ដើម្បីអានជាភាសាខ្មែរ សូមចុច នៅទីនេះ
Grandma Lin, as she is affectionately known in her Teuk Thla Ward in the Phnom Penh Cambodia North Stake, is a tiny lady with an infectious laugh and a beautiful spirit. Despite having tender knee joints and being stooped over with osteoporosis, she radiates a wonderfully positive outlook on life.
But what belies her radiant cheer and vivacity is a life riddled with difficulties and tragedy. Grandma Lin, age 79, whose birth name is Sot Maklin, experienced the loss of nearly her entire large family in the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields. She endured the horrors of the Pol Pot labor camps, abject poverty, serious accidents, and many other health problems.
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Sot Maklin, known as Grandma Lin by her many friends, is a longtime stalwart member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.© 2025 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.Despite Grandma Lin’s struggles, what keeps her thriving is her strong testimony of Jesus Christ. It is her knowledge of the Savior’s sacrifice and promise of a glorious afterlife that provides assurance that her incredibly hard life has meaning, and that she will be reunited with long-lost loved ones in a much better place.
Grandma Lin’s immense losses also make the imminent arrival of the House of the Lord, the Phnom Penh Cambodia Temple, all the sweeter because she knows that saving ordinances can be performed for her many deceased family members in the temple.
Sot Maklin was born in August of 1946 and grew up in a happy, loving family in Phnom Penh, the youngest of 15 siblings. Her father, Sot Linhong, worked on the Mekong River in Kampong Cham province. The family members worked hard during the week and on Sundays they gathered and enjoyed fun family activities.
But tragedy struck the family early. Sot Linhong, who was of Chinese descent, wanted his oldest child, Sot Vengkeang, to get to know his roots. So he sent Vengkeang to China to stay with his grandfather. While he was in China, the Cultural Revolution took place and Vengkeang was one of its many fatalities.
Then in the mid-1970s, the genocidal despot Pol Pot conquered Cambodia, murdering, torturing and starving as many as two million Cambodian citizens in the Killing Fields.
Nearly every member of Grandma Lin’s large family died. She does not know what happened to most of them, but she remembers the unspeakable anguish as, over a short period of time, families were torn apart -- fathers, mothers and children separated, taken away to be shot, or forced into slave labor and starvation. At one point she asked the soldiers to end her life, too. She did not want to be left alone.
Instead of being killed, the tiny young lady was forced into labor at work camps. She spent long hours every day hauling water, lifting large bags of rice, building furniture, digging holes for building foundations and moving dirt. She was relocated frequently to different parts of the country and always there was very little food. Those who could not work or who tried to escape were killed. Any reluctance to work resulted in torture. People disappeared and were never seen again. Many times, she thought she would die.
Of her large immediate and extended family, only Grandma Lin, her mother, and a nephew survived the war. Grandma Lin’s father was with them for a time, but he was very ill and bedridden, passing away in 1979 from starvation and disease. She also lost all of the friends she had before the war.
Grandma Lin’s nephew, Sun Veasna, remembers being forced to work by the soldiers. Among other things, he had to haul dirt to make a pond and was forced to go into the forest and cut bamboo. Grandma Lin’s mother, Chhayly, took care of the young children in the work camp and her sick, bedridden husband.
After four years, the Khmer Rouge were mostly defeated, and Grandma Lin’s country started to recover. She returned to Phnom Penh and began working in a factory sewing clothes. She was able to connect with her nephew, Sun Veasna, who also survived the war , and today she lives with Veasna and his daughter, Sun Sina, in a small home they purchased together. Grandma Lin is “grandma” to Sun Sina, even though she is actually a great niece. No other grandparents survived the Khmer Rouge.
In 2001, two missionaries, Elder Phillip Hall and Elder Tol Koim, from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, knocked on Grandma Lin’s door to teach her about Jesus Christ. She had always believed in God in some form, and she welcomed the missionary visits and lessons.
Grandma Lin said that right from the start, everything the missionaries taught her rang true. It just felt right. She said she wanted to be baptized even before the missionaries were ready to invite her. They wanted her to receive more discussions, but after two months of learning, she insisted on being baptized.
She became a member of the Church in 2001. Her nephew was baptized in 2002. She has been a dedicated church member ever since and is now one of the oldest people in her congregation. Ward members love her and take good care of her. Respecting and caring for the elderly is an important part of the Cambodian culture.
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Grandma Lin with the two missionaries who baptized her, Elder Tol Koim and Elder Phillip Hall, along with other Church members, in 2001.© 2025 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.Grandma Lin was never taught to read, but she really wanted to learn God’s word and commandments. She taught herself to read by studying the scriptures.
Life has always been hard for Grandma Lin. The most common way of traveling in the busy, teeming city of Phnom Penh is by moto (scooter or small motorcycle). She has been in three accidents while riding on the back of a moto, two of them serious. In the first accident, another moto hit the one she was on, and she fell off and hit a rock, badly hurting her hip. She walked home despite the pain.
A second accident did not cause serious injuries, but in the third accident she fell off and hit a rock so hard she heard a bone crack. She was taken home and healed on her own, not wanting to go to a hospital.
Soon after that, Grandma Lin fell down the stairs in her home and she has had a hard time walking ever since.
Grandma Lin said she has wondered many times why she is still alive, why God does not take her home to be with her family. She would like to go to heaven.
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Grandma Lin with good friend Horm Hom and Elder Bunhuoch Eng, Area Seventy for Cambodia, at the North Stake Building, August 3, 2025.© 2025 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.But as she learned about the temple, and rejoiced when a temple was announced for Cambodia, she became convinced that she is still needed on earth to do family history work for her parents and siblings, and for her ancestors. She has worked on her family tree, but has had a hard time filling out the generations.
Family history work is extremely hard in Cambodia because so many records were lost during the Khmer Rouge period and because many important dates, like births, marriages and deaths, were simply never recorded. She knows the names of her parents and some of her siblings but does not have many key dates in their lives.
Still, Grandma Lin and many other Cambodian members are determined to do the best they can.
“I am very joyful and grateful that a temple is coming,” she said through an interpreter. She wants to serve as proxy for her ancestors and she wants to serve in the temple.
Despite her health challenges, Grandma Lin likes to be busy and stay active. She arrives at church before 8 a.m. and stays through the meetings of all three congregations that meet in the Phnom Penh North Stake building. She said she wants to see all the members as much as she can before she dies.
Grandma Lin loves to sing the hymns of Zion and she sings with gusto. She feels personally responsible to make sure the senior missionaries serving in the three congregations she attends, who do not speak Khmer, have a translator so they know what is being said in talks and lessons. She directs young members who speak English to sit by the senior couples.
She has a great sense of humor. She often makes comments in women’s Relief Society and joint Sunday School classes that make the other members laugh. The members of all three congregations love her and take care of her during meetings. She rides to church with her nephew on the back of his moto and gets a ride home from a member or takes a tuk tuk (a three-wheeled motorcycle taxi) home at the end of the last meeting that ends at 4 p.m.
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Grandma Lin (sitting in front wearing mask) with the Relief Society sisters of the Toul Kork Ward, along with sister missionaries, March 9, 2025.© 2025 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.She recently joked with a young Cambodian member, Monica Max, who is single, “Either you get a husband now, or I die!” When Monica smiled and replied that she did not want a husband right now, Grandma Lin responded, “Okay, when you go to heaven you can be an angel if you don’t want a husband.”
“We love to joke with each other,” said Monica. “She’s a good teaser.”
During the COVID-19 period, no one was allowed to attend church in person. Buildings were closed. It was a hard time for Grandma Lin, who loves to attend church and mingle with the Saints.
The first Sunday when in-person church services were finally allowed again, her bishop could see that Grandma Lin really wanted to talk to him. When he greeted her, she handed him a cloth sack. Inside, he could see dozens of small packages of riel (Cambodian currency), each rolled up with string.
Even though she is very poor, Grandma Lin had faithfully saved her tithing money, rolling up the currency and labeling it each month.
“It was truly the ‘widow’s mite’,” said Bishop Ear Meng. One of the things Grandma Lin weeps over is that she does not have more to give to the Lord.
(Note: Thanks to Monica Max and Ronald Ratha for translating interviews with Grandma Lin and Sun Veasna.)
