Soeuth  &  Syna  Lao  Cambodia  

Soeuth & Syna are both Cambodian Americans. They came to the States separately in the early 1980's as teenage refugees and attended school in the USA. In 1995, God called them back to serve Him in their homeland and they have been there ever since. The Laos have been blessed with two wonderful sons, Justin (15) and Jonathan (9). For the last 8 years, they have been serving in Cambodia in the city of Poipet. Poipet is in the northwest part of Cambodia, which borders Thailand. Their main ministry focus has been discipleship and leadership training through the use of Theological Education by Extension (TEE) and other new believer materials. God has greatly blessed their Alliance ministry in Poipet! Presently, there are 10 house churches that have been planted and over 300 new believers who have been baptized. The majority of people that we've been working with are mostly young adults between 14-35 years old. Young people from all over Cambodia go to Poipet to look for jobs at the casinos or Thai border markets. Poipet is a small city with a population of about 150,000. It is known as the "sin city", "wild, wild west", and or the "armpit of Cambodia“. There are at least 15 casinos and countless numbers of illegal brothels scattered all over the city. It is also one of the former strongholds of the last Khmer Rogue Regime (that claimed over two million Cambodian lives during the 1975-1979 wars) . Presently, Poipet is one of the main hubs in Southeast Asia where drugs, sex trafficking, and crime occurs. As a result of these public problems and current conditions, the opportunities for reaching out to lost souls is enormous. The Laos have found that people in Poipet are receptive to the Gospel! Despite ongoing oppositions to ministry and the persecutions are many, it is the right time for harvest! CMA HISTORY IN CAMBODIA Arriving in 1923, Alliance missionaries were the first Protestant workers to enter Cambodia. The Alliance efforts grew into the nation’s largest evangelical community, the Khmer Evangelical Church. Alliance missionaries were evacuated from Cambodia in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge came to power. By the end of 1979, 80 percent of Cambodian believers had been martyred during the horrors of Pol Pot’s Killing Fields. From the small seed of some 2,000 remaining believers, the Khmer Evangelical Church has since grown to more than 200,000 members. Nonetheless, Christians in Cambodia number less than 2 percent of the population. More than 75 percent of Cambodia’s 14,000 villages do not yet have any Christian presence. The needs for evangelism and church planting in this war-ravaged country remain great. Grinding poverty for the vast majority of people, which leads to health and social problems, continues to be a major challenge. To that end, Alliance workers and their national partners are involved in medical work and church-based community development to help meet the nutritional, literacy, and AIDS-related needs of local communities.

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