Last weekend we got a once in a lifetime opportunity: team Abundant Pursuit got to attend a Christian Cambodian wedding! Beautiful dresses, many wardrobe changes, and tons of food set the scene for this wonderful celebration. What I didn’t anticipate was the brokenness I was going to feel upon return to my hotel that evening.
That afternoon after the wedding, we got to see where some of the girls at Sending Hope lived and hear the stories of oppression and exploitation that many Cambodian girls face every single day. There’s this popular proverb in Cambodia that goes something along the lines of this: “Men are like gold. The gold can fall in the mud but you can pick it up, clean it off, and it will still have immense value. Women are like cotton. If cotton falls in the mud, you can pick it up and brush it off, but it will never be clean again. It will be worthless.”
Wrap your mind around that. Women, God’s creation, are easily dispensable but also easily replaceable. Here are some things that might constitute a woman becoming “dirty cotton”:
Being a relationship before marriage
Being touched by multiple men (platonic touch on the face, arm, etc.)
Being raped, assaulted, or otherwise abused
Being trafficked
Being a victim of a crime
This is only a glimpse of what might make a woman “unworthy” in Cambodian culture. Notice how the majority of those circumstances don’t even include an avenue for the woman to be a consenting partner. On the contrary, they just have to be present. Where is the equality in that? Where is there justice or grace?
This bias doesn’t only reach the social circle; it has ramifications in every other aspect of life for these women. A large number of Cambodians live outside of the city in rural areas, areas that reinforce these ideals. Kids walk miles to school and a lot of times they end up trading education for work. Most girls are encouraged to drop out of school to help support the family by working. Even if they do stay in school, the long walks they take on isolated roads surrounded by bush put them at an insanely high risk of being raped, assaulted, or kidnapped. One of our students’ mother sent her to Sending Hope for that very reason. She wanted a better life for her daughter than she had.
Another common custom in these rural areas is to marry off young women while they are still simply teenagers. This could be for a number of reasons but most often it is for social status, the protection of the woman’s family, or a lack of anything else to do. Can you imagine being married off at 16 solely to make your parents happy? That’s exactly what happened with the woman mentioned above.
You see, during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, people of high social status, the educated, or the wealthy were taken and murdered. The woman’s mother was once married to a city official. When the Khmer Rouge took over, they kidnapped him and executed him, forcing her mother in to hiding only for her to later find out she was pregnant by her now late husband. She ended up remarrying a Buddhist monk who heavily abused her on a regular basis. In an attempt to escape, the woman’s mother arranged a marriage for her daughter with a man her daughter never met. When the woman showed up to her wedding and her eyes fell upon her soon-to-be husband, she was terrified. She didn’t want to marry this man at all. The woman told us, “I did not love him and I did not want to marry him. But I love my mother and I want to protect her and help her escape so I married him anyway.”
I can’t even fathom the weight of that decision for her. She sacrificed her happiness, she married a man who does not walk with the Lord, and she has stayed with him even though she still does not love him all out of love for her mom.
Dirty cotton. That’s what young women are told they will become, that’s the bar men set for them. They are to be used, traded, and tossed to the side when they lose their worth.
The amazing thing is, though, that that’s not what the Father says about them. He calls them chosen. He calls them beloved. He calls them daughter and coheir with Christ.
Sending Hope is raising a generation of women on fire for the Lord. Their hearts beat with passion for Christ and for making His name known to everyone they meet. These girls aren’t pieces of dirty cotton, they’re world changers, earth shakers, and daughters of the one true King. Praise the Lamb they never have to be anything else.
All the love from Cambodia,
Katie Mere
