A group from Immanuel Lutheran Church in Waterloo recently returned from a two-week mission trip in Cambodia, having come back home with fond memories of a journey originally meant to happen several years ago.

Several participating individuals offered their thoughts about the trip to the Republic-Times. Among them were Camp Wartburg Executive Director Robert Polansky and Adam Eggemeyer, who helped organize the trip.

This wasn’t the first mission that members of Immanuel Lutheran have participated in over the years. The first of their now four trips took place roughly a decade ago.

“How it really started was Adam and I were talking at a trivia night,” Polansky said. “He had just come back from doing a donor visit in Ethiopia, and he talked about what a wonderful experience it was. And we had always kinda talked about doing an international mission trip.”

In 2014, the group back then saw decent success in local fundraising for the trip, and with strong support from the church, they went off on their first trip to Uganda.

Another group would return to Uganda two years later, and another set out to Paraguay two years after that.

This most recent trip was similarly meant to have taken place two years after the 2018 Paraguay mission, but the group was unfortunately blindsided by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This trip was actually supposed to have occurred in January 2020, and then something big happened,” Polansky said.

While the pandemic might have bumped back their trip timeline by a few years, the group’s passion for international mission trips ultimately saw them visit Cambodia from June 1-16.

As Polansky described, the group visited the country’s royal palace, Angkor Wat and the areas around Phnom Phen. Their trip also took them to the S-21 Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields near Phnom Phen, where they got a grim look at the Cambodian Genocide which took place in the late 1970s.

All three of their previous trips, Polansky and Eggemeyer said, were primarily focused on doing physical work.

They specifically recalled how, on their second trip to Uganda, they did a great deal of landscaping work, even building pergolas intended to be used as a venue for weddings or other events in order to support the community.

As plans for this trip had to be scrapped due to the three-year delay, the group noted that their work was mostly social. Participants led Bible studies, English classes, devotions and other more spiritual activities.

They did, however, still get some physical work done. Specifically, the group took care of some tree planting and other such labor as well as the painting of playground equipment at a recently built school.

“There was a lot of landscaping and physical labor work,” Eggemeyer said. “Just kind of anything that was helpful we tried to volunteer for that and go with an open mind. After almost three years of delay, however we could be helpful, we wanted to do that.”

One other individual who participated in the trip was Jenna Hoeffken. She described some of her experiences in Cambodia, particularly noting her cultural takeaways from the trip.

Hoeffken spoke about working and interacting with young kids, recalling their overwhelming positivity each day.

“They really make you smile because they were always happy no matter what,” Hoeffken said. “It was raining outside and they were happy. It was sunny outside and they were happy. They were just always happy.”

Eggemeyer’s daughter, Ayda, expressed a similar sentiment, noting how nice it was to teach them and conduct Bible study with them.

Eggemeyer himself spoke similarly about the upbeat attitude many Cambodians displayed toward the group.

“What’s amazing is the people are so happy,” Eggemeyer said. “Everybody greets you, everybody is smiling and talkative and has a curiosity mindset. Whether we were in the big city or whether we were in the rural area where we worked at, people just astonish you.”

He noted how striking this positivity is given the country’s troubled history – particularly in regard to the previously mentioned genocide.

Eggemeyer further spoke about how somber the visit was at times, particularly as they saw the Killing Fields and took in the impact the genocide had on countless families and small villages in the country.

Polansky spoke to the privilege many Americans might take for granted, never having faced the sort of persecution that those in Cambodia have faced.

Hoeffken expressed a similar sentiment, describing how the trip has made her far more appreciative of many aspects of her life she had previously not considered as much.

“It makes you really appreciate that I myself have not had to go through any wars, and I’ve always been fortunate to have the things that I have,” Hoeffken said. “That I’ve gotten to stay with my family through 18 years of my life, and I’ve never had to worry about where my next meal comes from.”

All of the countries the groups have visited over the years have been selected due to their exceptional poverty or difficult history, Eggemeyer said.

Harkening to the cultural takeaways Eggemeyer and Hoeffken spoke about, Polansky recalled how, even as they visited several homes that were little more than a four-walled building with a single bed, they were always greeted with immense hospitality and offered either water or some food.

He and Eggemeyer ultimately summed up the positive culture they saw in Cambodia – a culture which persists despite tremendous suffering and a deeply painful history – with a single word: resilience.

On the subject of future missions, Eggemeyer and Polansky were uncertain when the next trip might take place, as COVID severely impacted the group’s momentum after their first three missions.

Finding partners for the trips is also a challenge, Eggemeyer said, as it’s rather important that whatever group travels abroad has a church or other connection established before they reach their destination.

Still the interest seems to be there among the members of Immanuel Lutheran, and while the next trip hopefully won’t be quite so delayed, it’s likely that another group will be traveling internationally sometime soon.

“I think that the interest in helping people internationally still remains,” Eggemeyer said. “So whether that means that it’s two years or three years, I don’t know. I don’t know what the composition will look like, but I think there’s still interest.”