Perfect love casts out fear
“Our communities are changing so quickly. I love teaching because literacy gives us information, practical skills and hope. It improves our nutrition, health and the future prospects of our children.”
You can help Kut bring the good news to the isolated Kavet ethnic community.
“No one will ever love you! No one will ever marry you! Just look at your hands and feet! You have no future!”
My parents called me Kut which means “crooked”. I was born with webbed hands and feet, but I can still hold a pencil or a piece of chalk. I am 14 years old. When I was 13, I started teaching a literacy class. At night, under our house on stilts, a dozen students crowd around a blackboard and solar light.
We were cursed
I have an older brother and sister and a younger sister. When I was very young, my brother was possessed by an evil spirit. To cure him, the shaman told us to sacrifice animals. Eventually my brother recovered but only after we had sacrificed all our livestock and the numerous chickens we borrowed from our relatives and neighbours. Our family was in debt and impoverished. We lived in a simple bamboo house, in the forest outside the village.
My parents sent my older brother to an evening literacy class. He was very scared walking alone from our forest home to the village. The path was dark and in those days evil spirits were everywhere. My brother was the first person in our family to become literate.
When I was still young, the gospel came to my village. My parents didn’t fully understand it but they were thrilled to hear the good news about a God who is stronger than the evil spirits and has the power to heal. They became followers of Jesus.
My brother went to the YWAM Bible school and became a Sunday school teacher and literacy teacher. My older sister, Toy, and I went to primary school in the daytime and to our brother’s literacy class in the evening. We learned to read and write first in our language, Kavet, and then Khmer. Then we learned to teach others to read and write.
I hope to train as a primary school teacher or health worker so I can help our entire village. We used to think that sickness was from the evil spirits. We did not know that malaria comes from mosquitos or that diarrhoea comes from unclean food and water. Our family was the first in the village to build a toilet.
We are blessed
Toy got married and had a baby when she was 14. My parents were very happy to have a strong son-in-law to help with the heavy farm work. My mother says I will never marry. That means I can focus on my studies and teaching. I have opportunities that my older sister does not have because she married so young.
We still don’t have a Bible in our language but my brother and sister and I can read the Bible in Khmer. The older generation thinks they are too old to learn to read, so they are learning the Bible stories we tell them. My parents are both illiterate but our family has produced three literacy teachers!
Please pray that I will gain the skills to help my family, church and village so my community can be transformed.
Kut is a volunteer literacy teacher in Tual Village, Siem Pang District, Stung Treng Province.