I spent three fairly intense months in Cambodia running around the country with my camera, pen, and paper, interviewing survivors of the genocidal maniacs known as the Khmer Rouge. I walked among many emaciated skeletons poorly disguised as women and children, homeless, crying, and begging for food while tugging at my clothing and my heart. I sat with tribes in the northern part of the country and listened to what they were doing to protect their rainforests from destruction, because their own greedy government officials were selling off the country’s natural resources and pocketing the proceeds, and the darker factions of the Vietnamese were employing deceitful schemes to rape the Cambodian rainforests in order to turn a dime with the Chinese and other countries.
I also spent time with homeless children who had been forced to grow up way too fast. Five to ten-year-old street kids had the wear and tear of forty-year-olds because they had to fend for themselves, scrounging for any food they could find on the dusty Cambodian streets. In my darkest and most soul wrenching moments, I went around with an undercover detective who was busting mostly Western men, sexual predators, who came to Cambodia to extract the life force from these vulnerable children. These demented beasts spilled over the border to Cambodia after Thailand started to clamp down on child sex tourism in their own backyard. Yes, it’s true. There are sick people who travel to underdeveloped countries to have sex with children. These disgusting characters exuded a dank and rotten vibration from the inside out.
Thankfully, some light came with the darkness. My numerous interactions with inspiring Cambodian activists kept my sanity and positivity afloat. The activist who I remember the most is Hant Pipaal. Anna and I had the blessed chance to interview her before leaving Cambodia. She is the head administrator of the office where I worked from in Pnom Penh. When I first met her, she seemed a little tough and almost frightening. She liked things her way in the office and sometimes got a little furious if she didn’t get it, but as time went on and I had more interactions with her, I saw her softer underbelly and we actually developed a friendship. It was a rare gift that she took the time to share the story of her own endurance and strength during the ghastly acts Khmer Rouge.
Anna was born in Cambodia’s Siem Reap province in 1947 and, at the age of four, her family moved to Phnom Penh where she studied French until the age of eighteen.
In 1960, Anna began working as a secretary for a French engineer who helped to bring electrical engineering to Cambodia. From 1970 to 1975, as Cambodia’s political environment began to deteriorate, she began volunteering for the International Women’s Association. There, she coordinated food and medicine distribution and job placement for Cambodia’s internal refugees that were fleeing from the Khmer Rouge, and supported her family by working a morning job with Cambodia’s Society for Imports and Exports.
In 1975, her boss from the Society of Imports and Exports asked her to work in Thailand, but, never dreaming that Cambodia would fall to the Khmer Rouge, she chose to stay and help her country deal with the large amounts of refugees that were arriving in the capital each month.
When asked about her initial feelings toward the Khmer Rouge, Anna said that she was afraid because “they all wore black.” When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, she remembers that thousands of people flocked to the streets to watch them enter the city. At first, the mood was happy, but this soon changed when the Khmer Rouge told everyone that the Americans were about to bomb the city and that everyone would need to go into the countryside for three days. When Anna asked if she could take her boat up the Ton Le Sap River to escape, the soldier told her that, “all things belonged to the Khmer Rouge now.” “They took my boat, and I realized it was over,” she says. Only those who were lucky enough to survive would see the city again, but not for over three years.
