Missionary Trip to Cambodia and Thailand—Reported by Dr. Brian Clowes, October 2010

Kathy and I finally arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, after 19 hours on two flights and after crossing 11 time zones.  Our general mission was to assist the Filipino charismatic group, Couples for Christ-Foundation for Family Life (CFC-FFL), in organizing and promoting the pro-life message in Cambodia and Thailand.  Both of these nations are overwhelmingly Buddhist (about 96 percent).  Less than one percent of the people are Christian, presenting interesting and unique challenges to our pro-life apostolate.  One of CFC-FFL’s pillars of activism is pro-life, and Human Life International has worked with the organization extensively over the years by providing education, materials, training and organization.

Cambodia: Population Controllers

On the day our work began, I stared up at the brand new five-story building in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which houses three of the most aggressive population control organizations in the world: Engender Health, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and USAID’s main project there, called RACHA, the Reproductive and Child Health Alliance.  I admired the 20 or so sparkling new SUVs in the parking lot (some equipped with snorkels!) and watched dozens of well-dressed workers walk in and out of their lavish air-conditioned paradise.

The $600 million spent by these population controllers in Cambodia over the past 20 years has inevitably had a profound impact.  Forty years ago, the average Cambodian woman had six children; today she has three, and the United Nations predicts that the country’s fertility rate will soon decline to only 1.4 children per family, a plunge of 77 percent.

Cambodia is a classic example of how the population controllers create a problem and then throw all of their resources into making the situation even worse. Today, most of the major organs of the United Nations are prominently visible in Phnom Penh—UNAIDS, UNCEDAW, UNDESA, UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and many others—a regular alphabet soup of well-funded agencies, all vigorously working to “improve” the lives of the people, and all largely dedicated to the promotion of contraception and the eradication of HIV/AIDS.

Cambodia: HIV and AIDS

Immediately after the murderous Pol Pot regime fell in 1992, Cambodia was essentially a closed society, with no recorded cases of HIV.  But when United Nations peacekeepers appeared that year, brothels immediately sprang up all over Phnom Penh, and the soldiers’ appetite for sex jump-started the AIDS epidemic.  Within two years, there were more than 20,000 recorded cases of HIV in Cambodia.

At the onset of the UN mission, the head of the peacekeeping forces, Yasushi Akashi, said: “Everybody has the right, even the soldiers, to enjoy the young ladies, and we cannot discriminate against the HIV-positive soldiers.”  This ridiculous statement shows how anti-lifers will eagerly sacrifice the lives of thousands of real people for the sake of a perverted and unworkable idea.

Cambodia is still a wild place today, with rampant sex slavery, millions of land mines still in place, and even an American-run euthanasia clinic masquerading as a coffee shop (which thankfully was recently closed down by the government).

NSSM 200

I gave a series of ten talks to about 50 Couples for Christ members, covering the topics they needed to be familiar with in order to mount

Brian and Kathy pose with the members of Couples for Christ (CFC) who were trained over the weekend in Phnom Penh.  Kathy is holding the little statue of Our Lady of Cambodia that they presented as a memento.

effective resistance to the Culture of Death in Southeast Asia.  We primarily talked about the population control agenda. The people were startled when I revealed the true reason the United States and other “developed” nations pour seven billion dollars a year into contraception and abortion programs, primarily in the Southern Hemisphere: the National Security Study Memorandum 200 stated, in plain black and white, that the reason the United States pushes population programs is that it needs more and more mineral resources from what it calls the “less developed countries.”  The aim is not to improve the lives of the people or pull them out of poverty with population control; all we want to do is get our hands on their natural resources!

NSSM-200 was written under President Nixon in 1974 and has not been repealed or modified, meaning that it remains official United States population policy.

Sowing the Gospel

Kathy and I also thoroughly covered popular abortion myths, statistics, demographic impacts, fetal development, the prominent role of condoms in accelerating the spread of HIV/AIDS, chastity, and how to debate and organize a pro-life group.  Everyone received a copy of HLI’s Pro-Life CD Library for further study, and we had plenty of discussion time.

Kathy sitting with sisters of the order Salesians of Don Bosco (SDB) during a presentation at their convent in Phnom Penh.

The Salesian Sisters of Don Bosco (SDB) asked Kathy and me to give evening talks the night before leaving for Thailand.  On our way to their monastery, the roads flooded from the rain again, and we left a wake behind us as we slowly made our way there.  I have never seen anything like it. The sisters were so encouraged by the talks that they invited us back to talk to the nearly 2,000 teenage girls and boys they teach at their schools.  They especially liked the funny movies I show between talks, and 30 sisters all laughing at once is a wonderful sound.

I promised the sisters that HLI would help them teach their kids about chastity and living by God’s plan, even if most of them are not Catholic.

We flew to Bangkok the next day (a mercifully short flight) and saw more friendly faces at the airport.  It’s always great to see someone with a piece of cardboard with your name on it.  Wherever we go, the Filipinos are ready to spread the Gospel.  They are truly the “yeast of the Faith.”

Thailand

Thailand’s HIV/AIDS epidemic is an excellent example of the results of ideologically driven public policy gone wrong.  The country instituted a “100 Percent Condom Use Program” 20 years ago, and the results have been predictable:  more than 650,000 people have died from AIDS, and half a million more live with the virus.  Thailand has the highest adult HIV infection rate in all of Asia.  Massive UN reports on the situation in Thailand prattle on endlessly about such things as “stigma indexes,” while almost completely ignoring behavior change (except, of course, for inducing people to use more and more condoms).

By contrast, in the Philippines, where condom use has (until recently) been strongly discouraged, there have been less than 3,000 cases of the disease among a significantly larger population of adults.

To summarize, one in 7,000 Filipino adults are infected with HIV/AIDS, while one in 70 Thai adults are infected ? a rate 100 times higher.  The stark difference between these two nations demonstrates the futility of condom promotion as a solution to the HIV-AIDS epidemic.

Bangkok

One memorable experience at a colossal Night Bazaar in Bangkok was plunging our feet into large tanks and having them nibbled on by what they call “doctor fish.”  Some people find this “therapy” very helpful.  But forget waterboarding ? 30 seconds of this will have the toughest hard-case singing like a demented canary.

Bangkok’s geology is giving its inhabitants nightmares.  The entire city is sinking about four inches per year due to the weight of all the structures on it and the draining of the under-city aquifer. Already there are sandbags lining the Chao Phraya River all year round. It is also disturbing to see the concrete shells of gigantic 50-story almost-completed buildings, totally abandoned due to the economic crash.

The two-day session in Bangkok was even more intense than the one we had done the weekend before in Phnom Penh, because the situation is desperate in Thailand.  We covered all of the same material, but added talks on homosexuality and dissent, which are more pressing issues in Thailand than they are in Cambodia.

At the conclusions of both sessions, our Couples for Christ friends told us that they had new optimism for the future, despite the sobering presentations we had given them.  Although it may seem at times that we are a one-eyed, one-legged David against a platoon of Goliaths all armed with rocket launchers, I exhorted the people again and again to look at the situation as God sees it, not as man sees it.  As St. Paul said, ”I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities; for when I am weak [in myself], then I am strong [in Him].” [2 Corinthians 12:9-10].

The hardest part of any journey is leaving our fired-up and faithful pro-life friends and returning to “home base.”  The second hardest part is sitting on airplanes for nearly 20 hours in seats seemingly designed for some kind of invertebrate.  But Kathy and I are both confident that the pro-life mission will flourish in these most difficult countries of Cambodia and Thailand, and Human Life International will be there to help it happen, as it has in more than 100 other countries of the world.