Daydreaming of Cambodia

My college friend, P, fled Cambodia in 1978 during Pol Pot’s revolution. She was eight years old. She lost her father during the Khmer Rouge genocide. Two men simply knocked on the door asking for her father.  ”We need his help. He’ll return tomorrow.”  He went with them and she never saw him again. Her husband also lost his father during the Pol Pot years between 1975-1979 when approximately 1.7 million people were killed (approximately 1/4 of the population at that time). Along with her mother and sister, she stayed in a refugee camp in Bataan, Philippines, before receiving a sponsorship to the United States. She told me about a time when she and her family bartered with the local mountain people in the Philippines. Her family would trade vegetables and rice for food and clothing. When she had to leave for the U.S, she remembered crying because she had formed strong bonds with everyone that lived along the mountain side.

When I told her I wanted to visit Cambodia, she insisted I contact her family who she had not seen since she left the country. Her eight-year old son was against my visit. He thought I would be turned into a “slave” or “captured by snakes.” These are the kinds of stories he had heard. While I was in Cambodia, he was always calling me on my cell phone. “Are you okay aunty?”

One day I hope that he and his parents will return to visit the beautiful country of Cambodia. I was and will be forever changed by my experience there.