Grandma to 500 orphans to discuss work in Cambodia
Widow, 83, says she knew she would be a missionary from the age of eight
There’s a small plot of Cambodian earth Marie Ens knows will some day be hers alone; but, not for a long while yet.
No, the 83-year-old daughter of the Prairies and grandmother to hundreds of orphans in that southeast Asian land has too much work still to do before she takes a wellearned rest and has a chance to experience the heaven she’s promised to so many others during her remarkable life.
This Tuesday, Ens visits Calgary to speak at the Foothills Alliance Church as part of a two-month trip back to Canada that’s part family reunion and part fundraiser for the three Cambodian orphanages she’s helped build and run for more than half a century.
Ens was the youngest of seven children, born in Saskatchewan in 1934 during the Great Depression. Even as a child during those difficult years she knew what the future would hold.
“I always felt in my heart, ever since I was a little girl, that I would be a missionary one day,” she said.
As a young woman, she went to the bible college in Regina where she not only got an education but also found Norman Ens, who’d be the love of her life and missionary partner.
“He had the same goals and desires, so when we finished school we applied to the Christian Missionary Alliance and asked them to send us somewhere. They chose Cambodia and it was absolutely God’s good choice for us because we bonded with those people,” she recalled.
After a seven-week sea voyage, they reached Cambodia for the first time in 1960. For Marie Ens, it was the start of a lifelong love affair with the country. She’d found the purpose for which she’d longed since the age of eight.
But Southeast Asia was then in the throws of war and turmoil. The conflict in Vietnam spilled over into Cambodia and several times the missionary couple was pulled out of the country for safety reasons. They returned to Saskatchewan at one point to start a church and then worked in France among refugees, but it was always Cambodia that called to them.
The couple had four kids and it was while visiting one of them in Africa in 1994 that Norman suffered a deadly heart attack.
As a 60-year-old widow, Marie could have decided she’d done her missionary bit, but instead she persuaded the Alliance church to take a chance. She was posted back to Cambodia. Six years later she was told that was it was time to retire and return to Canada.
Reluctantly, she did. That lasted three months until she figured out that with her pension and savings she could afford to live in the country she now considered home. So, without any financial church support, she returned alone in 2001.
“God kept the best for last," she now says of that fateful decision.
AIDS was rampant and Ens, with the help of friends she’d made years before, started Place of Rescue, a charity to provide makeshift shelter for those suffering from what was then a surefire killer.
“We started with 16 small houses to help families coping with AIDS. Essentially the adults came to die. There just weren’t the drugs. As well as palliative care, we also introduced them to Jesus and, for a Buddhist person believing in karma where a worse reincarnation lay ahead, then the Gospel was great news. If you believe, you can go to heaven.”
With so many adults dying, many children were orphaned and by 2004 Ens and her co-workers realized they had to act. They kicked off a drive to house those kids and today there are more than 500 children being cared for, within three orphanages. Rescue had blossomed so much that when the wife of that country’s prime minister visited, she immediately fast-tracked citizenship for the Canadian widow who’d made it possible.
These days, the kids all call Marie Ens ‘Ma Yeah’ — grandma in their language. And she’s teaching them not to see themselves as victims. During the 2013 floods in Calgary, she showed the children photos and suggested they help. She thought they might raise $100. They ended up raising $900. The fact that Cambodian orphans would send money to oil-rich Calgary caused quite a stir.
“We really teach our children that they must not see themselves as poor little orphans, that they have a Father in heaven who is much more loving than any earthly