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.