To be asked by a young man to describe his father's earlier life is a privilege and a responsibility. More so when the father is still alive, when in his earlier life he experienced the violence and fear in Pol Pot's Cambodia, generously served the community in a refugee camp and returned with his young family to an uncertain life of service in Cambodia. To tell such a story is both a gift and an act of piety.
The narrator of Writing for Raksmey is Josephite Sister Joan Healy, who worked with Meas Nee in the Healing Centre in the huge Site 2 Camp in Thailand. When the refugees returned to Cambodia she again worked with him in helping villagers reestablish themselves, listening to their stories and living simply with them. There they lived under constant threat from the remnant Khmer Rouge forces and from the political divisions after the first Cambodian elections.
Healy tells the story from the perspective of the Khmer people whom she met. After an introductory chapter that summarises the history of which the refugees were part, she mentions foreign agencies and workers only when they impinged on the lives of the people she knew.
She describes in unadorned language the horrifying events, sights and fears that punctuated people's lives, including in fragments the terrors of life under Pol Pot that they held so tautly. She notes her own response to inhumanity only as occasions of learning. For the reader they also provide a moral compass.
In the book, as in the life of the people, little details tell the story. A father sells everything, including his trousers, to buy milk for his sick child. She dies and he waits in his underpants to bury her in the makeshift crematorium. A woman mother takes her five year old fitting child to the camp hospital for treatment.
The overseas doctor with tears in his eyes declines to examine her because her condition is not listed. A United Nations agency tells expatriates that a train is likely to be attacked by the Khmer Rouge, but no one tells the train driver. When it is attacked many poor Khmer people die and are injured.
I found Writing for Raksmey intensely moving. I spent some summers in the border camps around the same time as Healy, and had met some of the people mentioned in the book. I also visited the Battambang area later. The experience