MEET OUR FOUNDERS
ND and Sophal Strupler met at the age of 17 in Switzerland. ND recalls “Everything started when I got to know a girl named Sophal. She was born in Phnom Penh before the war and was abandoned as a three-month-old baby and rescued by a Red Cross nurse from Switzerland who brought her into the hospital where she cared for the baby but nobody came to collect her.”
Faced with the prospect of leaving the baby in war-ravaged Cambodia, the nurse decided to bring her to Switzerland for adoption. It wasn’t until they were in their thirties that they decided to visit Cambodia for the first time. From their first visit in 2012 the family fell in love with the country and its people.
In 2013, the Strupler family decided to sell their home and move from Switzerland to Cambodia to begin a new life. They launched ICF Siem Reap, a Non-Denominational Christian Church the following year to meet the spiritual needs of the community. They quickly learned that the needs were great and weekly gatherings would not be enough to build the relationships they desired. Through this felt need came the formation of the ICF Campus. The ICF Campus is a dream of theirs that started its work in the community in 2014 and today ICF Campus offers weekly classes and activities to over 800 Cambodians at their facility in Siem Reap. Complete with classrooms, a soccer field, tennis courts, basketball hoops, and a lake for swimming and diving with plans to expand and offer even more space for training and equipping Cambodians.