By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
Boun Thorne, who had an abusive childhood in Cambodia, said an Operation Christmas Child gift changed her life and help her accept God’s love.
Thorne, who now lives in the U.S., spoke to a group Saturday at Messiah Lutheran Church in Hays about her experiences growing up and her Operation Christmas Child gift.
Operation Christmas Child is a project of Samaritan’s Purse, an international relief agency headquartered in Boone, N.C., and led by the Rev. Franklin Graham. Every Christmas, thousands of individuals prepare shoeboxes filled with small toys, school supplies and hygiene items, which are then delivered to needy children around the world.
This year’s shoebox collection week is Nov. 18 to 25.
Operation Christmas Child volunteers will be making crafts to place in shoebox gifts from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 22, at Messiah Lutheran Church, 2000 Main St. in Hays. For more information on this event or local Operation Christmas Child packaging, contact Rachel Albin at 785-639-1325, [email protected] or go to samaritanspurse.org.
Thorne’s family was very poor when she was growing up. She grew up on a boat in a floating village. Her father was a fisherman, but he was also an alcoholic. Thorne’s father would fish to earn money, but he would spend his money on alcohol, leaving his family with nothing.
“Because of that we never had money to buy food from the market,” she said. “Growing up, we would eat anything we could find around us. Fish and rice was our basic food three times a day, and we would eat the leftovers for breakfast. There would be special occasions when my dad would catch a snake or a monkey and that was when we got to eat something different than fish.”
There was no electricity, no school or hospital.
Throne’s father was abusive when he was drunk. He regularly beat Thorne’s mother. After a particularly brutal beating, her mother passed out and Thorne thought she was dead. Thorne and her siblings would swim to a neighbor’s boat to hide from him, but they weren’t always successful in getting away.
When Thorne was about 6 years old, she became very ill. Her mother asked her father to take Thorne to the hospital.
“My dad told my mom, ‘Just let her die. If she doesn’t survive, we will just make more babies,'” Thorne said. “When I heard that, I felt like my dad didn’t love me at all. I thought maybe I am not his daughter.”
Thorne survived her illness. She decided then she wanted to some day be a nurse or doctor so she could help children who were sick.
She went to her father and asked if she could go to school. He said no, she didn’t need to go to school. She was told she would eventually marry and stay home with her children.
When she was 8, she left her family and her village to live with her aunt so she could go to school. She had to help her aunt make and sell Cambodian cookies to pay her way.
Thorne woke up at 3 a.m to help her aunt cook. After school, she would be sent in to village to sell cookies. If she did not sell all the cookies for the day, her aunt told her she was lazy and sent her to bed without diner.
“No matter what happened. No matter what my dad did to us, my mom would make sure I had food in my tummy before we went to bed,” she said.
After two years, Thorne said she could no longer bear her aunt’s abuse, gave up on her education and moved home with her parents.
During a Cambodian holiday, her father became so drunk he couldn’t fish for the family. Thorne’s mother sent her to fish with her uncle, so the family would have something to eat. Her uncle abused her on that trip.
Her mother wanted to report the crime to the police, but she couldn’t do it that day because of the holiday. By the time her mother could report the crime, her father had alerted her uncle, and her uncle fled the area to avoid the authorities.
Because her village elder thought Thorne might be in danger from her uncle, a couple months after the abuse incident, Thorne moved to a Rapha House, an international mission aimed at ending sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of children.
She would have to leave her mother and siblings again, but she would get to go to school.
“My house mother showed me where I was going to get my food,” she said. “There was a table with a lot of food on it. We never had desert or anything like that, but on the table there is a lot of desert. I was just standing there crying because I really wished my siblings and my mom would get to eat all of this food with me.
“Then she showed me I had a bunk bed. I had my own bed with my own mattress. I never slept on a mattress before. At home we slept on a mat on the floor. I just wished my mom and my siblings could experience this all with me.”
One of her counselors told her about Jesus Christ. She told her that God wanted her to forgive her uncle and her dad, but Thorne said she was not ready to forgive.
“It didn’t make sense to me,” she said. “My dad didn’t love me. Why do I have to love him? My uncle didn’t love me. Why do I have to love him? It hurts me.”
Thorne regularly went to church, but she said she went to be with her friends, because she could sing and dance and they served snacks.
When she was 13, her teacher told her they had special gifts for the children. It was boxes from Operation Christmas Child. This was the first gift she had ever received. Christmas and birthdays are not celebrated in Cambodia. They were told these were gifts from the people who love God and they wanted to bless the children with these gifts.
The children were told they were supposed to wait until all the children received their boxes before they opened their gifts, but Thorne couldn’t wait.
Inside her box was a new pair of flip flops. This was special because the students at the school only received one new pair of shoes each year. At home, she and her family always went barefoot. The box also contained a stuffed animal.
“I never knew something like this existed. I never knew they could make an animal like this, so soft,”she said. “It’s new and smells good. I used to eat all kinds of animals, growing up, but I never knew there was an animal that I didn’t have to eat that I could snuggle with and smelled better than the real animal.”
She said the shoebox helped her fall in love with God more deeply and have a relationship with God.
“I realized that God was so big that he could make impossible things happen,” she said. “He can make someone who doesn’t even know who I am to love me and send me this gift. I realized what my teacher told me that God loves me and he wanted me to love my uncle and to forgive him.”
She added, “Even if my earthly father didn’t love me, there is a father in heaven who loves me, and he is way better than my earthly father.”
Her young brothers came to visit her while she was living in Rapha House, and they fell in love with her stuffed animal. She decided they needed it more than she did, so she gave her toy to them. Her mother later told her that her siblings often fought over the toy.
One day, the stuffed animal fell off their boat into the water. The children saw this and came crying to their mother that their stuffed animal was dead. Because they knew other animals floated when they were dead, the stuffed animal must also be dead. The toy was dried and fluffed, and her siblings exclaimed that their toy had been brought back to life.
Thorne, 25, eventually married an American, who she met when she was working as an interpreter in Cambodia. She is working toward her U.S. citizenship. Today, she lives in Oklahoma and is attending college to become a nurse. In the future, she hopes to periodically return to her home country to offer medical assistance.