a floor of bodies.

In a moment of terror, Setan recognized one of the cars - his father's new Peugeot.

Please, please don't let my father be in that car.

The next thing he knew, a military general who was one of his father's best friends, a man Setan called uncle, alighted from the passenger side of the car, grinning and waving to the crowd, shouting, Cheer! Cheer! Victory! Victory!

"And they shot him from behind."

Five other officers emerged from the car. Each was shot down.

The car held one more occupant.

The last out was Setan's father. A soldier walked behind him, pointing a rifle at his head.

Setan screamed, NO! NO! NO!

But he was too far away.

Ignoring the soldiers all around him, Setan raced to his father.

"I don't care at this point if I get killed. I don't care."

Setan could not have known that his father would be spared. He could not have known that his father was the driver, forced at gunpoint to ferry people to their deaths.

Setan's startled father embraced him, begged his captors for a moment so the two could talk. Quickly, quickly, the soldiers said, aiming their rifles at the heads of father and son.

Setan was bewildered. Dad, why are you here? Why didn't you go to Thailand?

Because of you, Setan, his father replied. Our family was waiting for you. I couldn't leave without you.

Guilt overwhelmed Setan. "Because of me, everyone in my family was captured."


Stalked by Death

Randa Yos, pampered daughter of a university president, now lived and labored in the rice fields as a slave to her Khmer Rouge captors.

The new regime in Cambodia had ordered the evacuation of all cities on April 17, 1975, and Randa's family had left their home in Battambang for her father's home village. Within two weeks, Khmer Rouge soldiers who had been guarding the village began splitting apart all families.

Children as young as 5 were taken from their parents and assigned by age to separate camps in the surrounding farms and rice fields.

Randa, five months shy of her 13th birthday, was ordered to a camp for 13- to 16-year-olds, with none of her brothers or sisters. She was forced to work as many as 20 hours a day, sometimes in the rice fields, sometimes lugging huge rocks and piles of dirt on her young shoulders to help build irrigation ditches.

At night, Randa slept in the fields where she labored by day.

"Sometimes if you were lucky, you got to a place that had a lot of coconut trees. Then you had a roof to cover you. But if you didn't have anything, you just slept in the open fields - raining or sun, or whatever."

Randa was fed twice a day - mostly thin rice soup, every so often containing some vegetable "like what you'd feed a pig." But she was stubborn, and she hadn't lost her pickiness. She'd refuse the food, instead eating something raw from the fields. And that would make her sick.

Sleep was scarce, yet prisoners sometimes were kept awake and forced to listen to indoctrination sessions. "They told us to be loyal to the party, to be brave, to work hard. I got so tired, but you had to sit there. My mind would go to sleep. But when everybody clapped, I'd clap, too."

Now and then she'd be spared a long, hot day in the fields and maybe get something extra to eat, thanks to a young illiterate camp leader who asked Randa to prepare reports, keep track of supplies or write letters for her.

Randa worked, slept when she could, ate what she could, day after endless day, barely able to keep track of time, always wondering and worrying about her family.

The Khmer Rouge began trucking in hundreds of people to help build a dam one day, and they all gathered at a meeting that night.

Randa spotted her father in the crowd.

"All of a sudden, I just see him there. But he was so skinny - really, really skinny."

She couldn't risk talking to him, but she managed to find out where his camp was. She sneaked out to see him in the middle of the night. They cried and talked briefly before she reluctantly returned to her own camp.

A short time later, Randa also discovered her sister, "the one after me," and a cousin among the hundreds working on the dam. They pretended to be strangers during the day. But at night, they crept to their father's camp and tried to get him to eat the food they saved for him - a few grains of rice, a vegetable morsel from their soup.

"But he never wanted to take it from me. He was so skinny, but he'd say, 'I want you to have enough to eat.' "

With the dam construction under way, Randa's father took a chance and asked for permission to visit his wife, who was allowed to stay in his village because she was sick and had two toddlers. The Khmer Rouge leaders consented, but only on the condition that he build a dirt roadway of 400 to 500 yards over the water in a large irrigated field.

He could never do it alone, Randa knew. So she, her sister and their cousin crept out at night after their own long days in the field to help him "so he could go quick."

Finally, the roadway complete, Randa's father prepared for his visit.

On the day he left, Randa heard horses galloping furiously into the camp.

The next night, she heard them again. What was all the commotion, she asked her camp leader. The answer chilled her. "She told me the soldiers had come to collect all the doctors, all the professionals, whoever they hadn't killed yet.

"I was so scared, my body was shaking."

Randa, with all the nonchalance she could muster, asked the leader if she could see the list of the prisoners who were being taken away.

"Taken away," Randa says. "That's what they call it. But it means you never come back. It means they kill you."

On the list, as she feared it would be, as she knew it would be, was her father's name. Her body started shaking and tears welled, but she choked them back. "If I cry for an enemy of the state, they kill me, too."

When the soldiers learned that her father had left for his village, they set off to hunt him down, the ominous sound of their horses thundering through the fields.

She asked, again, as casually as she could, if she could visit her relatives in the village. The leader refused. So Randa waited impatiently for the sun to set. Then she took off, racing through the dark to her father's village.

"That night, I run and run and run and run. I fell into the lake. But I just kept running and running."

Setan

Like Randa, 17-year-old Setan Lee worked in the fields, slept in the fields. During the summer rainy season, he'd wake in the middle of the night - nearly submerged by water - and have to sit up to avoid drowning.

"My mattress was mud and my roof was the sky," Setan says.

He was reunited briefly with his family when they all were assigned to work on an irrigation system at a farm. They had all been able to hide their identities.

"We don't have the privilege to visit very long. It was a bittersweet reunion. There's not much we could do or say - just everybody try to survive."

Even thinking a day ahead seemed fruitless. "I just think that if I can live the next hour, I'll be lucky." He watched friend after friend die of starvation or untreated malaria, dysentery or pneumonia.

Guards his own age or younger beat him, "several times, just for the fun of it." Once, two laughing guards held a candle to one of his arms and a piece of burning firewood to the other until the flesh burned away.

The emotional torture burned as deeply.

At an abandoned temple where the prisoners were camped, Setan, the favored grandson of a Buddhist priest, was forced to smash a statue of a sleeping Buddha.

"I couldn't sleep because I thought I had killed my own god, and the god was going to take revenge on me."

He waited, terrified, for the god's vengeance. But nothing happened. Nothing ever happened, planting seeds of doubt in a faith he had embraced without question all of his life.

"There was no power or force to support that belief anymore," Setan says. "Yet I knew there must be something out there."

Like his grandfather, Setan was a searcher. "Like him, I was very religious. He taught me that there was a force out there greater, more powerful than anything."

But if not Buddha, who?

Setan didn't have the luxury of pondering such questions for long. The struggle to survive took every act of strength he had.

The scalding rice soup they had to gulp down quickly, and the lack of nutrition destroyed prisoners' teeth and gums. Setan lost all of his teeth.

The starving prisoners hunted for food in the swampy rice fields - fish, frogs, small crabs, insects that they swallowed quickly so guards wouldn't see them. Many children died from eating poison insects or poison frogs.

Having food of their own was forbidden.

One day a girl working next to Setan in the rice field found a crab and furtively passed her treasure to Setan.

But she wasn't stealthy enough. A young female guard caught her. Everyone knew the punishment. Despite the girl's cries, despite Setan's pleas, the guard shoved a plastic bag over the girl's head. Egged on by laughing comrades, right in front of Setan, for what seemed like forever, the guard held the bag tight around the convulsing girl's neck until she suffocated and collapsed, dead.

It was Setan's turn.

The soldiers dragged him away to an area by some railroad tracks. They buried him up to his neck and left him for red ants, poisonous snakes or a hungry animal to finish off.

Randa

Randa ran through the night in hopes of reaching her father.

By the time she arrived at the village in the morning, the Khmer Rouge soldiers had tied her father to one of their horses.

"I started screaming and crying, 'No, No.' I just kept screaming and screaming. I said, 'Take me, too. Kill me, too.'

"And the people in the village all came around me and said, "Be quiet, be quiet, or they'll kill you, too.' "

Even her stepmother, who was too ill to walk, crawled out of her hut and begged Randa to stop.

"But I didn't care anymore."

And it didn't matter.

"They took him. He was gone. I never saw him again.

"I found out they tortured him so bad, so bad until he died."

As with so many other victims of the killing fields, reports vary on how and where Randa's father died. Randa believes he was tortured to death in the caves of Sampeou Mountain, along with thousands of others whose scattered bones and messages scrawled in blood on the cave walls create a grisly monument to the brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime.


"They Kill You Slowly"

Setan Lee should have died.

He was buried in the ground up to his neck as punishment for taking a morsel of food, a tiny crab, from a fellow prisoner in the fields. He was easy prey for deadly animals, poison reptiles or insects.

And yet, after two days and two nights, he was still alive when two young female Khmer Rouge guards came to check on him.

For all of their savagery, many of the soldiers were little more than children. Once in a while, however briefly, their youthful emotions and amusements got the better of them. As it happened, one of the guards who came to check on Setan had developed a crush on him.

And in the camps, Setan had learned a patriotic communist song that entertained her and the other soldiers.

So for a song and a brief infatuation, Setan was saved.

The guards pulled Setan from the ground. His legs were paralyzed, so they took him to their own camp instead of returning him to the slave labor camp.

"I couldn't do any work. All I did was boil water for (them) and sing that song."

He stayed for eight months - until he could move his legs again. Finally, they sent him back to the labor camp.

In the killing fields again, he was treated "worse than an animal." Some things he won't talk about.

Guards gouged out prisoners' eyes. Cut off their tongues. Pulled out their fingernails. Poured acid on them. Suffocated them, not always to death, sometimes just to paralysis.

His fellow prisoners became his friends, but not a day went by that one of them wasn't tortured or killed. Some slit their own throats instead.

Setan awoke every day wondering if it was his turn.

He thought what a relief it would be simply to give up.

"On so many occasions, I thought I'd rather die. I wanted to scream at the guards, 'I hate you.' That's all you'd need to do, and you'd be killed."

But something kept him going, one minute at a time. "Something just said, 'Move on, Setan. You're going to make it.' "

He had survived being buried alive. He had survived the assaults on his body and his spirit. Then he made a mistake that he was certain would cost him his life.

His captors found the student ID card he had hidden in a small pocket of his pants and forgotten about. He was a member of the educated class, a "city dweller," an enemy of the Khmer Rouge. It was a death sentence.

"I said, 'There's no way I'm going to make it.' "

The soldiers tied his hands, blindfolded him, attached him to a rope with four others, also students, all sentenced to be hacked to death with the sharp edge of a bamboo pole. Setan was last in line.

One by one, each of the prisoners was slaughtered. Setan felt their blood splatter onto his body. He heard their screams, their cries for mercy.

And Setan began to pray. "Lord of the universe, whoever you are, please spare my life."

He had no inkling where this strange prayer came from. "I had never heard those words before."

Then there was no one else left. All four before him were dead. Setan was next. He was shoved to his knees. He heard the soldier raise the bamboo branch "so close to my neck I feel it." He waited for death.

In that very instant, a guard rushed up, screaming at the soldier: Stop. Stop.

The guard wanted Setan brought to his court for further investigation. "But there's no such thing in the killing field," Setan says. "No investigation."

The soldiers yanked off Setan's blindfold, and he saw the four dead prisoners beside him.

"I knew whoever I called upon at that time - I felt release. I knew someone was there to help me. It was incredible."

He had left his own shattered faith in Buddhism among the debris of the sleeping idol he had destroyed without consequence. But he felt the beginnings of a belief in something else, some other nameless force.

Later that day, the guards handed him a piece of paper and a pencil, and he learned why he had been spared.

The education that condemned him had saved him. Despite Khmer Rouge claims that the country's rice production was healthy, it was, in fact, dwindling rapidly. The guards ordered Setan to design an irrigation system.

But Setan, who had been a medical student, knew nothing about irrigation, nothing about agriculture. He had never seen the great lake called Tonle Sap or the Cham Nom River, the water sources that would supply the system. Surely he could not escape death again. He braced himself to confess that he could not possibly complete his assignment - when suddenly he began to draw.

"Someone forced me to start drawing. It was supernatural intervention."

Though he didn't know it at the time, couldn't put a name to it, Setan says now, "God forced me to move, so I just flowed with it."

Setan drew the design and handed it to the leader. The leader declared it perfect. Setan's life was saved again.

"How I drew that system, I have no idea. That's why I believe so strongly in God."

In the months that followed, Setan often heard distant gunfire.

It was 1978, and the North Vietnamese, who had once been allies of the Khmer Rouge, were now on the attack, capturing more and more Cambodian territory.

Setan knew none of this. All he knew was that the fighting gave him his best opportunity to escape.

One day, with enemy gunfire approaching fast, the Khmer Rouge soldiers ordered the prisoners to stop working and head into the jungle.

"I told myself, 'Setan, this is it. If you stay (with the prisoners), you're going to die. If you leave, there's a 99, 100 percent chance you're going to die, but a little chance you're going to make it.' "

He took his chance. While the other prisoners headed for the jungle, Setan crawled into an irrigation ditch. He heard the Khmer Rouge soldiers calling his name, searching for him. Lying face down, he could see nothing. He dared not look up. He heard North Vietnamese gunfire grow louder. Khmer Rouge gunfire moved farther away. Hours later, all was quiet.

When Setan was sure he was alone, he, too, headed for the jungle.

Randa

Randa's desperate flight to reach her father in his village before his execution had condemned her, as well.

The Khmer Rouge now knew she was the daughter of a university president, a member of the enemy educated elite. Her cousin in the camp was already dead, and Randa was sent to another camp, "a camp where they send you to kill you - but before they killed you, they let you work."

At the new camp, Randa got only one meal a day.

She worked in rice fields, standing in water up to her thighs. During the rainy season, she had to tread water up to her neck at times to avoid drowning. The searing sun and hot, filthy water raised huge, raw blisters from her torso to her toes.

Leeches gathered everywhere. "You'd step into the water and they'd all swim up and get on you. The big ones, yes. But the worst were the little ones. They'd just all scurry up my legs."

She was sick constantly, with fever and diarrhea so severe she would faint.

Sometimes people collapsed and died in the fields, where birds or other animals would feed on them.

Randa saw people in the camp buried alive, their fingernails ripped out, beaten to death, bitten by a poisonous snake every day until they died. "Or sometimes they'd hang you on a tree and cut your throat - just a little bit - every day until you died.

"They don't kill you right away. They kill you slowly. They'd say they don't want us to die peacefully. They want us to die suffering."

But rather than wear her down, the terror and rage strengthened Randa's resolve to live. "I just kept praying every day for someone to just come and be a hero, and kill all these people and get me out of here."

Fueled by anger at the murder of her father and other relatives, she set her mind on escape, always escape. "No matter what, I wasn't going to die young."

Randa saw her chance one day when a line of trucks filled with soldiers pulled into her camp. She pretended to work as she watched them unload and disperse. When no one was looking, she climbed into the back of a truck and hid behind a seat. Though she figures she was maybe 15 at the time, she was so small that she fit easily without being seen.

An hour went by. Then two women soldiers jumped into the back of the truck, and it drove out of the camp, the small stowaway undetected.

As the truck headed for the jungle, one of the women heard a noise. She looked toward the seat where Randa was hiding.

In an instant, the soldier and Randa were staring into each other's eyes, neither breathing a word.


Revelation in the Jungle

Randa waited to die.

The soldier stared at her as she crouched behind the seat of the truck where she had stowed away to escape the labor camp. Randa stared back. There was no way out. She was exposed. She would be killed.

Instead, without saying a word, the young female Khmer Rouge soldier moved quickly but casually to the seat where Randa was hiding and sat down, shielding Randa from the view of the other soldier in the back of the truck.

Relieved, Randa stayed put.

But for how long? When the truck pulled into a military camp in the jungle, the other soldier jumped out and ran off. The first soldier waited until she was sure the others in the camp were out of sight. Only then did she order Randa from her hiding place.

Randa pleaded for her life.

If I save you, the soldier replied, you'll have to do as I say.

She took Randa to her tent, gave her one of her uniforms and helped her clean herself up. The soldier reported to her group that she had found someone to cook her food and take care of her tent.

And so Randa did. She washed the soldier's clothes. She brought water for her bath. She cooked.

But when the young soldier tried to teach Randa to shoot an automatic rifle, she balked. I'll do whatever work you give me, no matter how hard, but please don't make me shoot a gun, Randa begged. I don't want to kill people. The soldier relented.

In the way that war creates strange friendships, they were becoming friends. The young woman, probably about 20, told Randa that she was the daughter of a schoolteacher. When the Khmer Rouge captured her province, they took her to train in the military. She agreed so she wouldn't be killed. Randa, in turn, shared her own story. "We learned to trust each other."

The military camp kept moving, trying to stay ahead of the North Vietnamese forces that were invading Cambodia. Gunfire, rockets and the sound of exploding land mines drew closer every day.

One morning Randa awoke to find the camp empty. The soldiers had crept away, leaving Randa behind. She headed for a road, but the fighting was too intense, too frightening. She slipped back into the jungle to hide.

When the gunfire quieted, she made a decision. She would flee Cambodia, head west toward the closest border - to Thailand, which she had visited many times with her father.

She wasn't sure how far it was or how long it would take. Randa walked along the nearest roads, toward what she trusted would be a friendly country - and freedom.

Setan

Setan forced himself to step from corpse to rotting corpse, body to mangled body - all land-mine victims. He knew these bodies littering the jungle floor provided the only safe route because the mines had already exploded.

Sometimes the people weren't dead yet.

"There are a lot of corpses everywhere. Some are fresh. Some are still alive. But there's not much I can do. I wish I could help them, but they're about to die anyway."

Setan had known to head west toward Thailand after escaping the labor camp, where his Khmer Rouge captors were preoccupied with their own flight from the approaching North Vietnamese. But he knew nothing about the jungle, so thick with tangles of strange trees and vines that he sometimes couldn't see the sun. He ate leaves, fruit when he could find it. He drank water from the hollows of trees or in ditches where bodies lay. He worried about strange sounds, dangerous animals.

If he heard soldiers or gunfire, he stayed in hiding for a few days. He trusted no one.

One day, out of nowhere, in the heart of the jungle, Setan was startled by a dirty, bedraggled man, clothes in tatters. He grabbed Setan, shocking the breath out of him. Yet strangely, Setan wasn't afraid.

"There was something in his eyes I trust."

Holding onto Setan, the man kept repeating one question: Do you believe in the Lord of the universe? Do you believe in the Lord of the universe?

The phrase echoed. Why was it so familiar? Setan tried to reach back into his mind. Then he remembered. He had prayed to a "lord of the universe" when he was seconds away from being hacked to death. Now it was clear.

"Yes, I believe," Setan replied.

Then the man said to Setan: His name is Jesus Christ.

And just as quickly as he had appeared, the stranger disappeared into the jungle.

"I believe that man was a messenger from God," Setan says. "I had never heard of Christianity. I knew nothing about it.

"This was the moment of my conversion."

Randa

Everywhere she walked, Randa saw people dead, people dying, wounded soldiers. She met kindness along the way in strangers who invited her to stay in their huts and share their food.

Walking into a village one day, Randa, 16 by now, was startled to see her grandmother, her sister, her brother, an aunt and an uncle, all on her mother's side. Most had been in the labor camps.

Now they were headed back home to their village, and they insisted that Randa go with them.

Randa wanted desperately to go to Thailand. But she had been taught, as all Cambodian children are taught, to respect her elders. So, reluctantly, she accompanied her relatives back to her father's village, where she found her mother.

But as happy as she was to find her family, Randa was convinced that Cambodia was still dangerous. She didn't trust anyone, including the occupying North Vietnamese troops who had routed the Khmer Rouge.

She tried time and again to persuade her family to leave with her, but time and again they refused. Her younger sister and brother begged to accompany her. No, she told them. You stay here until I find a safe place, then I'll come back and get all of you.

To avoid a scene with her grandmother, she slipped away a few weeks later and headed toward Thailand, vowing to return for her family as soon as she could.

She reached a camp at the border run by Cambodian freedom fighters, early escapees from the slave labor camps. People were coming in from everywhere. They had to pay to get in, but Randa had no money. So she hid among a group of people who had paid. "There were so many people, children crying, all the fighting, they didn't know who was who."

Once in the camp, Randa had nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. She hid at night, fearing that she might be kidnapped, or dragged away and raped.

Again, strangers came to her aid. Two young women invited her to their family's tent and to share their food.

They all agreed they must escape across the border to Thailand.

So in the middle of the night, they ran for the border - ran for their lives, carrying few belongings, dodging barrage after barrage of earsplitting gunfire from both sides until they reached safety.

The next morning, American Red Cross and United Nations representatives were waiting to load them onto trucks that would take them to the new Khao I Dang refugee camp. And take Randa to her future.

Setan

After a month in the jungle, Setan, too, straggled into a military camp on the Cambodian side of the border with Thailand. And he, too, sneaked across the border into Thailand, into the arms of American Red Cross workers.

"It was just like heaven as soon as we saw those guys," Setan recalls. "They looked so nice, clean clothes and all that. And here I am, so dirty, so stinky. And here this guy just opens his arms and embraces me. To me, he is an angel."

Setan and hundreds of other refugees were trucked to Khao I Dang.

They were safe.

It had been four years and seven months since the promising 17-year-old medical student had driven his new red Suzuki pickup truck into the temple square at Battambang.

From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge killing fields had claimed the lives of somewhere between 1.7 million and 3 million people - victims of murder, starvation, disease, exhaustion and torture.

Cambodia had lost at least one-fifth of its population.


Finding Refuge

The fragrance of soap. The taste of an egg. To Setan Lee, these were miracles.

In November 1979, after enduring more than four and a half years of agony and horror in the killing fields of Cambodia, he had made it to the Khao I Dang refugee camp in Thailand. And it was heaven.

"They gave us a little tiny bar of soap, like in a hotel, probably not the best soap in the world, probably something they used to clean clothes," Setan recalls. "But to me it was precious. I wanted to eat that soap. For the first time in four years, I got myself cleaned up."

He feasted on whatever food rations the camp handed out: rice, salty fish and, every now and then, an egg. When Setan cooked one for the first time, "I couldn't wait. It was so good."

The camp was a ragtag community of food, shelter and hope: The smoky smells of rice and fish, makeshift tents of plastic sheets, tanks of water and people in line, children laughing and children wailing. Refugees searching posted notices, hoping for news of a sister or a father. Cries of joy from relatives finding each other. Tears of sorrow from those who never would.

By 1980, Khao I Dang was home to some 130,000 Cambodian refugees, the nonprofit Khmer Institute estimates. It was the only camp whose residents were eligible for resettlement in countries outside Thailand or Cambodia.

Among the thousands of refugees pouring into the camp, Setan found his family as they arrived in pairs, or threes or individually from scattered points across the country.

Some never came. Setan's older brother, Monthy, the pharmacy student who had shared Setan's dream of opening a clinic, was dead. Rather than go to Paris as he had begged to do, Monthy had stayed behind to wait for Setan and was taken prisoner. He stood up to his captors and they shot him.

To this day, Setan can barely express the guilt he feels, the grief. But he knows it is nothing compared with the burden his parents carry.

In all, 38 members of Setan's extended family died in the killing fields.

They had so much to mourn, yet so many spared lives to celebrate. Here were his parents, his sisters, his baby brother.

And there was someone else, too. The family had taken in a 17-year-old waif who was alone in the camp. She had no family there, and she and his sisters had become friends. Her name was Randa Yos. Setan took one look at Randa and thought: "Beautiful! There was something about her that I liked to be with the rest of my life."

How to explain love at first sight? Setan tries, but he can't quite find the words. It was this simple: "From the minute I saw her, I knew I was in love with her. I knew I wanted to marry her."

Lord of the universe

Setan also began to meet Christian missionaries in the camp who gave a name to his new faith.

"It was then I came to believe who had saved me from being killed, who had been the one who drew the irrigation system," Setan says, recalling how he had been able to sketch a design demanded by the Khmer Rouge even though he had no idea how to do it.

Then one day in the camp, Setan saw a man he thought he recognized but couldn't quite place. The man was scrubbed clean now, dressed neatly. But the eyes were the same. It was the mysterious stranger from the jungle who had first told him that Jesus Christ is Lord of the universe. He became Setan's pastor, and without hesitation "he asked me to help him start the church."

Every morning, he taught Setan one verse from Scripture. The man had no Bible; he had memorized each verse. In the afternoon, Setan went out among the people in the camp to teach the verse to others. He was a quick study. He had a gift. In this way, he learned Christianity and taught it at the same time. "It was four months before I ever saw a Bible," Setan says. "But I already had become a pastor."

Setan estimates that there were about 35,000 Christians - some who had already been Christians, many converts - in their refugee church, an open-air, haphazard construction of rice sacks stretched over bamboo poles. They called it the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It was in this church that Setan recognized another face among those who came to hear him preach. But this face was from a far more painful time. Sitting in the group of worshippers was the young female guard who had suffocated Setan's friend with a plastic bag for trying to sneak him some food. The young woman cringed when he looked into her eyes.

"This was the lady I hated, I wanted to kill. I felt it so strongly. I wanted revenge," Setan recalls.

"I was praying, 'Lord, take control of me.'

"And all of a sudden, I don't know why, I felt peace. I felt compassion and mercy for her."

He broke into tears as he knelt in front of her and took her hands into his. God has forgiven, he told her. Ask God to forgive you for all you have done. She didn't reply.

"I never saw her again."

Setan also began working for an American Embassy unit posted at the camp. He knew some English from his school days and became fluent almost immediately - "a supernatural gift," he calls it.

But Khao I Dang was only an outpost. Returning to Cambodia was unthinkable. The Khmer Rouge had ransacked the Cambodian banks. Setan's father had lost everything, and his business partner had fled Cambodia and emptied their joint bank account in Bangkok, Thailand.

Setan's arranged marriage to another prosperous family's daughter had been called off. Her family's fortune was safe in another country. Setan had no money. And he was a Christian.

The Lees agreed to start over in a new place.

The United Nations listed the first-world countries that were accepting Cambodian refugees: the United States, Canada, Australia, England, France and a few smaller European countries. The application process was simple: Write a letter to a country's embassy - better yet, write to more than one to increase your odds.

Setan and his family decided to go for broke. It was the United States or nothing. Setan had known Americans at school, had met more at the refugee camp. And he figured it this way: "If you're a slave to the poor, their leftovers are nothing. But the rich - their leftovers are plenty. And the richest is America."

So Setan found a dirty, torn piece of paper and wrote to the American Embassy on behalf of his father: "My name is Chan Lee. Together with my wife and children we have 14 people. We are survivors of the killing fields. We want very much to go to America. If you feel generously, compassionately toward us, please take us to your country.

"That's all I said. Sincerely, Chan Lee. That's it."

He had no envelope. He put the letter in a box along with thousands of others.

It worked. The family was notified a few months later that they would be relocated to Aurora, Colorado, where a local church would sponsor them as part of the resettlement program.

Love and marriage

But young Setan had one more piece of business.

Setan's parents and the church elders - still steeped in the Cambodian tradition of arranged marriages - told him they had a young woman in mind for him. He was starting over in a new country. He needed a wife.

Setan was apprehensive. He had fallen in love with Randa. But he was a good Cambodian. He knew he would be expected to fulfill the wishes of his family and his new church.

"I said to myself, 'Setan, I hope it's the one you like.'

"And it was."

His parents and the church elders had fallen in love with Randa, too. They knew she was lonely and in despair over the loss of her family. They knew she had nowhere to turn.

But Randa, not 18 yet, was torn. "I was too young. I never thought anything about love."

She initially had thought of Setan, four years her senior, as an older brother or an uncle. Loving Brother Setan, she had called him.

She clung to the remnants of her dream to become a dentist. She felt ambivalent about going so many thousands of miles away.

Mostly, she thought of the family she had left behind. It was impossible, she admitted to herself, to risk going back for them. She lamented her decision not to bring them along in the first place.

"I cried every night. I kept hoping they would come to the camp. Every day I would watch, look for them. So many people came. But they never came."

Though she loved Setan, "I wanted to go back home to Cambodia to get my family so many times. But then I thought, 'If I go home, how will I save them?' When I get to a better place, a better time, a better life, I will bring them to the United States one of these days.

"My mind kept going back and forth, back and forth, like two people in my head."

Her sorrow grew as she learned that at least 30 members of her extended family had died in the killing fields.

Then a man in the camp gave her advice. Randa, he said, you have to go on with your life. When you are strong enough, you can come back to save your family.

Randa had found another place to turn for guidance, too.

She initially had started sneaking into Christian church services to learn English.

She was angry, filled with despair. But in church, she found peace. The pastors were kind and welcoming.

Gradually, she became "convicted in my heart" and found comfort in the hymns she learned in English: "We are one in the spirit. We are one in the Lord. They will know we are Christians by our love."

In the Scripture verses she learned, she found hope and joy.

"Before I knew the Lord, I worried all the time," Randa says. "I had a lot of revenge in my heart for the Khmer Rouge, what they did to me, what they did to my family. A lot of confusion.

"Every day I went and learned more Scripture. When I would pray, when I would read his word, I would feel peace in my heart. I stopped worrying."

In the church, Randa also found a safe haven many nights. At dusk, groups of marauding men crashed through different sections of the camp, hunting for teen-age girls and young women. They ripped open the plastic sheets that served as doors, dragged the girls away and raped them. Sometimes they raped the girls right in the tents, right in front of their families.

Some of the young women killed themselves. Some got pregnant. For many, their lives were ruined. Rape was a shame brought on the woman and her entire family. The families were too afraid or ashamed to report the rapes.

Every night, Randa headed for a prayer chain at the church. Men and women from the camp surrounded the young women in the area between the altar and the chairs. In groups of 10 they prayed quietly for an hour while the others slept, then another group would pray for an hour, then another. Each night, the prayer chains - sometimes numbering 100 - prayed until dawn.

"The men wouldn't go into a church or a temple. They would not disturb you if you are praying."

'Quite an experience'

Randa decided to go on with her life. Still a little nervous, she asked Setan to wait to get married until they got to the United States, but her lovestruck suitor was insistent.

On Feb. 2, 1980, Setan and Randa were married by a Cambodian minister and an English missionary in the first Christian wedding ceremony at the Khao I Dang refugee camp. Christians crowded in and around the small rice-sack church to hear Randa and Setan recite their vows. "We hadn't invited them," Randa says, laughing. "But they came anyway."

Unlike Cambodia's elaborate three-day weddings with gifts, music, traditional outfits and mountains of food, this ceremony was simple and short. The English missionary, whom Randa called "my spiritual father," walked her down the aisle and gave her away.

"We had no idea. They said, 'You have to walk down the aisle. Setan will be waiting for you.' Then all of a sudden, the pastor started blessing us and announced we were husband and wife."

The wedding feast consisted of cookies for their unexpected guests.

"It was," Setan says, "quite an experience."

The Lees left for the United States much more quickly than many other refugees. Five months after they had moved from Khao I Dang to a processing center to prepare for their passage out of Thailand, the Lees signed a loan from the Church World Services aid organization for the airfare to their new home: a grand total of $350 for all 14 of them - Setan's parents, their four sons, five daughters, two sons-in-law and a daughter-in-law.

Once the plane was in the air, the 14 Lees held hands, excitement and sadness coming together.

Randa was convinced she would never see Cambodia or her family again.

Yet she and Setan had made a promise in the refugee camp, a vow they carried with them to their new home. In whatever way possible, they would contribute to rebuilding their country. They had no idea how or when, but they were determined.

"We thought about contributing to our people in some degree if there was an opportunity in our lifetime," Setan says.

"We'd been through hell, but then we go to heaven now. We wanted our people to taste a little bit of heaven."

In November 1980, they flew to Denver by way of Bangkok, Hong Kong, Nome and Oakland. Looking down from the plane's windows, they thought the white fields surrounding Denver were salt.

They had never seen snow.


A World of Promise

It was hardly an ideal beginning for newlyweds Setan and Randa Lee - living in a basement in Aurora with 12 relatives, learning a new language and culture, making soup out of free bones meant for family dogs.

But after their years in the killing fields of Cambodia, the refugees were grateful even for the crowded quarters offered in 1980 in the home of a Cambodian family who had not been victims of the Khmer Rouge.

Randa marveled at how clean and big everything was in Colorado and how welcoming the people were.

"I thought, 'I'm not important. I'm from a different country.' But people were so warm to us."

They began learning about life in the Denver area, about schools, about English lessons, about where the grocery store was, about services for refugees.

Setan and Randa also wanted to find a place to worship in their newfound Christian faith as soon as they could. Setan looked in the telephone book. He searched for the Church of Jesus Christ - the name of the refugee camp church in Thailand where he and Randa converted and married, the only church name he knew.

"But there was no such thing." He found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - the Mormons. "That didn't sound right." He kept looking and got even more confused: Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist and on and on. "I got lost. I didn't understand about denominations."

Setan met a man who explained as best he could and pointed them to Faith Presbyterian Church in Aurora, where Setan later was ordained and set up a refugee church in the chapel. They remain members there today. "By accident," Randa says, "we became Presbyterians."

Setan, the only family member who spoke English, got a job within three weeks as a case manager with Church World Services' refugee resettlement program, which had helped the Lees come to the United States.

In less than two months, Faith Presbyterian helped the family move into a small house in Aurora.

Setan's $800 monthly income covered the $450 rent, utilities, food and clothing for everybody. The transition to a new country was hardest on Setan's parents. The weather, the customs, the language - everything was new, everything was in upheaval.

The family - except for Setan - walked to nighttime English classes at Aurora Central High School.

"It was quite a walk. (My parents) were old, and they had to walk in the cold and the snow. They cried almost every day," Setan says. "I felt so sorry for them."

Setan's father, Chan, recalls, "We didn't know how to do anything. We couldn't even get kitchenware. We didn't know where to get it. We were afraid to ask."

The Lees learned a few things they weren't taught in English class or from refugee services. One was that the closest grocery store gave away bags of beef and pork bones for dogs - but only one to a customer.

"So they got a lot of dogs at that grocery store - 14 of them," says Setan, laughing.

Each Lee walked into the store to get the bag of dog bones and brought them home to make soup.

A few other family members soon learned enough English to get jobs at a meatpacking plant. With more income, they bought used clothes and stocked their house from a nearby Goodwill store. They all pitched in to buy an old Volkswagen van so Setan - the only one with a driver's license at first - could drive the family around.

Although more of the younger Lees were finding work, hard as he tried, Setan's father, Chan, couldn't get hired. By the time the family arrived in Aurora, Chan was 60 and his wife, Noeun, was 51.

"Whenever my kids would go to apply for jobs, I would always go along," Chan says. "But they wouldn't hire me because they said I was too old. Even at the meatpacking plant or at a motel cleaning."

Setan met a woman who helped his parents apply for food stamps. "I lost everything," says Chan, who had owned a successful import-export business in Cambodia. "It's very difficult. I don't like to talk about it.

"But God helped us through it. I knew it would be OK. I knew we would go on living."

Setan says, "It was a rough start. But it was a lot better than life in the killing fields."

Randa struggled with the language and grew frustrated with obstacles. But she persevered. In 1983, she graduated with honors from Adams City High School. Education was still a priority for her, and she was determined to take advantage of it in her new country.

She learned to drive - after the accident. Randa, ever the brave one, had borrowed her brother-in-law's car to run an errand and wound up crashing it into the side of a neighbor's house. Terrified, she ran back to her home and hid under the bed, waiting for the authorities to cart her off.

"I thought, 'This time I'm going to jail in America.' "

She didn't. She did get a ticket and a court appearance. The owners of the car and the house were understanding. So was the judge.

Her first job was at a McDonald's for $3.40 an hour. She understood more English than she could speak, "so the manager said, 'OK, you stay in the back and cook. If you don't talk to anybody, you're fine,' " Randa says.

Setan went to work for the state refugee services department as a caseworker, and quickly got promoted and won pay raises. He and Randa bought an old, beat-up Mazda for $300. The heater didn't work, which meant the defroster didn't work, so in winter Setan bundled up and drove from Aurora to his job in downtown Denver with the car window open.

Over their family's protests at another separation, Setan and Randa moved to a small apartment in Commerce City in 1981. They visited the family every day. But they wanted to start their own life together.

Their first child, Ben, was born in 1985.

After waiting the required time, they became U.S. citizens in 1986.

Randa went to work at a company, which has since been bought out, making computer printer ink cartridges.

She dreamed of going to college, but money was tight, and she knew that Setan wanted to go just as badly as she did. "I decided if I couldn't get an education, I want my husband to get an education," Randa says.

At first, Setan planned to become a doctor, but he couldn't get a loan, and medical schools wouldn't accept his previous experience. "For a while, I was quite upset. But then I decided God had another direction for me."

Setan started classes at Colorado Christian University, then at Denver Seminary.

As the couple settled into their new home, they also felt an urgency to make good on the vow they had made in the refugee camp to help rebuild their ravaged homeland. Their lives were vastly better here, but "we didn't just want a better life," Randa says. "We did not want to be selfish."

Their dedication since childhood to helping the less fortunate, buttressed by their calling to share their Christian faith, urged them on. They realized that if they could make a living and make a home in such a short time in the United States, maybe their dream of returning to Cambodia wasn't that far-fetched.

"Because of the things we had seen and experienced, we thought it was going to be a long, long time, maybe not even in our lifetime. It was always in our thoughts," Setan says. "We didn't know it was going to come this quick."

Randa's longing for her family remained strong. She had heard from an American Red Cross worker that her sister and brother were living in a refugee camp in Thailand.

But making their way to Cambodia required persistence.

Cambodia was still in turmoil. The Cambodian puppet regime installed in 1979 by the North Vietnamese was being challenged by a coalition of former leader King Norodom Sihanouk, anti-communists and the Khmer Rouge.

Setan first tried to go in 1988, but he was turned away at the Thai border. He was turned away again in 1989, the year their daughter, Sandra, was born. It also was the year that Randa's sister and brother made it to the Denver area. They knew where their grandmother was, and their grandmother knew where to find the rest of the family, including Randa's mother.

So in 1990, Setan and Randa decided to travel to Cambodia together. They left their children - Sandra was only 3 months old, Ben was 5 - in the care of trusted friends from the church. It was an agonizing decision.

"It was so hard," Randa says. "But my dream every day was to see my family, to make sure they were alive and well."

Randa and Setan wouldn't risk taking the children. "We don't know whether we're going to live or die. But this is the killing fields. We don't want to take our kids. It's not fair," Setan says.

This time, the couple decided to try their luck going through Laos. They had been refused visas for Cambodia, but they went anyway. They'd gotten that far. They couldn't go back without trying.

At the border, they told the Cambodian officials they had come to search for relatives. And they said they were Christians, come to spread the message of Jesus Christ.

But to the government authorities, Christians from the United States meant only one thing: Randa and Setan must be CIA agents. They were taken into custody and detained in the capital city of Phnom Penh under house arrest.

For the first time in 10 years, Randa and Setan were home, only to find themselves prisoners again.


Mission of Faith

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."


Slaves to Sex Trade

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Women in garish red lipstick lean against doorways or lounge on the porches of flimsy, wooden shacks, the rooms beyond dimly lit in red.

In twos and threes, they line the dirt road in the notorious Tuol Kok brothel district, flirting and calling to the steady stream of men.

On this Friday night in November, the city is crowded with hundreds of thousands of spectators and athletes here for the annual water festival and boat races. Boatmen, most from rural villages, roam Tuol Kok, known as a place where sex is cheap, just a dollar or two.

Health organizations blame the three-day festival for the spread of an AIDS epidemic that has hit Cambodia harder than any other Southeast Asian country. The HIV infection rate for adults hovers at 3 percent, compared with 0.3 percent in the U.S. Among Cambodia's estimated 50,000 prostitutes, the rate runs as high as 40 percent.

It is prostitutes such as these in Tuol Kok whom Setan and Randa Lee had in mind when they opened their women's center north of Phnom Penh five years ago.

So on a Saturday morning, Setan walks into a weather-beaten shack to invite three women to visit the center.

Na Lin, 36, became a prostitute to support her two children. But she paid an enormous price: Na was infected with HIV about four years ago.

Her old customers no longer visit her for sex. "Sometimes they just drop by and give me 1,000 riel (25 cents). Or if they have a big party, they bring leftover food."

Mom Sok, 30, came to the capital in 1999 to flee a husband who beat and raped her, but she had to leave her 4-year-old daughter behind with her sister. A friend who offered to get Mom a job at a restaurant instead sold her to a brothel owner.

"At first I refused to have sex," says Mom, who has a third-grade education and few job prospects. "But I had no money for my daughter."

Matter of factly, Leap Sok, 21, says she had four customers last night. A couple of years ago, Leap was kidnapped and sold into prostitution in Thailand. Eventually one of her customers helped her return to Cambodia. "I do the same work here, though," she says.

The three women climb aboard Setan's truck for the 11/2-hour ride to see the center.

Compared with the squalor of Tuol Kok, the women's center seems like paradise - serene, lush and clean. Flowers, cashew trees and palm trees dot the property.

Na, Mom and Leap tour the center and learn about the sewing and cosmetology classes. "We take care of everything . . . ," Setan tells them - food, medical care, all the necessities.

"I love how beautiful it is here," Mom says. "It was always my dream to live in a place with beautiful trees."

The trip tires Na after a while, so the women return to Tuol Kok, agreeing to come back to the center after the water festival and after they have visited their families.

"I feel lucky to meet you all," Na says. "It's destiny."

That night, Na and Mom stand on the side of the road in Tuol Kok. Another woman joins them. They say they are getting ready to go to water festival events. But as they wait, Mom works hard to catch the eye of the men passing by on foot or on motorbikes. Leap is back at the brothel.

A few days later, when the three women show up at Setan's office in Phnom Penh, they are turned away by security guards uncertain about what to do. The same happens a second time, a few weeks later. The women haven't been seen since.

"I'm disappointed in our own organization," Setan says. "Staff was not trained to know what to do. It was a lack of management on our part.

"We try our best. We are disappointed sometimes."


Haggling for Freedom

KAMPONG THOM, Cambodia - Three pastors walk into a brothel, looking for prostitutes.

But their business isn't the customary kind.

Setan Lee, a Cambodian-born minister from Aurora, and two colleagues have come to buy the freedom of six prostitutes, to give them a new start at a women's center founded by Setan and his wife, Randa.

On a late morning in November, the pastors arrive at the brothel outside this town northeast of the center to pick up the women.

One of the ministers, Sinoeun Chea, had negotiated the deal three days earlier.

Armed with a letter from town authorities granting him permission to visit the local brothels, Sinoeun had told the owner he was recruiting women who wanted to get out of prostitution.

The owner had agreed to let him talk to the prostitutes, and six decided to go.

Sinoeun had taken detailed notes: their names, ages, whatever background they shared and the amounts of money they said they owed the owner. Sinoeun and the owner had struck a bargain: $120 for all six women.

Now Sinoeun is back to pay the money, sign the contract and take the women to the Christian center, where they will be housed, fed and taken care of while learning job skills.

Sinoeun had told the truth to the brothel owner, but that's just one technique the ministers have used in five years of trying to help prostitutes.

Sometimes a minister poses as a pimp or a brothel owner and negotiates to buy a prostitute who has no idea what's going on. The woman finds out only later that her new "pimp" is taking her to a different life in a safe place.

Sometimes the pastor recruits the women in secret, then poses as a pimp to make the deal with the brothel owner.

"If a girl owes $100, maybe the pimp will sell her for $200. Sometimes we can get older girls for very little," Setan says.

"These are lower-class brothels. Often the women start in Phnom Penh. They come (to smaller towns) after they've been there a while, when they can't get as much money. The women are older, and they're not as attractive anymore. And the brothel owner wants new girls to keep the customers interested."

Bargaining to rescue lives

On a dusty road just outside town, the brothel sits between two others just like it: unpainted wooden shacks, dirt floors, plastic chairs.

Women sit outside chatting and eating. Flies buzz around a tub full of dishes crusted with rice and scraps of meat and vegetables. Small children in need of baths run helter skelter. About a dozen men, young women and children sit in chairs or on the floor watching TV in one room. A narrow hallway, crowded with clothes, plastic toys and a bicycle, leads to the women's cramped rooms. On this hot morning, the place smells of sweat, urine and rotting food.

Sinoeun can't find the deal-maker from three days ago.

Out of nowhere, three women walk up and confront the ministers. They represent Cambodian Women for Peace and Development, a nongovernmental organization, or NGO. They had heard that Setan's organization, Kampuchea for Christ, was coming this morning. Who told them isn't clear. They demand to know details of the organization and what these three men are planning.

Everyone drags plastic chairs into a semicircle. One of the NGO women pulls out a notebook. Sinoeun shows them his official authorization and explains his mission.

"They want to make sure we're legitimate," Setan says.

Just as pastors pretend to be pimps, sometimes pimps pretend to be pastors.

Suddenly a woman who has been sitting off to the side starts shouting.

"Talk to me," she shrieks. "I don't know what's going on, but I'm in charge here. My husband is not in charge. The girls you want are not here. I don't know where they are."

She says she is Polly Chan, 28, the brothel owner. She is also the mother of the eight youngsters racing around.

It's not uncommon in Cambodia for women to own and run the brothels.

Polly's husband, apparently without her knowledge, had negotiated the deal with Sinoeun while she was away.

And she's not happy about it. Or the amount they settled on.

"If they want to go, you have to let them go," an NGO woman warns her. "You can't keep them here."

Three of the prostitutes who had told Sinoeun they wanted to go to the women's center appear outside, but Polly says the other three have vanished.

The prostitutes charge 10,000 riel, or $2.50, for each man they have sex with. They give Polly half, and they borrow from her when they need money.

Polly pulls out a small, worn notebook. On dirty sheets of torn paper, the prostitutes have set their thumbprints in red ink, and Polly has written their names, the dates and amounts they borrowed, and what they bought.

"See?" She holds the book out for inspection. "Whatever the girls want, I give them. But they have to pay it back. They need to buy clothes and jewelry so they look good for the customers."

According to her book, this is what the women owe her:

Srey Oun Sim: 90,000 riel, or $22.50.

Dalin Chea: 249,000 riel, or $62.25.

Sokha Ud, the most at 309,000 riel, or $77.25:

$22.50 - for her parents

$8 - red pants

$5 - two pants

$2.50 - shirt

$3 - blouse

$7.50 - shirt and pants

$2.50 - pants

$2.50 - scarf

$6.25 - three shirts

$5 - blouses

$12.50 - watch

Desperation and trickery

Setan acknowledges the irony of bargaining for human life to save women who are, as he says, slaves - sometimes literally, sometimes by debt and sometimes by their belief that they have no other choice.

He and Randa grapple with the moral and ethical issues. Is misrepresenting themselves for a higher purpose justified? Is it right to pay a brothel owner who will only use the money to buy more prostitutes?

"It's a very big concern for Randa and me," Setan says. "It's so hard to pay a brothel owner."

But they believe they should do whatever they must to free these women.

"Sometimes there is no other way to get the girl out who wants to come," Setan says.

The three women at this brothel have typical stories.

Srey, 24, became a prostitute a little over a year ago because she was desperate for money and had nowhere else to go.

Dalin, 21, is divorced. She turned to prostitution to support her two children, who live with their grandmother.

Sokha, 26, says she was was tricked by her boyfriend into becoming a prostitute.

The women retreat to their rooms to pack up.

"These three girls are the only girls I have," Polly wails over the din of the TV, the other conversations and her screaming children. "They are all leaving me."

In the confusion, at first nobody notices two other young women who show up at the brothel. When Setan sees them, he ushers them to a quiet corner.

Meanwhile, a vexed Sinoeun argues with Polly over the amount she is demanding. He shows her his notes. She shows him her notebook. They add up the figures again.

Sinoeun calls for the prostitutes so he can straighten out some things with them.

"When I first came to ask you how much you owed, what you told me is very different from what you owe now," he says. "I don't trust what you are saying to me."

To Dalin, he says: "First it was 80,000 riel. But now you are saying 249,000?

"This is a huge difference in what we planned. It's just a huge disparity."

Frustrated and angry, he walks away to talk to the third pastor, Hoeun Lao. The women gather around the brothel owner, chattering.

"It's too expensive," Sinoeun says to Hoeun. "We can't afford to go ahead with it."

The ministers speculate that the women spent more money after they made the deal with Sinoeun. It's a safe bet that many items in the notebook are fabricated. The ministers also begin to suspect that the prostitutes and the brothel owner are in cahoots. Maybe Polly has told the women that if they run back to the brothel in a few days, she'll split the money with them.

It wouldn't be the first time Setan's group has been cheated. Just recently, the ministers bought four prostitutes for $600 and took them to the women's center. Three days later, the women disappeared. The staff found them back at their brothel.

"They manipulated us," says Setan, still angry at the betrayal.

Besides the ethical issues in paying for prostitutes' freedom, these financial obstacles are sometimes equally troublesome.

"That's another reason we have to find other ways to get the girls out besides paying the pimps and brothel owners," Setan says.

While Polly sits fuming, Sinoeun and Hoeun stand by the truck, whispering as they pore over Sinoeun's notes, calculating, adding, subtracting. They agree that the owner is using the women to get more money. And they just don't have it. But they hate to leave empty-handed.

Finally they make an agonizing decision: They will take the two women who owe the least. They will have to leave behind the third woman, Sokha.

Meanwhile, the two women who had been talking to Setan climb into the back of the truck. One is a prostitute from another brothel in town. The other has escaped a brothel where she was being held prisoner because she refused to become a prostitute. They both want to go the women's center.

Communication breakdown

The deal with Polly isn't a deal until a contract is signed, protecting the pastors from accusations of stealing the women.

The pastors take the handwritten agreement to a small wooden table outside, ready at last to close the deal. But as Sinoeun begins to sign it, three things occur almost simultaneously.

A woman from the brothel next door approaches Sinoeun and whispers to him that it's a bad arrangement - she had overheard the three prostitutes plotting with the owner.

Then the three prostitutes tell the pastors they have made a decision: Unless all three go, none will go.

And Polly announces loudly that she has changed her mind. She wants twice as much for each woman, or no deal.

This time, there's no hesitation. Sinoeun, looking defeated, slowly folds up the agreement and puts it in his pocket. He makes a last appeal to the three prostitutes. "If you change your mind and you want to come, you can call me anytime."

After an hour and a half of failed negotiations, the ministers pile into the truck and drive away.

But it's not a total loss. They've recruited two women they didn't even know about, without spending a cent.

They've also learned a valuable lesson. Next time they make a deal, they'll be more skeptical, and they won't delay it. They'll take the prostitutes right away.

"We learn as we go," Setan says. "We make mistakes. Some things don't work.

"We're dealing with life, with human beings. There are a lot of things we can't control."

At the brothel, owner Polly Chan sits silently in the doorway. The prostitute Srey watches the truck until it turns a bend and disappears from view.


Seeking Sanctuary

KAMPONG CHNANG, Cambodia - One woman hopes to escape her past. The other is running from a dangerous future.

But on this rain-soaked November evening as they arrive at Setan and Randa Lee's women's center, they face only a warm welcome. The most difficult choice Nane Chan and Son Put must make tonight is to pick a bunk bed in a dormitory.

Setan and pastor Hoeun Lao have brought the women from a town a five-hour drive away. Nane and Son had showed up unannounced at a brothel where the Christian ministers were negotiating a failed bid to buy six prostitutes' freedom. The two women had asked to come to the center.

Director Phally Mam, 49, and manager Lyn Kit, 23, greet them. Son is curious and asks questions, while Nane is quiet, wary, frowning. Her face is puffy, and she looks exhausted.

In one of the two dormitories, Nane sits on the bed with the director as they chat quietly.

"If you have any needs here, you just ask Lyn or me," Phally says. "If you're sick, just let us know. There's no need to hide anything."

Phally doesn't push for information. Tonight is for introductions, a bath to wash off the long day. And sleep.

For now, Phally invites Nane and Son to meet the students, who have gathered in the other dorm after dinner and evening devotions.

Among these 24 who have been at the center since early fall, there are, for the first time in the center's history, no prostitutes. Recruited from remote villages, they appeared to be at high risk of turning to prostitution if they didn't learn a trade. Most are illiterate and unskilled. Many have parents who are ill or dead.

Nane stands silently against a wall, arms crossed, as the women tease each other and giggle, looking shyly her way, interested in their new classmate. They welcome Son, too, who is eager to join in.

The students invite Nane and Son to watch television in Phally's room. Nane sits a little apart, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette.

Smoking is prohibited, but Phally keeps quiet. She knows when to enforce a rule and when to let it go.

Days begin early for women

Mornings begin in the gray light before dawn at the New Development Center.

The simple tan buildings, with their high ceilings and large windows, are cool and inviting.

In addition to the two dorms, there is a building with a kitchen and dining hall. The two-story main building houses classrooms and offices. Construction has begun on another dormitory-classroom building and a two-story guesthouse.

An old-fashioned school bell clangs at 5 a.m., some days awakening even the roosters.

The students rise sleepily from their bunk beds. It's not long before they are running laps, giggling and racing each other, their flip-flops slapping the dirt. After five, maybe six times around the grounds, they wash up, clean their rooms, straighten the bamboo mats on their bunk beds, sweep and mop the floors.

Cambodian pop music floats from a CD player as the sun comes up.

Dogs bark.

At 6:15, precisely, the bell rings again for devotion in the dining hall, where the women take turns reading Bible verses in Khmer from the podium as the others follow along. The cook takes a brief break from her breakfast chores to join them in prayer. They sing as Phally prays, head uplifted, eyes closed, arms outstretched, palms facing toward heaven.

Sometimes their songs compete with music from loudspeakers at a Buddhist temple down the road.

For most of these young women raised as Buddhists - if they were raised with any religion at all - this is their first experience with Christianity. Randa and Setan say the students are "encouraged" but not required to attend the daily devotions and Bible study.

"I want them to have a life of Christ, but I don't want to force them to believe what I believe," Randa says. "I just want to give them the option."

The religious study also is part of the discipline of the day's schedule, she says. "We want to teach them to learn to obey the rules and regulations of the school."

Sometimes Setan teases the young women who don't go to devotion. "But they get shy and say they want to take a nap or talk to each other. So we don't make them go.

"We do share with them. And we tell them that whatever happens, God will protect them and provide for them. He will give them comfort and peace."

The devotion completed, the women quickly turn their makeshift chapel into a dining room again, carrying steaming bowls of chicken soup from the primitive kitchen. The cook works magic on a two-burner portable gas stove. Electricity runs from a generator, but only from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., so there's not even a refrigerator.

The women eat quickly without much chatter.

They are in their classrooms at 7:30 a.m.

Overcoming a hard life

The morning after Son and Nane arrive, Phally seeks out each of them to learn their backgrounds.

As she makes her way through the day, she jokes with the students, comforts a puppy that had been attacked by a larger dog, consoles a young woman worried about her family and admonishes another who hasn't completed a chore. She dresses professionally in crisp blouses and skirts, and she passes hugs around at will.

She's learned to be patient, and the women almost always wind up confiding in her.

Nane, 26, says her hard life started early. The youngest of seven, she was barely a toddler when her mother left her father for another man. Nane stayed with her father, helping him tend their cows.

"I was 5 years old when I started smoking," she says to explain her persistent cough. "I'd herd the cows and smoke."

She never attended school. "My father couldn't afford it."

She grew into a big-boned woman, lacking the delicacy of many Cambodian women. Married briefly at 16, she had a baby who died two days after it was born.

When her father died five years ago, Nane went to live with her mother, but she didn't stay for long.

"My stepfather was very cruel. He beat my mother," Nane says. "The only time he was nice to me is when he wanted money."

Nane eked out a living doing odd jobs. But she couldn't do much. Something had happened to her left arm after she had her baby, leaving her left hand paralyzed. She couldn't afford to see a doctor.

The paralysis makes any type of labor difficult.

She talked to a friend from her village who worked in a brothel in Kampong Thom. "I never wanted to be a prostitute," Nane says. "But how can I eat if I don't do something to earn a living?"

In some respects, the brothel wasn't a bad place. She got along with the other women. The owner didn't force anything on her.

She sometimes made 20,000 riel, about $5, in a day. She gave half to the owner and kept the occasional tips of 50 or 75 cents.

Sometimes, though, she made nothing. Nane squirms a little. "I didn't make a lot of money because sometimes when a man told me to take off my clothes, he'd see my hand. It would disgust him and he'd leave."

When she heard about the women's center, she saw a chance at a new beginning. She owed no money to the brothel, so she just walked away.

Running from slavery

Son Put didn't walk away. She ran for dear life.

When the 19-year-old showed up at the brothel in Kampong Thom, she had only recently escaped from another brothel nearby where she had been locked up for a day and a half.

She had gone to the first brothel because a friend said her boss needed someone to do housecleaning, and Son was desperate to help her parents, who were scraping by as farm laborers.

But Son learned she had been sold to the brothel owner, who locked her in a room and tried to force her to put on makeup and dress up. She refused.

Luckily for Son, a prostitute unlocked her door and helped her escape.

Son then cooked and cleaned for a family in exchange for room and board, but no pay. Later, a brothel owner in Kampong Thom offered to hire her to cook. But cooks aren't merely cooks for long at brothels.

Son had heard about a group of Christian ministers who helped women, and when she saw Setan at Polly Chan's brothel, she asked to go with them to the center.

Polly, watching Son climb into Setan's truck to head for the center, had remarked wryly: "There's a fish that got away."

"I want to work, but I don't have any skills," says Son, who never finished first grade. "I don't want to be a prostitute."

A taste of learning

Son and Nane must choose whether to join the sewing or cosmetology classes.

Upstairs in the sewing classrooms, a few of the 16 women in the class work at the manual sewing machines, while others sit on the balcony sewing hems on pant legs or watching their instructor fix an incorrectly cut sleeve. One young woman irons a hem with an ancient-looking iron.

Son and Nane decide to attend the cosmetology class downstairs. Phally joins them.

Bible verses in Khmer decorate the otherwise stark white walls. The women take turns doing each other's hair and makeup and nails in front of the mirrors at the carved wood tables. Randa bought all the equipment. Most of the supplies are donated. The women work quietly, coaxing neat sections of hair onto rollers, patting on foundation or applying eye shadow or nail polish.

With experienced students guiding her, Son puts Nane's hair in rollers, then combs it out and watches intently as a student shows her how to roll up the sides. When Nane disappears to take a nap, Son gets the full treatment: hair, makeup and a manicure.

Phally praises Son as a quick study.

"She's doing really well, better than the others when they first started."

Son says she'd like to have her own shop and do makeup for weddings. She already seems more carefree, hopeful. She's making friends. "I like it here," she says. "Everyone is doing things. It makes me happy."

But Nane is worried. "I'm afraid I won't be able to do anything because of my hand. I can't use it at all," she says, struggling just to lift her arm to her chest. "I'm afraid I won't be able to do the course."

Chattering young women

When classes are over at 4:30, the women have free time - to do laundry, sit and talk, perhaps bathe in one of the secluded areas outside where they scoop water from a large clay pot. There are no showers or tubs.

The plumbing is minimal. Each dormitory has a squat toilet. A separate building houses a couple of others.

Many of the women are in their late teens, but they tease and play as younger girls do: grimacing in mock horror at each other's armpits, squealing and running from a pair of ill-tempered geese. They feed the small monkey that Phally keeps tied to a rope near her room. (She had set it free, but the monkey came back to her.)

Some of the women gather on the steps outside with Nane and Son. When someone discovers that Nane might have lice, a young woman offers to pick through her hair. Phally joins them to find out a little more about the new students.

Phally says later that she is concerned about Nane. "She's having a hard time. Son is reaching out, and it's easier for her to meet the girls than it is for Nane."

After dinner, the women help wash the dishes and clean up. At 7, they line up chairs in the dining hall and divide into teams for devotion, taking turns at the podium as those who can read follow along in the Bibles they share, all under Phally's watchful eye. They stand and recite the Lord's Prayer in Khmer.

With devotion over, they put away the chairs and straggle off to their dorms, wash their hair or crowd into Phally's room for TV before going to bed.

At night, two male guards take turns patrolling the center until dawn. A 10-foot-high concrete wall helps keep out intruders, too.

Because of the stigma attached to prostitutes, the center keeps a low profile. It's one reason for the intentionally vague name: The New Development Center.

The area is sparsely populated, but it's inevitable that word gets out.

"The community looks down on these girls," Setan says.

The concern for their safety is real.

Not long after the center opened, a gang of men with guns broke in, dragged some of the women outside and raped them.

"One of the women had AIDS," Setan says. His voice hardens a little. "She died . . . "

Living for the successes

By late November, Setan has returned to Aurora and Randa makes her first visit to the women's center in two years.

Randa learns from the staff that Nane had grown increasingly uncomfortable in her first few weeks there.

Nane complained constantly that she was ill. She insisted that she had malaria, but when Lyn took her to the hospital, the doctors found nothing.

Nane smoked all the time, despite the no-smoking rule. She refused to eat with the others. She didn't want to get up and go to class.

Every morning, she asked the staff and other students for money.

By the time Randa arrived, Nane had run away.

Staff members found her where they often find runaway prostitutes - back at the brothel she had left.

Randa is frustrated, a little fed up. How do you help somebody who doesn't want or know how to help herself?

"I want to make sure all the girls have the right care. I want to make sure we don't favor some girls over others.

"Some girls need more help. Some are lazy. Some don't know how to do anything.

"I want them to learn to take initiative. They have to learn how to solve problems, to make the right decisions."

But Randa doesn't allow herself disappointment. As she has done her entire life, she pins her hopes on the successes. "With the small amount of resources we have, at least we saved some lives," she says.

Sharing a dark secret

Although Son loves the center, she weeps every night at first, worried about how her parents are surviving without her help.

She grows frustrated when the more advanced tasks don't come easily to her.

"She's slower than the rest of the girls," Randa says. "She's depressed because she can't learn as quickly. But she started later than the rest of them."

To reassure her that her parents are surviving, Randa and the staff take her home to her village on Christmas Day. "They were surprised and happy to see her," Randa says. "She told us they wanted her to go back to the center and learn some skills."

But even after her visit home, she cries constantly.

In early January, Randa comes home to Aurora, and Setan returns to Cambodia. When he sees Son again, she tells Setan that she wants to go home, that her parents need her.

Finally, Setan learns that Son has harbored a dark secret.

Son's original story that a friend tricked her into the brothel was a lie.

"We learned that Son had been sold by her parents," Setan says. "Probably for $40 or $50.

"These girls are so innocent, so naïve. They have no idea they have to become prostitutes. They only know they have to make money to help their families."

Setan spends some time with Son, trying to help her make a good decision.

You can go back to be with your parents, but what is your plan to make an income? Setan asks Son.

She tells him she doesn't have a plan.

How will you make money to support your family?

Son starts to cry. She doesn't know.

Setan is frank: If you go back, you could end up being a prostitute. If you stay, your parents won't get any money while you're here. But they've survived so far. They can survive a little longer.

If you stay, you will learn a skill, then you will be able to make money.

Son decides to stay.

Setan hopes she will learn sewing and be part of his new plan for teams of young women to work in garment factories.

And Son thrives. She smiles and seems more at peace now, Setan says. She is more patient with herself as she struggles with new skills.

"She has become a very happy girl," Setan says.


"We Can't Save Them All"

KAMPONG CHNANG, Cambodia - The outspoken prostitute walks into the women's center with a purse full of surprises.

Boeun Long has come to find out more about this place built by Setan and Randa Lee, to see if it holds any promise of a better life for her and her 16-year-old daughter.

She introduces herself to Setan and the other staff members, who pull up chairs outside a dormitory to chat. Boeun, with her hair pulled back and no makeup, wears a soiled, pink gauze blouse, a black skirt and dusty sandals. She's confident and outgoing, but she's a little frayed this afternoon.

Boeun quickly takes over the conversation. As she talks, she begins pulling out the contents of her purse: a photo album, a certificate in a plastic bag, a package of condoms.

And there's one more thing in the purse. With a twinkle in her eye, Boeun nonchalantly pulls out a penis carved of dark wood, on a stand made from the same wood. She plops it on her lap, talking nonstop. The group sits back, eyes a little wider, slightly embarrassed, bemused.

Some of the staff steal furtive glances at the carving. Others concentrate on Boeun's face as she tells them about herself.

A freelance prostitute for about two years - she doesn't stay at one particular brothel - Boeun says she has been certified by a women's nongovernmental organization to visit brothels to teach about AIDS and safe sex. The NGO pays her 3,000 riel, or about 75 cents, for each visit. The certificate is from the NGO. The condoms and carving are for demonstration purposes.

Setan and the staff are relieved by her explanation. But their chuckles die as Boeun begins to tell her story.

She had an abusive husband and eight children, including two sets of twins. Three children have died. Her husband was a drunk who cheated on her and beat her, Boeun says. "All he wanted was sex."

She finally left with three of the children and wound up two years ago in Kampong Chnang, near the women's center.

"I came here with not even a penny in my pocket," Boeun says. "I was desperate."

She found work in a karaoke shop - another front for prostitution - and began her life in the sex trade.

Now, Boeun goes from brothel to brothel - she says there are about 30 in Kampong Chnang province - doing makeup for prostitutes and teaching them about AIDS.

"If a man comes in and wants me, I'll have sex with him," she says. "This town isn't very big. Sometimes it's only one or two a day, sometimes one every two days. There's a lot of competition."

"A lot of men now are looking for older women," says Boeun, who is 32 but looks older. "They're looking for character, experience. Even though I'm no longer young, I can please them."

Boeun's children are her biggest concern. Her sons are 14 and 15, but her 16-year-old daughter, Leakhana Hi, worries her most.

"I'm not ashamed to tell people I'm a prostitute. I just want to see my children grow up healthy, so I'll do whatever I need to do.

"But I'm afraid my daughter may become like me.

"Sometimes all I get is 2,000 riel (50 cents) from a man. Some men are completely drunk. They stink. They throw up all over my face, all over my body. They fall asleep on top of me. It's very painful. When you do it like this, you have no pleasure. It's just painful, painful misery."

She wants to come to the center "today - I don't even want to wait another day."

But she can't. How will she support her children?

She can't afford to send them to school. Instead, they cook rice every day and put it in plastic bags to sell in the village.

Boeun invites Setan and the staff to meet her daughter, so they all pile into Setan's gray pickup truck for the ride.

In the village, Boeun's daughter seasons and roasts frogs and pig ears over a makeshift stove, fashioned from a piece of rusty metal. The air is smoky and pungent as people crowd around the food. Leakhana and her mother work side by side, putting the meat on sticks and talking softly to each other.

"She likes to cook," Boeun says proudly. "A lot of the sex workers from the brothels come here and ask her to cook for them."

Boeun's children stay with a 76-year-old widower and his grandson. Boeun pays them what rent she can and shares her food with them.

Boeun impresses Setan. "She speaks with conviction," he says.

He tells her they must find a solution for her, and they say goodbye reluctantly. Setan isn't sure she will return to the women's center.

Once again, children are the sticking point. Setan and his staff know they must solve that dilemma.

"Their average need is $20, $30 a month. That's it," Setan says. "If we could provide training for them and income for their kids, they'd all come to the center today."

Or as Boeun put it earlier: "This place would be packed with prostitutes."

A test of wills

Within days, Boeun leaves the boys with the widower and shows up at the center with her daughter, Leakhana. Setan will try to find a way to pay Boeun as the center's liaison with the brothels in Kampong Chnang.

Leakhana, who enrolls in the cosmetology classes, delights the staff with her ready smile and eager interest. She latches onto Son Put, the young woman who had found Setan after escaping from a brothel. They make quite a pair: petite, delicate Leakhana next to taller, sturdier Son.

But it's not long before Boeun begins to bristle at the rules. By late November, Setan has gone home to Colorado and Randa has arrived at the center. She finds herself in the middle of a test of wills between Boeun and Phally Mam, the center director.

Phally tells Boeun she must quit smoking, quit drinking alcohol and quit going back to the brothels to have sex for pay if she wants to stay at the center.

The battle goes to the heart of what Randa is trying to instill in the women. Her vision is not just about work skills, health and hygiene.

It's about courage, self-respect and dignity. A measure of control over their lives. Principles of morality.

As Setan says, "We teach life, not just a trade. I want them to be able to stand on their own. To know they have value."

To no one's surprise, Boeun decides to leave. But she asks Randa to let Leakhana stay and complete her training. Randa gladly agrees.

If the mother is lost to them, there's still hope for the daughter.

Catching them early

Reaching young women at risk of falling into prostitution is a new strategy the center adopted last fall when it recruited 24 young women from remote villages with the help of World Vision, an international Christian humanitarian agency that focuses on poor children.

The women are uneducated and unskilled, barely able to make enough money to eat. Many, like Sinane Lun, 18, are orphans.

Three years ago, Sinane lost both of her parents to AIDS - they died within three months of each other. The youngest of the family's five children also died of AIDS. Sinane's father had contracted HIV in Thailand, where he drove a taxi for a year.

After her parents died, Sinane moved in with her grandmother and an aunt. She collected firewood or did other labor for about a dollar a day. With only a third-grade education, she can read, but she can't write very well.

When the people from World Vision came to her village, she didn't hesitate to take them up on their offer.

Now Sinane has discovered her passion. She has a knack for sewing, and she loves making what Cambodians call "modern clothing." She tries to keep up with the latest fashions and designs clothing in a notebook filled with carefully drawn patterns for shirts, pants and jackets.

She has made close friends. She has unearthed a talent that the staff has nurtured and encouraged. She hopes to get a sewing machine eventually, and make clothes to sell at the markets in her village. Or perhaps she could work in a garment factory in a city.

Sinane is poised for a more productive and creative life than she ever knew was possible.

She hangs on tightly to her notebook and her new dream. "I like everything about sewing," she says. "I like everything here."

Buying and fixing

On her first trip to the women's center in two years, Randa has her work cut out for her.

She has barely settled in for her visit in late November when she learns that half the sewing machines are broken. Eight machines for 16 students just won't do.

She figures out what's wrong, goes to Phnom Penh to buy the parts, and, with the help of one of the center's guards, repairs every one of the broken machines.

"It cost me $30," she says, a little frustrated. "And" - she emphasizes the word - "I bought a button-holer and a part to make seams."

While Setan imagines the future of the women's center on a grand scale - adding buildings, buying more land, expanding to accommodate 500 women some day - Randa rolls up her sleeves.

Setan travels the world, attracts financial backing, has the cell phone number for Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen - and isn't afraid to use it to cut through red tape. He's working on opening a Battambang branch of the women's center, where students could live while attending the trade school.

"I'm the big dreamer," Setan says. "Randa is the doer."

With her own money, as well as donations from friends and supporters, Randa heads out to buy blankets, sheets, pillows and mattresses for all the bunk beds in the dorms. She piles them onto the Kampuchea for Christ pickup truck and drives the whole lot back to the center. She buys an extra-large rice cooker and a stove with an oven to replace the kitchen's little kerosene two-burner.

Always conscious of propriety, she installs a clothesline behind the dorms. "Not in front," she says. "I want the place to always look nice." She wants to make sure the students have a proper shower, too.

Randa coordinates management when she's there - and even when she's not. She installs a computer program at the center that makes it easier to keep track of the women after they leave. The girls have no telephones or addresses, so follow-up visits must be done in person.

Randa wants to find more experienced teachers. She wants a stricter schedule. She wants students to stay longer if they haven't mastered the needed skills in six months. She wants to find volunteers who will stay for a year to teach reading, writing, computer training, English.

"I wish I could go two times a year," Randa says.

Setan wishes Randa could be the full-time coordinator.

In the five years that the center has been open, Setan and Randa and their staff are still finding their way.

They know they must do more to help the women become self-sufficient once they leave.

During his last trip, Setan met with an American factory owner in Sihanoukville and a Korean factory owner in Phnom Penh. He toured their plants and came away impressed with the conditions, the hours and the pay. "These are not sweatshops," Setan says.

He is working on a deal with them to hire women trained at the center. Teams of four will live together, share expenses, support each other and perhaps have money to send home. Setan will hire a staff member to help and keep an eye on them.

Students who prefer staying in their villages talk about finding a place together where they can live and earn money sewing. The sewing instructor will hire some to help in her business.

The center can't yet afford to provide cosmetology supplies or sewing machines - which cost $55 to $75 - when the women leave. Setan is searching for donors.

The cosmetology instructor has established a wedding service. She takes some of the young women to a bride's home to dress her in clothing provided by the center and do hair and makeup for her and her bridesmaids. "This is very popular in Cambodia," Setan says.

The Lees remind each other when their dreams exceed their means. "We can only do so much," Setan says.

It is Randa's perpetual lament: "We can't save them all."

Waiting at the gate

Leakhana misses her mother. Every day after class, she stands at the center's entrance gate and cries, waiting in vain for Boeun to come. But the girl never asks permission to visit Boeun.

"She didn't want her mother to go back to her old ways," Randa says. "And if she doesn't get some skills, she's going to end up just like her mother."

But Leakhana is smart, Randa says, and it helps that she has just turned 17. Randa is coming to understand that the odds of success are greater if the girls are "in their teens - ideally 13 to 15 years old."

When they're older and have been on their own for a long time, "sometimes they're just too set in their ways."

When Setan returns to the center in January, he has changed his mind about Boeun.

"She told us different stories," Setan says. "I don't trust her. I know she said she didn't want her daughter to become like her, but I'm afraid she'll sell her daughter to be a prostitute."

With the bright-eyed, happy Leakhana, however, he is smitten. "She is so precious," says Setan.

So his "selfish plan," as he calls it, is to keep Leakhana at the center another year, until she turns 18. She tells him she loves it there and never wants to leave.

Maybe in a year, they can hire her as a part-time staff member or at the new medical facility that Setan hopes to have built near the center by then.

"I feel that little girl is my daughter. She has the brightest smile," he says.

Randa has gone back home to tend to their own children, 19-year-old Ben and 14-year-old Sandra, in a world separated by far more than miles, where the Lee children are surrounded by caring, comfort and security.

It is a world that the Lees, especially Setan, often must leave behind to help save their fellow Cambodians, as Randa says, "one by one."

They have paid a price to keep their vow.

"It's a family commitment, a family sacrifice," Setan says. "It's not easy. But we believe in what we are doing."


A Future Built on Courage

Setan Lee travels so much in his Christian ministry that his suitcase has a permanent place in the entryway when he's home.

Everybody just steps around the luggage without thinking. But adjusting to Setan's long absences as a father and husband has been more complicated, and each member of the family has handled it differently.

His wife, Randa, is the keystone. She has been breadwinner, head of the household, and mother and father to their two children - once enduring three years without Setan being home. She has made an American life for her family in Aurora while sending her husband halfway around the world to carry out the work they both vowed to do for their native Cambodia. Only now and then has she been able to do it herself.

Yet she knows they made the right choice.

"God called him to do his work, and I'm going to sacrifice myself to let him go. I'm going to handle this," Randa says.

Their son Ben, 19, has grown up apart from his father, often left to rely on his grandfather and uncles for the guidance a father would give. But Setan's dedication also gave Ben his own sense of duty to help others. And Ben found a dream of his own after years of saying goodbye at airports and wishing he could fly his father around the world himself - he wants to be a pilot.

Ben's sister, Sandra, has learned the comfort of a close-knit extended family, too. She has witnessed her mother's devotion to her children, her willingness to make sacrifices for a cause greater than herself. At 14, Sandra already shows glimmers of her mother's grace and humor, as well as her commitment to helping the less fortunate.

A mission of healing

Setan, 47, who long ago dreamed of a life as a doctor, does healing of another kind now.

He's in Cambodia two or three times a year for months at a time, managing the organization he founded in 1995, Kampuchea for Christ. He trains Christian leaders and oversees the trade school, the orphanage and the women's center where prostitutes - or young women at risk of taking that path - can learn a new way of life. He evangelizes, too, offering spiritual healing to former Khmer Rouge soldiers by converting them into the service of Christ.

When Setan isn't in Cambodia, he's usually traveling the world explaining his work - in Russia, Africa, Europe, China, Japan, Korea. And Canada, where he admits to being something of a celebrity on Christian television stations.

"I'm very popular in Canada right now," he says with a sort of wonder that his message has such power. The last time he was there, more than 5,000 people lined up to talk to him after his speech, he says. He shook hands for more than three hours before his hosts rescued him.

In the U.S., he spends as much time in Washington, Texas, Florida or Virginia "giving testimony," as he calls it, as he does in Colorado - where he long ago planted the first seeds of support, which still flourish.

Though his organization relies solely on donations, Setan says he rarely asks directly for money when he speaks. "I give the facts to people," he says. "I share the testimony of what is happening in Cambodia, our work in the ministry. I say, 'Put yourself in their shoes. I'm not going to answer for you. You have your own answer.'

"People in this country have enough intelligence. But their heart is half-empty. I speak from the heart to the heart."

Setan personifies "absolute devotion and dedication," says his friend, Jim Groen, president of Global Connection International, where Randa works part-time. The Christian humanitarian agency, based in Greenwood Village, is a major contributor to the Lees' projects. "He has come through these horrific experiences," Groen says. "He has the potential of a great leader."

A good husband

When Setan is back home with Randa, though, he has more potential as a dishwasher and grocery shopper.

"I don't know how to cook," Setan says with a smile. "I do whatever Randa tells me to do. I wash the dishes. I clean the house. If she goes to the market, she likes me to come along. We pick things out together."

Randa, 41, praises Setan for such non-Cambodian behavior. "In Cambodian culture," she says, "men don't do anything. Setan is a good husband, even when he's not here."

Sometimes he just stands at the kitchen counter and talks to her while she prepares dinner, the rice cooker going, as it does every day, all day, the air fragrant with the smell of steamed chicken and stir-fried vegetables.

For two people who spend as much time apart as Randa and Setan do, they know each other's lives, asking a small detail about this event or that person, or, as many couples do, finishing each other's sentences.

They try to make up for lost time. The first few days Setan is home from a trip, they stay up all night talking "about life, about the family, old stuff, new stuff," Setan says. "The sun comes up and we never sleep. We just enjoy each other."

Randa and Setan say their marriage remains strong. But they miss each other.

Setan, the romantic, e-mails Randa every day. "I wish I could be with her all the time," he says. "When I'm in Cambodia, and I see a lady with kids, I wonder how Randa's doing, and I wish I could be there. I get lonely. I cry a lot. I just wish Randa was here to hold her. It's like medicine to be around her."

He remembers the day 25 years ago when he first laid eyes on her in the refugee camp in Thailand. "Since the first time I saw her, I never felt any different. I'm in love with her."

Randa doesn't e-mail every day. "I have nothing to say," she says, laughing. "I wait a couple of days."

Randa is warm and gracious, and she gives hugs, even to new acquaintances, at the drop of a hat. She cries easily.

But with Setan, she insists, "I'm not a romantic person. I don't know how to say sweet things. I just ask him how he's doing and tell him to keep walking in the Lord's way."

Setan sometimes returns home exhausted and confides in Randa that he feels alienated or defeated. The work is hard, the failures pile up and some people in Cambodia criticize their work with prostitutes.

"When I first tell people about what we are doing, they say, 'Why are you involved with these unclean people? What's wrong with you?' " Randa says. "They want to know why we associate with women like that.

"I say, 'If we don't get involved with these women, how will they change? How will they build themselves up? How will they get better? How will the country get better?' " Randa says. "You have to go to the people who need help and help reshape them. One by one."

Setan and Randa learned long ago that to persevere is to survive. "You can't look at your current situation and conclude that's what you will be your whole life," Setan says. "Have a dream."

That keeps him going. That and the light he sees in the young Cambodian women at the center.

"They have a future. They have self-esteem. Now they realize they are important beings," Setan says.

Some of them even get married. "In Cambodian culture, when you lose your virginity, no man will marry you," Setan says. But when a man sees the special joy and light in a young woman from the center, he is willing to go against convention.

"I have the privilege of performing ceremonies for some of them, attending their receptions. It was incredible. Just like giving you a million dollars. Words cannot describe the joy that I have, and the girl, as well."

Blessings and broken hearts

Home last winter between trips to Cambodia, Setan proposed a weekend family getaway to the mountains. To his dismay, the kids declined.

"Ben's a college student, and Sandra's in high school now," Setan says. "Now they don't want to go with us. They want to stay home with their friends, or they ask if they can bring their friends along. I miss having our kids without their friends - just us."

Though it breaks his heart, Setan appreciates the irony.

"I realize I missed out," Setan says. "But it's a family sacrifice. Unless they give me their blessing to go, I don't go."

Ben and Sandra say they miss their father when he's gone. But they've missed him all of their lives, and now they have their own.

These days, Ben has a better understanding of the work that takes his father away so often. But when he was younger, "I was always angry that he was always gone. It was almost like living without a father. I've gotten used to it. I don't hate him or anything. I know he's doing good stuff over there. But it was rough."

He's grateful for his uncles and his grandparents, although they could never replace his father. Ben and Setan keep in touch through e-mail. "But I never really talked to him about deep problems because he was always so far away, and it's better to talk in person. So I just dealt with them myself, or with my mom."

Ben has completed his first year at Metropolitan State College of Denver, where he's majoring in aviation technology.

He works when he can to help pay his tuition, car expenses and cell phone bills. He played hockey at Hinkley High School.

And this son - whose parents had never seen snow before coming to Colorado - has a new passion: snowboarding. "I really love cold weather for some reason."

Ben also has inherited his parents' commitment to good works. He was a member of a high school club that planted trees, visited the elderly and read to elementary school students.

He organized a project that raised $2,000 for the David Anlong Veng orphanage that his parents founded in Anlong Veng, in northern Cambodia, for children of the Khmer Rouge. The orphanage is named after Ben's cousin, David Hou, who drowned at Lake McConaughy in Nebraska when Ben was a senior. David was two years older, and the two were like brothers. The loss for Ben was profound. He says simply, "That was hard for me."

Setan, who lost his own brother in the killing fields so many years ago, decided to stay home most of last year to spend time with his family.

"I wanted to be around," Setan says. "I try to make it up (last) year. I know I never do. But at least I have this time."

A world of the past

Ben balks at Randa's efforts to teach him her native Khmer language. "I'd say no," he says. "I'm an American. I'm just a kid. I just want to have fun. I'm no different than the average kid."

And so far, he and his sister have resisted visiting Cambodia, remembering their last harrowing experience there.

In 1997, Randa took 12-year-old Ben and 7-year-old Sandra to visit Setan. Ben came down with a fever soon after they arrived. Three weeks later, Randa and Setan decided they had to get him to a doctor in a modern country.

Hoping to fly standby out of Phnom Penh, they rushed to the airport and found it eerily quiet and empty. Soldiers with automatic rifles milled around.

As soon as the Lees boarded a flight to Singapore, Ben's fever started to go down.

When they got to the Singapore airport, every television was airing scenes of Cambodia at war, grenades exploding, burning cars and buildings, soldiers firing at each other, wounded people.

Ben tugged at his father. Look, Daddy, they're showing The Killing Fields.

But it was no movie.

A fierce battle between the country's co-prime ministers had led to a coup by one of them, Hun Sen.

All of the phone lines were disconnected, and the Phnom Penh airport was destroyed. The Lees had taken the last flight out.

And the Lee children have never returned.

American teens

"Maybe when I'm older," Sandra says when asked if she will go to Cambodia.

She is her parents' primary concern these days. Randa and Setan have agreed that when one is traveling, the other will be home with Sandra.

"She's 14 now, and she just started high school, and it's important for one of us to always be here for her," Randa says.

Sandra has settled into the life of a student at the new Cherokee Trails High School, where her favorite subjects are science and art. She loves basketball and volleyball, and she hopes to make the tennis team.

She's played piano since she was 3 and still tries to practice every day. She's won her share of ice-skating competitions, but she had to miss a year when the family couldn't afford lessons.

Her passion is Japanese animation, and if pressed, she'll shyly show off a notebook filled with intricate pencil drawings of Japanese-style cartoon characters.

She is her parents' daughter. Setan says Sandra befriends schoolmates who have mental or physical handicaps and helps them however she can.

Sandra misses her father, but says, "I got used to it. I'm close to my mom. And I talk to everybody." Between friends and cousins, there's never a lack of companions.

All 25 members of the Lees' extended family in the Denver area attended Sandra's 14th birthday party.

For the Lees, Setan says, "The beauty of being alive is to be close to our family and our friends."

Strong family ties

When they're together, the Cambodian-American Lees do what American families do. They watch the Broncos on a big-screen television in the family room. They go to hockey games. Randa likes baseball. Setan doesn't understand it. They visit the family, go to church, rent videos. When they eat out, they're as likely to choose a steakhouse as a Chinese buffet.

Randa, remembering when she lived without food, admonishes the kids to take no more than they can eat and to eat everything on their plates.

Setan wasn't home when Randa bought the house a couple of years ago in the Vista subdivision in east Aurora near E-470 and Smoky Hill Road.

The couple wanted the larger home in a new part of Aurora to house the Kampuchea for Christ offices, and to make room for the steady stream of students and other visitors from Cambodia who stay with them.

She picked out everything: the model, the raspberry carpeting, the paint colors, countertops, cabinets and tile - all the details required to build a new house, including finding the best mortgage rate and locking it in.

Randa, who works wonders with the family's tight finances, saved the down payment from her $2,200-a-month salary at Global Connection International, where she's worked for almost four years.

She and Setan had met Jim Groen, GCI's founder, at their church, Faith Presbyterian, and he took an immediate interest in their work.

Randa was reluctant at first to accept Groen's offer of a job as his assistant. She had taken computer and general office courses, but she'd never worked in an office.

"I said, 'Are you sure you want me to work for you? I might wreck your office. People won't understand what I'm saying.' "

But Groen insisted. He sweetened the offer by giving her a flexible schedule so she could keep taking classes and travel to the women's center.

So far, Randa hasn't wrecked the office. But family responsibilities and money have limited her trips to Cambodia.

Randa finally brought her mother to the U.S. in 1995. She lives with Randa's sister in California. Randa's stepmother also lives in California.

Still in Cambodia are two brothers and two sisters, including "the one after me," who kept her promise and never married. They visited the Lees in Aurora once.

Randa doesn't talk much to her children about her own father or the killing fields. She doesn't want Ben and Sandra "to have that sorrow in their mind."

Neither she nor Setan pushes the children to follow in their footsteps. Both Ben and Sandra go to church, but it's one with later Sunday morning services than Faith Presbyterian's. What the Lees want most are for their children always to practice compassion, mercy and grace.

"That's the theme for our family," Setan says.

In courage, a future

Randa is the only one of the six Lee women of her generation who will drive by herself to South Federal Boulevard to the Asian markets. She gleefully remembers once trying to find her way to downtown Denver and ending up in Boulder.

But with Setan gone so much, if she didn't drive, she would be marooned.

She has succeeded at her GCI office job, too.

"I'm not very good with grammar. I still ask Jim (Groen) why he hired me. But he said, 'Everything I give you to do, you finish.' "

One night, Sandra decided she wanted spaghetti for dinner. Fine, Randa told her, you can chop the onions, green peppers and carrots. But Sandra was squeamish about using a knife.

"I told her, 'When I was in the concentration camp, I was younger than you. I didn't know how to chop or cook. But I had to learn. I had to do it or they would kill me.' "

Randa pauses, a twinkle in her eye, the timing of a comedian.

"I say, 'Now, Sandra, I won't kill you. But you still have to learn.' "

Despite her independence, Randa understands the importance of a helping hand. She remembers working in the killing fields, trying frantically to distinguish young rice plants from weeds in the wet paddies. Others taught her: One was round at the end, the other flatter. Without their guidance, she would have been killed.

Reminders of the killing fields are never very far. Neither are the lessons - never give up, stay hopeful and strong, be grateful for kindness.

While once she had to learn the difference between rice plants and weeds to live one more day, Randa now helps keep track of a dozen aid projects and fund-raisers in an American office.

She escaped through the jungles of Cambodia, scrambling from gunfire, racing for freedom. Now she gets lost on her way downtown. But she's still the one who drives.

She might even go to college one day. Not for a while. But one day.

She plants roses in her new garden. She teaches her daughter to chop carrots in the warmth and safety of her own kitchen.

And Randa and her husband, Setan, take pleasure in a future measured in more than minutes.


Meet the Team

Jane Hoback, Reporter
Jane Hoback is a writer and assistant business editor at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. She also is the adviser to The Metropolitan student newspaper at Metropolitan State College of Denver. She has a particular interest in covering issues that affect women and minorities.

Ellen Jaskol
Photographer

Jonathon Berlin
Designer

John Moore
Copy editor

Charles Chamberlin
Graphics editor

Sonya Doctorian
Photo editor

Janet Reeves
Photo editor

Tim Skillern
Web producer

Carol Hanner
Project editor


2005 Dart Award Preliminary and Final Judges

2005 PRELIMINARY JUDGES

Robert Jamieson
Robert Jamieson, metro columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, began as a P-I reporter in 1991, covering education, city hall and general assignment beats. His stories include the crash of Alaska Flight 261, the fatal police shooting of David Walker, a mentally ill man whose death sparked police to adopt less lethal weapons, and the local Mardi Gras riots. Jamieson’s first news jobs were for the Wall Street Journal and the Oakland Tribune. He has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Best of the West journalist competition. In 1997 Jamieson received a fellowship to visit quake-ravaged Kobe, Japan. He also received a Casey Foundation fellowship and in 2004 was one of five from the Seattle area representing Rotary International on a goodwill trip to East Africa.

Michele Klevens
Michele Klevens, a licensed clinical psychotherapist, has worked with veterans for over 20 years. In addition to private practice, she is currently a research health science specialist at the VA Puget Sound Healthcare System. She provides comprehensive assessments and treatment for recently returning veterans, veterans and their families from prior conflicts, and non-veteran combat and civilian trauma survivors. Klevens has been adjunct faculty and staff psychotherapist at the University of Washington Hall Health Center, where she was the administrative lead for the Same Day Need Crisis team. She is a certified sexual assault counselor and a former counselor for at-risk teens in Los Angeles High School.

Marc Ramirez
Marc Ramirez is a reporter for the Seattle Times. Since 1996 he has written news and features on topics ranging from social, cultural and spiritual issues to youth, recreation and travel. In Fall 2001, he reported on Cuban hip-hop as social movement as a recipient of the Pew International Reporting Fellowship. Ramirez worked for the Times from 1990-94 as a Sunday magazine staff writer and education reporter before spending two-plus years with the Phoenix New Times, the alternative weekly in his hometown. Before completing his Master’s in Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, he reported for the Phoenix Gazette and interned with the Wall Street Journal.

Karen Rathe
Karen Rathe is a full-time lecturer at the University of Washington Department of Communication, where she teaches community journalism news lab, copyediting and design. She has also taught journalism at Seattle University and Shoreline Community College. A newspaper journalist for 20 years, Rathe was a copy editor, editorial page editor and designer for the Seattle Times, a copy editor and regional correspondent for the Oregonian, and a reporter, editor and photographer for the Headlight-Herald in Tillamook, Oregon. Rathe completed a 1986 Poynter Institute fellowship in newspaper management and entrepreneurship.

Edward Rynearson, M.D.
Edward Rynearson, M.D. is co-founder and Medical Director of Separation and Loss Services and the Homicide Support Project at Virginia Mason Medical Center. Since 1980 he has been an examiner for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and a clinical professor of Psychiatry at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of the book, Retelling Violent Death (Brunner/Mazel), and has published extensively in professional journals on the synergism of trauma and loss and the treatment of traumatic grief, particularly through the use of imagery. In 1984 Rynearson was both a Royal Australia-New Zealand College of Psychiatry fellow and an American Psychiatric Association fellow, and in 1988 a fellow of the American College of Psychiatry.

 

2005 FINAL JUDGES

The final judge panel consists of three journalists, a victim/survivor representative, and the president-elect of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies. Judges look for entries that go beyond the ordinary in reporting on victims of violence, taking into account all aspects of an entry.

Tom Arviso, Jr.
Tom Arviso, Jr. is the publisher of the Navajo Times and CEO of the Navajo Times Publishing Company, Inc. A staunch believer and advocate for press freedom, he fought many battles with tribal leaders and officials that resulted in the incorporation of the independent Navajo Times Publishing Company. Arviso was a sports writer and news reporter with the Navajo Times TODAY. Prior to that, he wrote for The Arizona Indian. Arviso is a former board vice president and treasurer of the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA), and is a member of the Arizona Newspapers Association Board of Directors. In 1997 Arviso received NAJA’s Wassaja Award for extraordinary service to Native journalism, and in 1998 he was honored by the Arizona Newspapers Association with the Freedom of Information Award. Arviso received a John S. Knight Fellowship in Journalism in 2000-2001.

Clementina Chéry
Clementina Chéry is director of outreach services for the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, past president of the National Coalition for Survivors of Violence Prevention, and founder of the Survivors Outreach Services Program in Boston. She and her husband formed the Peace Institute to honor their fifteen-year-old son, who was shot and killed on his way to a Christmas party given by a group called Teens Against Gang Violence. The Louis D. Brown Peace Curriculum, developed for students from kindergarten to high school, was commended in 1996 by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno as contributing Boston’s reduction in juvenile crime. Chéry’s many awards include Lady in the Order of St Gregory the Great (bestowed by Pope John Paul), the Search for Common Ground 2001 International Service Award; and the American Red Cross 1998 Clara Barton Humanitarian Award.

Gretel Daugherty
Gretel Daugherty is a photojournalist at the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel in Colorado. As a freelance photographer, she worked on assignment for the Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, Ladies Home Journal, and other publications. Daugherty has won first place awards for her photography from the Colorado Associated Press and the Colorado Press Association. A 2000 Dart Ochberg Fellow, she has reported on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the rights of military veterans who suffer from PTSD. Daugherty represented the National Press Photographers Association in conversations involving media and the public after the Columbine shootings, and received a Casey fellowship in 2002. She is currently the national Media/Government Committee co-chair for NPPA, and project coordinator of NPPA’s support network for journalists who have experienced trauma.

Dean G. Kilpatrick, Ph.D.
Dean G. Kilpatrick, Ph.D. is president-elect of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, a professor of clinical psychology, and Director of the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center (NCVC) at the Medical University of South Carolina. In 1974 he was a founding member of People Against Rape. His research interests include measuring the prevalence and mental health impact of rape and other potentially traumatic events. Kilpatrick has over 130 peer-reviewed publications and over 60 book chapters and monographs. In 1990, President Bush presented Kilpatrick with the President’s Award for Outstanding Service for Victims of Crime, the nation’s highest award in the crime victims’ field. For the past 20 years he has served on South Carolina’s Crime Victim Advisory Board. He also serves as President of the Section on Clinical Emergencies and Crises for the American Psychological Association.

Sharon Schmickle
Sharon Schmickle is a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She worked as a war correspondent in Iraq in 2003; in 2004 she wrote an in-depth report on Afghanistan’s efforts to recover from a quarter century of war. In 2000 Schmickle won a McClatchy President’s Award for a special report from Japan on the global controversy over genetically modified foods. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1996 for an investigative series on federal judges and U.S. Supreme Court Justices; in that same year she was named Washington Correspondent of the year by the National Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists, for her reporting on the impact of the federal budget on one Minnesota community. Her other journalism awards include an Overseas Press Club first place in 1994 and five first-place prizes from the Minnesota Associated Press Association.