Here's Where I am Now

My twenty-page paper is due tomorrow. I’ve written most of it. And by that I mean everything but the conclusion and ending.

I have been avoiding it. Not because I am a procrastinator, but out of a fear of being finished, of being “through” with Cambodia, which emotionally I don’t think I ever will be. But I am struggling. I feel a heavy burden. It’s not a burden of having to carry anyone’s pain, it’s this weight of knowing that I have no obligation to hold on any longer, it’s a fear that I can so easily push away all of my experiences, push away all of these people’s lives who have touched me. I’ve been doing a lot of crying, praying, thinking about what these next years hold for me. Needless to say, Daddy and I have nearly irreconcilable ideas and plans for me. He looks out for me, my future while I am just so desperate to be with people who are raw, alive with humanity, who needs me in some way. Seeing children’s faces light up at three silly white girls teaching them the Hokey Pokey was one of the greatest moments of my life.

 

And here am I trying to write this paper about what justice looks like for a population surviving a genocide. There is no justice. The world needs another word for reconciliation after life traumatizing, nation and history affecting atrocities. Because justice—it doesn’t exist. If I had lost my entire family, nothing anyone said to me or gave me would make me feel that justice is served. Needless to say writing a paper, then about justice, has been more about teaching a population how to be a “bigger person”, which I fear is also just a load of crap, something I wish would happen to help me sleep better.

 Since being home, I recently read a book that had a very meaningful passage. I have since given the book to another friend to read, but the jist of it has helped me learn the value of forgiveness. In western cultures, we have this forgive and forget mentality when someone has done wrong against us. This book is speaking about sins done by one person to another, and how we just like to move on in the relationship and forget it ever happened. But we tend to skip the “forgive” part of it. Someone has to take the fall, accept the sin, accept the pain and the hurt of the wrong-doing in order for forgiveness to take place or else you just skip right along to the forget pattern, but we never really forget because often down the road the issue will resurface because forgiveness has not really taken place.

 I feel this is so applicable in Cambodia. Forgiveness is the only way out. It is the only way to stop the cycle of violence from repeating itself. And forgiveness hasn’t happened; in fact the entire population has silenced themselves. These people live in a culture where you don’t talk about anything bad. From the book you will read about in the next paragraph, the author, Somaly Mam, writes

“During the Khmer Rouge regime people detached themselves from any kind of human feeling, because feeling meant pain. They learned not to trust their neighbors, their friends, their family, their own children. To avoid getting mad, they shrank to the smallest part of a human, which is “me”. After the regime fell, they were silent, either because they had helped cause the suffering or because this is what they learned to do in order to survive.

            The Khmer Rouge eliminated everything that mattered to Cambodians. And after they fell, people no longer cared about anything except money. I suppose they want to give themselves some insurance in case of another catastrophe, even though the lesson of Pol Pot—if there is one—is that there is no insurance against catastrophe."

Great writing. Sad Truth to think about from the comforts of the air conditioning, right?

Those excerpts came from a book I just finished. It is the most heartbreaking book called The Road of Lost Innocence about an escaped sex slave in Cambodia who writes not only her gut-wrenching story, but also of the hundreds of girls who have similar lives as she. I’m regretful to say to all my male friends that this book has made me disdain men, especially because it is just about these endless stories of rape, and male empowerment through destroying the lives of little girls repeatedly. I understand that this is not a burden or an accusation I should place on most men, but it really is hard to help it when reading these stories. All the men in my life, especially those of you reading this, treat my girlfriends and me with the utmost respect, but I don’t think a single woman can read this and not have similar sentiments. The majority of men in Cambodia lose their virginity to prostitutes by the age of fifteen. One-in-eight Cambodian girls are sold into sex trafficking. And I just cannot even begin to describe the atrocities written about in this book. The entire country of Cambodia today is a story of men dominating and oppressing and ruining women. And here I am, reading this book, under my blue sky in my Orange County utopia in my pink polka dot bikini thinking, “Oh this is just terrible… Hmm, its hot, I think I’ll go for a swim…” And I just have so much difficulty even speaking about this to my parents, to my friends, to anyone. Not just this book, but also my whole experience because I just cannot do justice for everyone. And my comfortable, amazing, spoiled life is just becoming less and less comfortable emotionally.

In this last chapter, she writes that “there is one law for women: silence before rape and silence after,” (185). This is understood throughout the entire culture.  It’s a story of men with AIDS raping six-year old virgins thinking it will cure them. It’s a story of these same girls being stitched up in the brothels without anesthetics the same day and resold two days later as virgins again.  The author has created centers throughout Southeast Asia to recover these girls, over four thousand now.  But threats are made against her life daily because the majority of the top officials in all of these countries are bribed by the pimps and the police and the military who run these brothels. She writes, “Even if we do make a scandal, the political authorities can only try to force the judicial machine into action. Then things get blocked up and nothing happens. The results are rarely satisfactory. We have laws in Cambodia, but everyone ignores them. The law of money prevails. With money you can buy a judge, a policeman—whatever you want,” (173). This is not just true of sex slavery, this is true of the entire country’s corruption.

And four thousand saved girls is great, but what about the hundreds of thousands of girls who the organization doesn’t have enough money to save.

This entry is not supposed to be a guilt dump on your shoulders. But it’s a here is what I am thinking as I am trying to write about justice.

So I am thinking now is time to go write the paper again. If you want some light summer reading, aka my twenty pages, which are quite similar to this, let me know. I’ll be more than happy to email it along to you. 

We presented our entire trips this morning in our groups. It was amazing and definitely what I needed to start my own personal healing process. I have to write a lengthy research paper about transitional justice in Cambodia. I am excited for the challenge. 

I was reading the end of a book called Velvet Elvis just now and came across this quote which really shed positive light and put into words many of my thoughts after the trip.

"Ultimately our gift to the world around us is hope. Not blind hope that pretends everything is fine and refuses to acknowledge how things are. But the kind of hope that comes from staring pain and suffering right in the eyes and refusing to believe that this is all there is. It is what we all need-- hope that comes not from going around suffering but from going through it."

I'm okay!

We spent the weekend in Siem Reap doing touristy things. It was great. I am headed back to Los Angeles tomorrow.

I have found peace with all of this. I know I left on such an intense note. But Christina, Jessica and I went to a Christian bookstore on Thursday that they knew about through the missionary. Literally the first book that caught my eye and picked up was  called "The Good News About Injustice" and it's all about the Christian perspective of why all of this happens throughout the world. It has been helping a lot. And Jacqui (the roomie in Hong Kong) sent me the most encouraging, long, positive, reinforcement email and it was just such a good read and really renewed my faith in what I am doing here. And I just pray that somewhere down the line, God has me in his action plans for some (ANY) third world country, or making a difference in some soul-crushing plight that the world needs some form of answer to. 

I had a fantastic trip. Totally life changing in ways I don't know if I will be able to talk about for quite awhile, but just really too unreal. I kept having to remind myself that this was real: I was really in this amazing country doing this amazing thing meeting these amazing people, going to UN TRIALS, seeing all those world famous amazing temples. It was just too good to be true.

Thanks Mommy, Sid, and Daddy SO SO SO SO MUCH. For everything. For your constant support (and monetarily too), encouragement, and all the constant outpouring of your love. I cant wait to get home and actually speak to everyone! 

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I have been neglecting the blog, and I keep trying to say its because I am busy or because too much is happening to even try to fit into a post, but that would be a blatant lie. Then I've been contemplating just deleting the whole blog, but then I felt that it would be unfair to those of you who have actually been tracking me while I'm here. 

So I'm breathing underwater here, and let's just say I'm not a fish. In other words, I'm drowning. 

I came on here to tell you all of the more amazing things happening, example: I'm going on Voice of America radio in about fifteen minutes with a few other students. We are being interviewed for the Phnom Penh post in a few days, my picture was in the newspaper last week when I distributed books! I've been at the Duch trials, and I want so much to talk about it, but if you all thought I was all confused after interviewing Him Huy, that was nothing compared to what I feel after these trials. I just want so much to give Duch a hug, and tell him that God loves him, no matter what. Here, this man is on trial openly admitting to killing 15,000 people, he is more educated and keeps correcting the prosecution to implicate himself further, and only because he has already lost everything and played a role in destroying an entire nation. But he is not even in the top echelon in the regime, he just wrote a diary so he was able to implicate. They dont even have enough hard evidence to put the few top leaders who are still alive on trial, in fact some have diplomatic immunity. It just crushes my soul. And Duch, he is just so stoic and well mannered, and brave and wants so much to heal the country that he helped ruin. I'm just flabbergasted and floored.

And now I just feel so much that I am useless. I am here, doing nothing, really. I want to understand these trials, this genocide, heal these people. But I can't, most of them don't even want to talk. And why are we wasting so much money on this? They are talking to us because we ask to, but what are we doing with all of this? Publishing a few meaningless articles in newspapers, writing more books that wont be read? It's hard to find meaning in exposing someone's deepest pains when I have nothing to give them in return, to show them my gratitude for even speaking to us. 

And then it's like this genocide is in these people's past. The children who stand outside our car windows who are seven years old with babies around them. What do we do with them? What should my heart do for them? I can't give them money because it goes to pimps. THey dont have families to come home to at night. They dont get the money I want to give them, it lines someone else's pockets. And if I dont give them money then they get beaten for being useless, for not wrenching tourist's hearts enough. What can I do? What can any of us do? And it's not like you can follow them, its not like you can take the cops. This is a country where corruption rules everything. The cops turn a blind eye because they are paid by the pimps to disregard it. It cant be brought to trial because there is no justice system here to speak of, it too is overrun more than anything with corruption to the maximum. 

And when we walk down the riverfront streets at night, there are girls who are selling themselves, their bodies, and not even for their own gain, but for someone else's own monetary gain. They get beaten for not making enough money, for not being pretty enough, or seductive enough. 

These are their real problems. Now. And here I am for a class learning about "justice". I dont know what I am going to write in this twenty page paper because the word is meaningless. And justice and forgiveness doesn't feed parentless children, it doesnt root out pimping children and women, it doesnt slow the sex trade. Forgiveness is something we as outsiders want to help us sleep better at night.

I'm not sleeping well. My heart hurts more than it ever could for a boy. And my crying heart doesn't save humanity, it doesn't even help humanity.  And even if I could save Cambodia, this is one of hundreds of countries with similar problems. The problems here arent even as bad as other places. 

SO anyway. I am not writing any more. It feels dumb and pointless and heartless to write on here and entertain you all when really I just want to spend my time crying on curbs with children who I can't do anything for. 

I was almost inclined to say pray for me, but more than anything I would rather all your prayers, at least for this one night, go out to not only Cambodia, but to all the ills that plague civilization and humanity.

Thanks for reading, hope you all laughed in the past. Thanks for caring enough about me to read this for two weeks, it really does mean a lot to me. 

Ginger 0 Tiffany 1

Jessica didnt believe me that there are penguins in South Africa.

Read the title of the post to find out who was right. Not that it should surprise you because if it was the Super Ginger, I dont think I would post it. Then again, I am rarely wrong so if you want the real score, its probably Ginger + Rest of the World: 8. Tiffany: 10,000 to the nth degree of Right. 

Him Huy

 It is only 4:30 P.M. as I start writing this on Monday. It is weird that I will only be here one more week, as in I will be in Taipei at this time next week. Where did my adventure go?

 Two tattoos were inspired by this trip. Oh snap. Sorry to my parentals. However, I leave you with the somewhat comforting thought that me getting around to actually committing to scarring my skin forever is totally different than just saying I’m getting them (that is where I am now, after all, I cannot imagine a tattoo parlor here is in any way sanitary.)

 So today we woke up and went out to yet another province outside the city to interview Him Huy (did you do your homework?)

 In four hours, I drank 1.8 Liters of water, which is more than one is recommended to drink daily by whoever makes those rules. Well whoever made that limit had never ever been to Cambodia. I am still parched. TMI life example: I never have to pee here. The water pours out of my pores before it has a chance to wash my system. Maybe that’s why I got sick. I wanted to entitle one album of my pictures “Moist” because it is the word I use to describe everything about this country. Sweat stains.

Now I am back from dinner, I can write about why I’m actually here in Cambodia.

We interviewed Him Huy today. I have a lot to say, and I don’t think most people want to hear it mostly because it takes a very humane view of a very inhumane genocide. So it’s more serious, but feel free to keep reading further down. I will make it loud and clear when my IR sociology sputter is over.

We interviewed Him Huy today. He was so enlightening. His home is very modest and unassuming because he is just like any other Cambodian. He wants away from a genocide that he wanted nothing to do with.

His shortened story: He was conscripted at age 15 into the Khmer Rouge where he was initially a soldier, he got sick many times with malaria and was in and out of hospitals most of 1974. Then Comrade Hor bonded with him and didn’t make him go back to the front lines. He was part of the KR that came into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. He was part of this Division 703 that was taken into S-21 prison (the one I wrote about previously in the blog) where Hor was second in command to Duch. Everyone did what Duch said to do. Within the prison there was Duch’s Western Zone faction and Hor’s 

Division 703 faction. In 1977, Duch started cleansing the party from within at the prison and many of Duch’s fellow prison guard cadres were interrogated, tortured and killed. Him Huy recalled throughout the interview that he lived in constant realization that he was next, that he daily believed he was going to be killed by Duch. To this day, he says he only lived because the Vietnamese came in and won the war. If the Vietnamese had lost, Huy would still have been part of the Khmer Rouge and knows he would have been killed by Duch. Him Huy did plan a revolt that never happened because Hor “got quiet” which meant that it would not happen. Him Huy’s job at S-21 prison was a prison guard where he was responsible for bringing the new arrivals at the prison into the room where they were processed. He was also supposed to make sure at night that none of the other guards were sleeping. He recalls hearing lots of screaming from prisoners, but he could not talk to anyone, even the guards in other units. There was a lot of secrecy in the prison and division so that he only ate with his unit and interacted with only other guards. He had no contact with the torture/interrogation units and thus had only vague inclinations as to what has happening in the prison. He was also the person responsible for writing the name of each prisoner at Choeung Ek as they were taken from the holding room to the killing fields, so he wrote down each name and numbered each person as they were sent to their deaths.

The interview was two and a half hours, I have over ten pages of written notes from it, so I am not going to transcribe all that plus a lot of it would entail a factual  background of a conflict that I’m guessing none of my lovely avid readers have. And I mean I understand, I was in the same boat until the last couple months of reading books and then class and being here.

Here is where you can disagree with me:

Him Huy is a perpetrator by the plain and simple fact that he was in the Khmer Rouge, he was a guard, he was a head guard. He witnessed killings, he may have even partaken (even though he only recalls one specific time when he did kill someone.) But I don’t think he’s guilty. Of course we all have choices in life, and yes he had the choice to kill or not, but if one understands the culture of paranoia that encircled this entire regime, then he looks a lot more blameless, along with many of the other KR cadres. When Him Huy says he literally did not have a clue what was really happening in the prison, it is the truth. There were six men who literally ran the entire country and even a few of those top leaders were assassinated because Pol Pot was so paranoid. Duch ran S-21 prison, he was one of the six. Comrade Hor, who I spoke of earlier, was second in command at s-21. He was tortured and killed. When the top people are being killed, what are you supposed to do? Him Huy watched dozens of his unit be killed, he watched their families come in and be killed simply for being affiliated with a prisoner. Huy told us at the end that every day he wanted to put a bullet to his head but never did because his family would have been tortured and killed for his actions. Him Huy planned a revolt as he told us for a long time, the plan was intercepted by Duch’s faction. Many of the men involved with the plan were tortured and killed.

SO again, while Him Huy could have chosen not to partake, put yourself in his shoes. If he had chosen not to be a part of the Khmer Rouge (he frequently asked to be moved to the fornt lines because he understood that his life and his family’s life was in grave danger as long as he was guard, but he was always turned down), he would have been killed. And had he died, it is not that it would have prevented anyone else’s life from being taken. His death would have been entirely in vain, as all of the deaths were. He was unimportant to the Khmer Rouge, his life and death was of little consequence to the Khmer Rouge (a phrase which was actually told to everyone in the country. Your life is irrelevant and your death is of little consequence and forgotten).

I cannot hold Him Huy accountable for being human. I cant. I am sure he probably killed more than one person, but I mean its thirty years later. He has nine kids, why should he feel obligated to tell his own guilty conscience (if it is in fact guilty) to a bunch of white girls who are doing this for their own research—his guilt is between him and his God on his judgment day. I don’t think I have any room to sit here and say that I would have behaved any differently, and I don’t know that many of us have. While we would all like to say that we would have done something, the top of the regime went out of their way to literally make it impossible to disobey the party lines without being killed as a result. Not to mention, by the time KR fell in 1979, Him Huy was barely 22. He was my age. He thought he was going to be killed every day. Him Huy told us today that Duch kept offering to get him a wife, but he refused. Not because he didn’t want one. But because if he had a wife, that was one more person who could potentially be guilty. The more people you associate with, the more likely you are to be killed because of their alliances.  It was a culture of isolation for survival. Heroism in any way resulted not only in your own death, but in torture and the consequential torture of your family and then their deaths. Would you have gone against it?

 I think most people disagree with me, not because they think my logic is wrong, but it is difficult to fathom holding six people responsible for the death of 1.7 million people.

But these people are thirty THIRTY years removed from this conflict. 75% of their population is under the age of thirty. Meaning that only a quarter was even alive during this time. Justice cannot be had for this thirty years later. You cannot kill Him Huy because that is not going to make any one else feel better about what happened. It will instead anger his family, and anger the younger generations that are related to former KR people. It will make the young population resentful of international interference (AGAIN. That is what brought such an extreme group to power in the first place. This sounds like a GREAT IDEA.) at this stage, trying low ranking officials is useless. You cannot bring back the loved ones lost, but you can educate the young population to what happened. Have them talk to their parents, talk to former KR, let them tell their stories because they are victims too.

 At the end of the interview, we asked Him Huy what would bring him peace. His response was for all of us to just leave him alone, to stop asking him about it. People keep unburying this past, and no one has forgotten it but meaningless rhetoric, like this interview aren’t doing anything but angering and refreshing resentment.

If you are still with me, I am going to Duch’s UN trial for the next three days. You can imagine how I feel going into this….

Anyway, its hot as… a lot of inappropriate things I will refrain from saying. TMI example: i’ve been sleeping in a light, cotton “Swim with Mike” tank top. I went to the front desk an hour ago, got scissors and cut off the bottom half of the shirt. I am sleeping with essentially an elastic-less sports bra and I am still sweating my face off right now. Our room is set at sixteen celcius but the humidity just seeps in everywhere. Its brutal. Note to self, third world countries on the equator during the summer and the typhoon season is a bloody mistake.

 On a better note, Kru Kosal says there is a place in the North (the province I spoke of earlier in the elephant post) that is completely untouched by tourists and cars. Elephants take you EVERYWHERE. We cannot go this trip which as you can imagine is just the worst news ever. But I will be going to this province on my next trip for my elephant ride and to adopt my son.  I am fifty shades of excited for this.Bed time. We spoke a lot today about the general state of Cambodia today. It breaks my heart in a lot of ways. I hate and resent NGO’s more than I already did.

Hooray Lakers victory. I want this to be over in four games. But if it goes longer, then I can be home for game six and seven!!!! But I don’t think it will, and I would rather we just spanked Orlando and got it over with. 

Elephant Part 2

Dear Avid Readers/ Facebook users,

For all of you wondering about the sudden obsession with elephants, I am realizing that my trip is only one more week long and I am yet to see a country so I did all of the research (of course, right?) about elephants in Cambodia because I WANT ONE, at least a ride on one. And I want to blow into his trunk so he never forgets me. Ok, so there is one place in the capital where I can go ride an elephant, but its ten dollars! TEN. And im pressed for money so thats going to be a no. I thought about hopping my way across Southeast Asia to Malaysia because there are hotels there that escort you to your room via elephant, which sounds like a life venture I should have at my future homes. However, I think Malaysia may be more expensive than ten dollars, so again--I'm thinking thats a no. In addition, there are only 250-600 wild elephants left in Cambodia. THey are way up northwest. I will not be venturing there, so thats out the window. (Do you see how fast my hopes are being dashed????). Lastly, we are going to Siem Reap this weekend for the weekend to hike Angkor Wat. I think there are also elephant rides there. I will spend the rest of money and potentially sell my soul (not myself daddy, not prostitution, merely my soul) for an elephant ride before I leave. 

 Also, I am inspired to start a Sprinkles (the world's best cupcakes that are sold in LA) chain in Cambodia. Emily had the following brilliant idea: "OH. idea. you should 1. get an elephant 2. ride it around cambodia and 3. sell cupcakes from it! it'll be like the cambodian version of the hot dog vendors in LA. brilliant. i know. you're welcome. :)" I personally feel this is a brilliant idea and will take to it soon. Thoughts? I am thinking of starting a few surveys and petitions from this blog. A yes no survey of Emilys sprinkle idea. Followed by a petition to get Tom and Sue to get us a Cambodian boy. It would be the greatest. A third petition, which is imperative, LETS GET TIFFANY AN ELEPHANT. NOW. 

Thoughts everyone? Daddy?