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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

Conversations with Arnold Hooker

Arnold Hooker has been a missionary for more than a quarter of a century and has compiled more experiences than we have time to talk about.

As a missionary and as an advocate for missions, Arnold's life of mission service has resulted in great things being done by God.

Now you're a coordinator of missionaries, but more about that later.

How did you get involved in mission work?

Well, you know when you're a young person you think, I'd like to be a missionary.

And in fact, I tried to get into Adra, but I was a furniture maker.

My father was a furniture maker, and my brothers are furniture makers.

And so what happened was, they said, we don't need your skills.

We need, you know, someone with pastoral skills or we need someone who, you know, can do agriculture or something like that.

So I kept filling the, they used to, in those days, you'd put quarters into envelopes.

It'd hold $40 worth of quarters and send them to Addera.

Send in your money to Addera and you're doing your part for mission.

And I found a magazine 1 day called Frontier Mission Magazine, Adventist Frontier Missions, and I read it and I thought, I wonder if I could do that.

And someone prompted me to maybe start online, I wasn't online then actually, to call them up and see if that would be something I could do and that's kind of how it started.

Okay let's rush through this but we'll come back.

Well I spent 6 years in Cambodia and then actually coming back to the US for several years finding funds for sending missionaries and stuff.

But for the last 6 years now being field director in Cambodia and Papua New Guinea.

And also Nepal, earlier we were in Nepal.

All right, so Cambodia, and where do we begin?

What were you there to do, and what did you do?

In Cambodia, we were there at a church plant.

And church plant simply means to learn the language.

All Adventist, Mentor missionaries have to learn language.

And then We just made friends with people, just like you would next door to your home here in the United States.

You make friends with people and kept learning language.

I used to go to the people and say, am I saying this right?

And finally, they stopped laughing and I was saying the words right, and then just invite them.

We had an English school and different things to invite people to, to get them interested in our book rack.

We had different things to share with them, already written, some of the things written in that time, Bible studies and so on.

I believe it was January or March of 1995.

Okay, so we're going back a few years now.

Talk to me what it was like to be a Christian in Cambodia then.

I want you to tell me too about the political situation that is as it relates to daily life and as it may or may not impact Christianity at that time?

Well, many of your viewers are going to know about Pol Pot.

And Pol Pot was still alive during that time when we were there.

The Khmer Rouge was just kind of phasing out and a new government was coming in.

In those days when we went, they would, we would go through roadblocks and they would check through your luggage and everything.

They did, they opened our luggage many times.

I don't think there was hostility towards Christians.

I think there was an opening there that had never been before.

They were coming out of diversity trouble like they had never had in their country, and they were looking for answers.

And I think Christians at that time and different organizations were there taking care of the people like they'd never been taken care of by their own government.

When we went there, they really wanted us to be there.

We provided gifts and different things simply by helping with English classes, medicine, and I can remember taking people to the hospital.

I took pregnant ladies and rushed them to the hospital.

I had an old, at the time, a Vietnam veteran old Jeep that was left over from the Vietnam War that I had found and I was using that for an ambulance.

Now it seems like the government has grown wealthy in some ways and they don't need the Christian or the NGOs there anymore.

I want to try not to miss too much of it but let's walk through some of the practical sides of mission work.

1 of the things I hope, in fact 1 of the things I know as we talk, there are going to be numerous people who say, yeah, I felt like God is calling me to either be a full-time missionary or to become more active in supporting mission work.

You went from the United States to Cambodia, which when you went there was a whole lot more primitive, if I can use that word, than it is now.

You went there with children, you went to a country that was very different from what you were like now, what the United States is like now or what it is like now.

What's that culture shock transition like when you go from a first world Western nation to a country presumably you'd never been to before.

You know, when you get off the plane, immediately you realize that you don't speak the language.

I mean, they're speaking Cambodian and they're coming at you really fast with their language.

You don't understand it anyway, and it sounds like they're angry with you.

And I can remember the smells because there were no public bathrooms or stuff like this.

The smells were, and the heat magnified that smell, and just the flies and the different things.

And finding a place to live, we were blessed because Scott and Julie Griswold were there ahead of us and they had found us a temporary place to live while we learned language and stuff.

Not all missionaries have it that good, right?

No, in fact, them getting there, they were in the Khaoi Dong camps and the camps of Thailand.

After the war, they were helping there, and then they came into Cambodia to help the Cambodians later.

So they'd already been there and understood the language and so on and so forth.

So you get to a place like that, did you ever say, we just gotta get on the plane and fly straight on?

I can tell you many times, you have, with tears in your eyes, you wonder why you even came here and you know I don't mean it bad but people can be misunderstanding of you and misunderstand you and misunderstandings happen and I've been spit at I've been you know I can tell you story after story, but anyway, it's just a different place, and you have to learn how to use their rules, not your own.

And I remember being very American and thinking, I'm gonna do it the way I grew up understanding how things are done and you just can't do things that way.

You've gotta be very adaptable, I suppose, when you go to a foreign place, like a very foreign place.

You've been based relatively recently in Australia, going from the United States to Australia, no big deal other than the distance, but going to Cambodia?

So what are some of the...I don't want to major in the challenges, but I sure do want you to tell me about them.

You get there and you bed down, you find a place, and now life has got to crank up.

What are some of the things that you faced or that missionaries face that people like me, you know, we just don't understand or don't know about.

Well, 1 of the things that you can think about is like medical help.

My little girl and I got in a motorcycle crash along with, we had 4 of us on a motorcycle, but anyway, We crashed and there was nowhere to go.

At that time, there was no medical facilities.

Now there's plenty of them now, but in those days there was no doctors, no nurses available, and so you had to be your own doctor and nurse, and that's a little scary, especially I can remember when my family members was sick and I had to give them medicine that I didn't know exactly what it was, but I knew they had malaria so I had to prescribe it, give it to them, and it cured the sickness and no 1 died.

But you know it's a little scary being, you know, having to do those kind of things for yourself and that's the way it was when we first went there.

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Conversations with Arnold Hooker

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