JEFFERSON CITY, Tenn. (AP) - Lewis Burke started college at Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City with an eye toward practicing law.
But learning about Cambodia dictator Pol Pot, whose actions from the 1960s through the 1990s killed more than 8 million Cambodians, about a quarter of the Cambodia population, “broke my heart,” Burke said. “We started praying for the nation.”
At Carson-Newman, Burke met his wife, Kristen, a social worker. They married and had two sons; Sterling was 5 and Benjamin 2 when they felt called to move to Cambodia.
By more than a decade later, they’d have 29 more children they thought of as theirs.
The Burkes moved to Cambodia to help with an existing orphanage, only to find that the facility was informal and lacked the legal standing to keep children if people who wanted to abuse or exploit them came to retrieve them.
“We decided to establish our own organization and make everything legal” and by the books, Burke said.
In 2003, the Burkes opened Heritage House, a literal house in the province of Kampot, Cambodia.
Their first Cambodian child was a 12-year-old girl. Her grandmother had returned for her, planning to sell her into prostitution, Burke said, and the orphanage where she had been staying had no legal grounds to keep her.
Because Heritage House was then still in the process of being formed, the Burkes adopted her as their own daughter. Named Srey Roth, or “Sunflower,” she graduated from a Malaysian College in Cambodia and teaches English at an international school there.
Over the next 13 years, 29 children grew up in Heritage House. Many had lost their families to genocide, or AIDS, which is still a huge problem in the country where prostitution is endemic, Burke said.
If they had not died of abuse or malnutrition, “probably most of the girls would have been sold into prostitution,” he said. “None of the young men would have gone to school.”
Initially, the Burkes lived at the house, but eventually they hired and trained longtime live-in staffers, including three older women who “suffered horribly” during Pol Pot’s regime, losing their families to genocide.
“We don’t want to give them American culture,” Burke said. “Our goal was to give them Christian culture, but keep Khmer (a Southeast Asian ethnic group that makes up about 90 percent of Cambodia’s population) culture, not taking away from that. So we invested a lot of time and energy into the staff.”
That paid off when the Burkes came to the United States on furlough in 2014 and Kristen was diagnosed with breast cancer. She went through surgery and treatment, only to have a recurrence this past April. Now having chemotherapy and radiation, she said it will be at least four years before doctors clear her to live in Cambodia again.
“We miss it horribly,” said Lewis Burke, who said the couple has Thursday-night Skype dates with their Heritage House family. “I feel like Dorothy in the ’Wizard of Oz’ - when she was in Oz, she missed Kansas, and when she was in Kansas, she missed Oz.”
At the same time, he’s confident Heritage House staffers are running the orphanage just as they were prepared to do.
“The community loves us, and the government loves us,” said Burke, who said Heritage House has been ranked the No. 1 orphanage in its six-province region for the last decade, even training social workers for other organizations.
The Burkes had counted on Kristen’s social-worker income to help with living expenses in the United States and fund their nonprofit, Lighthouse Ministries, that supports Heritage House, but since she’s been in active, intensive cancer treatment, she’s been unable to work full-time.
Two area nondenominational Christian churches - Jefferson City’s Heritage Fellowship and Johnson City’s Hosanna Fellowship - have long supported Heritage House, as has the Burkes’ home church, White House Church in Morristown, a plant of Hosanna Fellowship. Burke said during furlough, he’s spoken about Heritage House at other churches and will this Sunday, which is Orphan Sunday as designated by the Christian Alliance of Orphans.
“There are 158 million orphans in the world,” Burke said. “It would probably be impossible to adopt all those children, but I think it is possible to help all those children.”
He said much of Heritage House’s budget comes from individual donors who give between $10-$30 a month.
After high school, Heritage House sends its children to college or vocational school in the capital city of Phnom Penh, about two to three hours away. This year, four children are in college there, all whose parents died of AIDS, Burke said; their career goals are to be a police officer, a businessman, an engineer and an English teacher. School, food and housing run about $1,500 a year each.
“All of the kids have amazing stories,” he said. “We’re really proud of all of them.”
Lewis Burke will return to Cambodia at the end of the month for a holiday celebration with the children and staffers living at Heritage House, as well as the 14 who have moved out. Seven are now married, and four have children.
“On holidays, they all come back and bring their wives and kids,” he said. “We have a big party.”
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Information from: Knoxville News Sentinel, https://www.knoxnews.com
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