Vietnam and Cambodia: The Power of Seeing the World

So many factors affect how you perceive a place. Returning to Vietnam after only three years, I had a ready comparison with how I responded before, whereas Cambodia was a new country for me. This time I had the added benefit of traveling with Scottie and learning about her reactions. But there are so many other things that shape your perception:
· which experiences you choose to focus on – Scottie and started in Ho Chi Minh City with a tour of the Reunification Palace complete with what can only be described as propaganda video that certainly influenced how I felt about the city, less warmly than on my first visit;
· how hot/cold/tired you are at the time – we were so hot in HCM City most of the time that our shirts were drenched and sticking to us and my whole head poured sweat down the full width of my face, not just rivulets from my temples, meaning that I literally couldn’t see. Scottie commented, “I remember Gran telling me that ladies don’t sweat, they glow. Well, I’d have to say now ‘Gran, I’m SWEATING!’”;
· how extensive your expectations are – Scottie and I had both read a poignant and very well-written autobiography of a girl who survived the Khmer Rouge genocide, First They Killed My Father, and had some idea of the horrors we’d learn about at the Killing Fields. The students who had chosen this particular trip had done so fully aware that they had the alternative of doing only the temples of Angkor on another trip. They chose with varying degrees of preparation and differing expectations but all of them wanted to see and learn and try to understand. I am in awe of their courage at such a young age. Watching them force themselves to take unspeakable, incomprehensible horrors into their consciousness and grapple with them both breaks my heart for a world that contains that hell and deeply inspires me;.
· who your guide is and how free s/he feels to speak – we were divided into two buses in Cambodia and the guide on the other bus was a woman who took as her mission the telling of her story, but only while she was safely inside the bus, out of earshot of officials in this still largely Communist country. While our guide was a baby when he lost his father during the genocide, she was a teenager and told the powerful story of her tragic life and losses. I’m told there was not a dry eye on the bus, including hers. When I remarked to someone who had heard her story that I was sorry I missed it, he said, “I’m not sure you should be sorry. I don’t know if I could have chosen to hear it.”
· And so many more. We all wear lenses shaped by so many things; we all see and yet sometimes don’t see. Such is the nature of experiencing the world.

Someone told me the other day that they think Semester at Sea is a cult – and I had to agree, at least in the lighthearted sense the comparison was offered. Sharing the time in Southeast Asia with Scottie and watching her reconnect with memories of her SAS voyage in spring 1984, I saw how the core of this voyage continues through the decades and how its values, benefits and challenges endure. I won’t presume to summarize her impressions and hope that many of you will hear about them directly from her. But for me, to connect with her through this experience was a treasure and a privilege. I’m acutely aware of what it takes to get a committed mom away for a whole week and the courage it took to risk this adventure away from them. I am truly indebted to Phil, Dorothy, John and all Scottie’s devoted friends who helped out while she was gone and especially to my precious granddaughters Erin, Rachel and Lauren for sharing their mommy with me. It was a gift we’ll both remember for a long time. As she wrote to me in an email after she got home, only slightly tongue in cheek I’m sure, “We’ll always have Cambodia.”

What we have in Cambodia is a bittersweet offering, a rough-edged gem, a painful challenge to our hearts’ best tendencies. I relished the timeless coming of a new day over the splendor of Angkor Wat while trying to block out the din of the chattering Japanese tourists who had risen in surprising numbers to also witness the sight. I felt privileged to hear a student process out loud, in a sort of stream of consciousness, her emotions as she saw real poverty for the first time in a small floating village across the river from the spectacular Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. I took picture after picture at the Genocide Museum, wanting to have a record to verify the reality of sights I knew my mind might try to gloss over in remembering. But soon I had to stop, unable to do anything but the work of bringing into my awareness an incomprehensible horror.

Between 1974 and 1979, Pol Pot tortured and killed a million of his own countrymen, women and children. The genocide museum we visited was a high school that had been converted into a prison where people were interrogated for weeks to months in unspeakably cruel ways. No matter their answers, the outcome was always the same. They were herded into trucks, taken out to the Killing Fields, made to dig their own shallow graves and then killed in brutal ways without the swiftness of a bullet. As they were being processed into the prison, mug shots were taken. The black and white 8x10 photos are displayed in row after row, hundreds of human beings, even mothers holding babies, looking out at me with unmistakable emotions in their eyes – confusion, fear, defiance, despair – each one destined for unimaginable terror and death. I’ve no doubt they will be with me always.

I confess to my own despair. Perhaps it’s because I was just at the Rwandan genocide museum last March which told the story of a million Tutsis and their supporters who were killed by Hutus just ten years ago. All the talk after the Holocaust of “never again” and here we have two more genocides. And now Darfur in the Sudan. When and how will it ever end? We all can do our part certainly – committed work and money and small acts of tolerance can and do help. We need great leaps forward in local and global nonviolent conflict resolution. We need powerful and charismatic leaders like Nelson Mandela and Gandhi, whose portrayal by Ben Kingsley in that wonderful Attenborough film I watched last night during our own passage to India. But who? When? How?

Bereft of answers, I am also compelled to hope, inspired by these young people with whom I am traveling. Time and again I have heard them doing the heartbreaking work of processing what they have seen, bringing the horrors of poverty and man’s inhumanity to man into their consciousness. Whatever expectations they came with, whatever lenses they wear, their vision is clear. But they are bewildered and angry and overwhelmed. Their paradigms are imploding and they feel the loss of their familiar constructs of the world. I’ve done what I can to listen, to reassure them that they don’t have to have it all figured out, to comfort them as they grieve for this world we’re leaving them.

I’m convinced that what we can do is what Semester at Sea does and that’s why I am so committed to this program. I’m persuaded that providing the opportunity for these fresh, earnest, smart and caring young people to see the pain and joy of this world we all share is an answer with boundless power. I am reminded of stories of SAS alums I’ve known or heard of who are working for peace and justice in every way and venue imaginable from nutrition programs in Cape Town shanty towns to political campaigns in ordinary American towns. I love this program because it changes these powerful young people. Then they go out and change the world.