For four terrifying years, a brutal regime called the Khmer Rouge sought to transform the country of Cambodia into an agrarian communist utopia. To do so, they emptied the cities, destroyed the infrastructure, and murdered the educated elite and one third of the Cambodian people.

One of their slogans was, "Hunger is the most effective disease."

When Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, thousands of families were separated and assigned to work camps. Seven-year-old Dareth lived with more than a thousand young boys and worked from sunup into the night building channels in the rice paddies. “These channels served no particular purpose other than to keep us busy and work us to death,” he remembers.

The boys knew the effectiveness of hunger. Fed one small cup of rice water a day, the boys were weakened both physically and mentally. Many died of starvation, and some would do anything to stave off this drawn-out death. “There were many different kinds of insects that you could find in the rice paddy – grasshoppers, crickets, and little toads, a snail, different kind of grass, roots, barks… I ate what I could find to stay alive.”

The workload and starvation took many of his friends’ lives, but more perished at the hands of their guards. “Every day they would randomly select a handful of children, six or seven at a time, and they would line them up in front of all of us. Those of us not being tortured were forced to watch as they would put plastic bags over the children’s heads and suffocate them.” That was among their more humane actions, Dareth acknowledges. Others were tortured to death with pliers and knives.

After four years of crushing hunger and work, the suffocations and whatever else the soldiers devised, less than 50 of the boys survived. When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and the soldiers fled, Dareth and his fellow survivors walked almost 200 miles to the border with Thailand where they heard refugee camps had opened. Terrified and severely malnourished, only half of the boys made it to the border.

Considered an orphaned refugee at age 11, Dareth was eventually sent to Minnesota and placed in foster care. Dareth tried not to think of Cambodia, of what he experienced. Yet no matter what he did, Dareth relived those four years in the camps in his nightmares each night.

His foster mother attended a church, and it was the experience of joining the church body that transformed Dareth’s heart the most. “She took me in, and because of her love and the love of the people of that church there, at the age of 14, even though I did not understand much about God or about Jesus Christ who came and died for me, I gave my heart to the Lord. God just touched me and healed me from the nightmares of my past and set me free. Yes, the memories are still there, but the nightmares that woke me up in the middle of the night were completely gone.”

Out of gratitude for all God had done, Dareth enrolled in a Bible college, hoping that upon graduation he could plant a church among the large Asian population in the Twin Cities. But the Lord had other plans.

Soon after he graduated, a peace settlement and ceasefire meant Cambodia had reopened to the world. “I hadn’t truly thought about Cambodia since I left, but my church sent missionaries there. It so happened that one of the missionary families that first went to Cambodia, they were from my home church, and he had led me to the Lord when I was 14 years old. And because of our relationship, he wrote a letter asking if I was willing to go and help him in the summer for a couple of months in 1992.”

Dareth wanted nothing to do with it, initially. But his friend insisted, and Dareth finally reasoned that he would go for a couple of weeks and perhaps gain some closure of that dark chapter of his life. As soon as he set foot in his home country, however, the memories flooded his heart and mind. One of the strongest memories was of his mother. “I was separated from her by the Khmer Rouge when I was seven years old, and I did not know if she was alive or dead. But with the help of my missionary friend, we began to search and two weeks later, we found her.”

She did not recognize Dareth right away, and he was unprepared to see her so frail and sick. She too had endless stories of her own suffering at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and up until that day – she still struggled to find enough food to eat each day.

During one visit, Dareth’s mother was cooking a tiny bit of rice she had saved up. A group of Buddhist monks was in her village, and Dareth’s mother scooped the grains into a small bowl and approached the monks as Dareth watched. Bowing three times, she offered the rice to the monks, who accepted it and said a quick chant over her. This chant was believed to turn into karma, or good deeds.

When she returned, Dareth was troubled and asked why she did not eat the rice herself. His mother began to cry and explained that she had known so much suffering in her life and had no hope anymore. Thinking she would die soon, she could only give enough rice to the monks so that when she was reincarnated, she would have enough good karma to avoid living the same life again.

Dareth knew at that moment that his mother had put all of her hope in a lie from the pit of hell. “For the first time in my Christian life I understood what it meant to be completely lost, completely hopeless, without a shred of hope. And for the first time, I felt that I knew how God felt when he looked at our world and at the people who were suffering without Jesus Christ.”

Praying harder than he ever had before for God to do something, Darth heard God respond. “The Holy Spirit said to my heart, ‘Jesus Christ did something. He came. He came to proclaim good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted and give sight to the blind.' And because He came, I could do something, too. I could give hope to my mother and the people of Cambodia, and preach salvation to those who are lost.”

A few years later, Dareth was serving as a missionary to his own people. He taught at Bible schools, managed orphanages, and planted churches. He and his family now help Mission of Mercy build and run schools. “I get to see lives are being changed in our schools,” Dareth says. “These kids are transformed first of all by the love and tangible things we can give them through nutrition and vitamins and a place for them to go to school, but more importantly, I see a transformation taking place in the lives of these kids through the love of Jesus Christ.”

Dareth and his family have ministered in Cambodia for 15 years. The suffering he endured at the hands of the Khmer Rouge has become a gift, allowing him to relate to a people who have known only darkness and pain. “It is like the story of Joseph,” he says. “What Satan intended for evil, God is using to save lives.”

Dareth’s incredible testimony is one of many among the men and women serving the God’s children in Mission of Mercy programs. If you would like to leave them a note of encouragement for all the work that they do, please leave a comment below.