Cambodia – “Mutilated Christ”

“We still have like two hundred accidents per year, like five accidents per week, and it’s terrible. They are hidden in places that only poor people are walking there. Because they go to work in the rice fields, or in the forest, or hunting. The last one that we have here in Arrupe Center is Sumet, a little boy who was playing and he had the explosion of a landmine in his hands.”

Bishop Enrique Figaredo Alvargonzalez

During the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the party killed about 1.7 million people, including nearly half of all Catholics. Some thirty years ago, however, the devastated Church experienced a rebirth in a country in which the majority of the population belongs to the Buddhist faith. Today, although the Catholic community remains a tiny minority, it has become integrated into the country. No-one encapsulates this more than Bishop „Kike” (as he is known locally), the Apostolic Prefect of Battambang, who founded the Arrupe Centre in Cambodia’s north-west in 2001 with the intent to restore the dignity and rights of those devastated by the effects of landmines through the opportunity to study and work.