“Bringing Jesus” to Cambodia

Rome (Italy). During missionary October 2022, the Missions Sector of the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians proposes some missionary experiences and realities. Sr. Dory, FMA, Colombian missionary, tells of her vocation and her missionary experience in Cambodia.

“I am Sr. Dory Helena Ramirez Zuluaga, a native of the Province of St. Mary Mazzarello in Medellin (CMM), Colombia. Now I belong to the Province of Mary Our Help of Cambodia-Myanmar (CMY); in fact, I have been a missionary in Cambodia for 22 years.

I felt the missionary vocation even before the Salesian vocation. I submitted a missionary application from my first religious profession and, after ten years, on the occasion of the celebration of the centenary of the presence of the FMA in Colombia, I was ‘given’ to the then Superior General, Mother Antonia Colombo, for the missions of the FMA Institute, together with four other FMA, representing the 4 Provinces present in Colombia. After a year of study in Rome for missionary preparation and eight months in England to learn the English language, I was sent to Southeast Asia, to Cambodia.

Initially I dreamed of being a missionary in Africa and living in a poor hut among young people and children, but I was sent to Cambodia, in a very different reality, but no less poor. The Country was just emerging from the civil war and the regime.

In Cambodia I lived the mission for the most part holding responsibilities in the administrative field, as a treasurer, and only for a few years I worked with the children of the Kindergarten, Primary School, and with the girls of the boarding school.

I learned the local language, Khmer that is very difficult while going to the market among the people, almost all Buddhist. Seeing me with the religious habit, the crucifix, and always cheerful, they discovered something different in me. When I passed, people called me saying, ‘Preah Iesù’, which in Khmer means ‘Jesus door’ or ‘Christian’, and in this way, even without words, I brought my testimony of evangelization.

After seven years of presence in Cambodia, I applied for Cambodian citizenship because I wanted to live and die in the mission and I wanted it to become my second homeland and my home. I obtained citizenship after three years.

I live in Phnom Penh, in an international community where good experiences are made, and at the same time difficulties are encountered, which however are always overcome and this becomes a real school of life. The certainty of having been called and sent, despite my poverty, makes me renew every day the commitment to go forward.

Even if the fruit of the work in the mission is not immediately seen, I am sure that the Lord of life, who is sowing through us, will make those who come after us enjoy the fruit, as we too now enjoy the journey made by those that arrived before us.

May Jesus, who called me, and Mary, the first missionary of the Father, give me and all the missionaries around the world the strength to go forward with courage in the certainty that nothing is lost when one works in the name of Jesus”.

1 of 4