30 years later - still rebuilding Cambodia

Nun on a mission to restore education

GALESBURG -Sister Luise Ahrens is on a mission.
Or more accurately, many missions. Sr. Luise is on a two-month tour of the United States to visit with friends and family and raise money for Maryknoll, a Catholic mission group focused on ministry and missionary work overseas.

She was in Galesburg Sunday to visit her best friends from college, Pat Conklin, Galesburg, and Judy Scheider, St. Paul, Minn. Her sabbatical is part fun but also part work on her main mission.
Ahrens was invited to Cambodia in 1991 to help re-establish the Royal University of Phnom Penh and has been working toward that goal for 16 years.

"It has been like starting all over - the year zero started in 1979 for Cambodians" said Ahrens. "The country is filled with damaged people, people who don't trust each other and have no belief in what the future can bring."

During the Pol Pot regime, millions of Cambodians were killed by the Khmer Rouge. People with educations and religious beliefs as well as civil servants were many of those murdered. Only 15 percent of educated Cambodians survived the genocide.

The Royal University was hit particularly hard during the reign of terror. Only two educators and 36 students were still alive and able to return to re-establish the University in Phnom Penh.
"If someone spoke French, had soft hands, or wore glasses, they were killed," said Sr. Luise. The majority of Cambodians died in work camps.

"Those that survived were extremely traumatized," Ahrens said. "One student was buried alive while trying to escape capture. Many survivors lost entire families."

The task of re-opening the University was difficult on many levels. "There was no electricity, no water, no books," she said. "The Khmer Rouge kept pigs in the auditorium to degrade and discourage the people." The auditorium was also a holding place before people were sent to the camps.

"One of the first things we did was teach English to the faculty," Ahrens explained. "The program grew from there."

Ahrens said many of those people educated in the 1970s came back but were poorly educated. "There was no leadership in the country," she said. "People could buy an education if they had money and many educators were very bad."

"The biggest challenge we faced was ignorance," Ahrens said. "People could not imagine what their lives could be."

It will take time and several generations to move past that way of life and mentality said Ahrens.

"Things are growing, but growing corruptly," she said. "Children learn corruption at a young age and that stays with them. It is all they have known."

Ahrens said the country has 53 universities but only eight of them are public. She said anyone with money can open a university in just a few days but most are worthless.

Positive changes are slowly happening however. Ahrens has worked closely with leaders from World Bank who recently gave Royal University $1 million to double the size of the library.

About 50 students a year from around Cambodia are given scholarships for master's programs in universities all over the world. "Nearly everyone of those kids that entered the master's programs has done well," she said. Those students sent to get a good education are the people needed to change the country.

"It has to be the Cambodians wanting change and Cambodians promoting change," she said.

Ahrens, who has a Ph.D. in English literature, no longer teaches at the University, but as an assistant vice-rector serves as a liaison between government, faculty and students.

She entered the Maryknoll Sisters Congregation in 1960. She went on to earn her master of arts in English then earned her Ph.D. in English literature in 1969.

In 1984 Ahrens was elected president of the Congregation of the Maryknoll Sisters and served for six years.

The 69-year-old Ahrens said she gets around the Phnom Penh on a motorcycle and the only thing that scares her about living in the city is the traffic.

"Life is cheap there," she said. "But I'm not worried about my safety. I have salty spit."

Ahrens said her work is rewarding.

"I would do it if I didn't like it," she said. "It is the sense that I can make a difference, even small one. The words of the Gospel are so important - planting seeds and watching them grow."