Cambodia, the Buddha and the Past

 

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Temple monks at lunch

We weren’t supposed to bomb Cambodia, but we did.  I remember the day that the revered Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield first learned of Nixon’s “secret” attack on what seemed to be a gentle, somewhat innocent country for which he held considerable affection.   He was almost trembling with rage.  I know now that his anger arose from what he knew would happen to Cambodia as a result of this assault on a nation so far not actively involved in the conflict.

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Here are the tenets of Buddhism described by our guide YuKu; they inspired gentle Cambodia then and still do today: Neutralism, Tolerance, Compassion and Sympathy; Learn to know, Learn to do, Learn to be, Learn to live together. In many ways, our bombing wiped out the capacity to follow them.

In the years before Richard Nixon ordered the bombings in 1970 (there were, to be fair, Viet Cong racing over the Vietnamese border into Cambodia to avoid US and South Vietnamese troops) Buddhism offered a foundation, and the Cambodian economy was growing well. The bombs put an end to that growth and threw the country into the vicious chaos that brought on the killing fields. In thosse terrible years, the Khymer rouge herded most of the people into the countryside to farm.  Those who were were well educated were often executed instead.  More than 2 million met torture and death.

For me, the visit to the temple and the rest of our day were haunted by my growing awareness of just what our bombs had retarded or destroyed.  Not just temples and Buddhas.  Not even just the futures of the educated or political.  No.

We destroyed lives.

Cambodia has had to build or rebuild much of its infrastructure from roads to hospitals to schools.

We visited a school.  And we met Monica.

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Second-grader Monica, “#1 student” in her class — 41 kids jammed three to a desk.

We all know poor countries have fewer resources to educate their children but the gap between our worst school and this one is pretty big. The kids go to school free but must buy their books, workbooks and supplies. And the teachers? Their documents and supplies are stored in a dusty filing cabinet in the one-room office. Not a computer in sight.

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Monica and her 40 classmates

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The school library

This is a tiny school that lets tours pass through once in a while.  I know it’s a tourist resource but there is no way to fake 41 kids singing to you about hygiene and brushing their teeth.  Or to imagine the poverty and determination that surrounds their classroom.  They lost so many years — maybe chunks of a generation, in fact, and are still far from recovered from those years.

For the village farmers it is the same.  The simplicity of their homes and paucity of resources is shattering.

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The “spirit house” and, behind it, the outhouse.
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The “living room” and bedroom for all but the girls who sleep behind a jerry-rigged door because “girls need privacy.”
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The rest of the living space, next to the TV
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The pantry.
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The kitchen (pardon the shadows)

Part of the reason it is so painful to remember those days, whether here in Cambodia or in the US, where US universities exploded and four students died at Kent State at the hands of the National Guard, is that it doesn’t take long to determine that there is a basic sweetness in the Cambodian people that ill-prepared them to face down what landed upon them once the bombs began to fall.

You can see it in the face of our guide here as he sang to us before we left the bus to fly to Vietnam.  I know this post is all over the place but I kept rewriting it and there’s so much more to tell you about that I’m just going to leave it as a meditation on a terrible time.  Being in Cambodia and even more in Vietnam (that’s next) has awakened all kinds of things in me.  Which is what is travel is for.  It doesn’t help Monica and her friends though.

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Our sweet, excellent guide YuKu singing us a farewell at the end of our day.

 

 

 

 

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.