Our next stop is the Supplementary Feeding Unit. Here sick, malnourished, pregnant women, and children under five (though my observation that many of the children here are clearly over five is met with a wink), are given an extra meal every day to supplement the one provided by the UN budget which is both barely able to sustain life and boringly repetitious. Here, again, the Khmers themselves are the intermediary force. They are trained as cooks and bakers and shown how to build and maintain earthen stoves. (An American company offered CONCERN a supply of modern stoves, but they were refused on the basis that the knowledge and experience gained by using them would be valueless to people who wouldn't have them to use when they were repatriated.)

  Back at the office for a late lunch with some of the staff, my impression is reinforced. The youth and seeming fragility of these volunteers is evident, and is just as evidently a gross underestimation. Two of the brand new arrivals (both named Mary O'Connell, so they quickly adapt to the use of their middle names, Kate and Christine), when questioned about the feeling of being in this kind of primitive situation and having months (or in their case, years, each having volunteered for a two year stint) of it to look forward to, shrug off the consideration of their personal well-being and turn the conversation back to the plight of the people here and the job at hand. The attitude seems to be the same as it is about the extraordinarily intense heat. It's here. These are the facts. There's nothing to be gained by fighting it, so let's get to it. Further conversation brings out the fact that many of these same people have worked in the field with CONCERN before, some in Bangladesh and some in Biafra.

   Next stop is the classrooms where Khmer teaches Khmer the rudiments of reading and writing in their own language using illustrative signs with pictures and symbols that have all been created in the artists' workshop – yet another CONCERN project.  
 

Across the way are the workshops themselves, where men put in time learning crafts that can then be sold at the CONCERN stores in Ireland and America to provide a small amount of cash and a large sense of accomplishment for the craftspeople. Every project I see is designed with the idea in mind of teaching self-sufficiency and maintaining a sense of dignity and purpose among the clients, as they are called. Whether or not this attitude on the part of the CONCERN volunteers is to be credited, I am incredibly impressed with the evident high spirits of the Khmers. They are positive, bright and willing. There is none of the expected feeling of resentment and negativity that so often accompanies a welfare-oriented relationship. No evident feeling at all, as a matter of fact, except for appreciation and cooperation.

    Leaving the group at Section Seven, we get back in the car for a ride over to the B Unit Hospital. The ever-present air conditioning is now an icy blast in comparison to what we have almost gotten used to and I ask the driver to turn it off or at least down. He either does not understand the request or chooses to ignore it, causing me to give some thought to just how quickly one can become enamored of the sometimes double-edged benefits of western technology.

    The B Unit Hospital is run by a holistic health group from northern California and includes a psychologist, an internist, a pharmacist, and two nurse-midwives as well as some others I did not meet. As we enter, Davida is immediately brought up to date on some comings and goings, including a report of a volunteer who arrived one day, was overcome with the enormity of the job to be done, and left the next. The psychologist explains his position to me and answers my questions about the language problem causing him trouble with an explanation of his use of interpreters and his belief that the fact of having someone who cares enough to listen has done as much for most of these people as any medicine could ever do. He too is high in his praise of his Khmer assistants, their understanding of the benefits of his work and the speed with which they grasp his techniques, implying that some of them should be able to continue on their own when he leaves.

   A young boy attaches himself to us and is clearly a favorite with the staff. He had been living alone in the wild, the psychologist tells me, and was barely more than a snarling beast when he was brought in here a few months ago. That is hard for me to square with the smiling, playful, nine-or-ten year old who clowns with the group and wants his picture taken with the visitors. Davida introduces me to a young woman who does not respond at all to either of us, simply stares into space. She goes in and out, Davida explains, and is sometimes quite lucid. So many of these people have been severely damaged psychologically, Davida goes on, but except in the severe cases, those are considerations that have to wait in the face of the extreme medical and nutritional needs.

  A unit of "unaccompanied minors" is our next stop. The one hundred or so youngsters in this unit have twenty house-mothers assigned to them so that there is a sort of foster-parent relationship with one adult to every five children. This is superior to the old method of massing all the children in one area, Davida explains as we walk into a chorus of "Hello, OK, Bye-Bye!" the chant with which all Khmer children seem to greet westerners. The situation of the unaccompanied minor is one of the most difficult in this tragic place. At first when a child came into a refugee situation, without an adult and with a story of murder, starvation and terror, the assumption was made that the child was an orphan and he or she was adopted out, sometimes to a country far away, as soon as possible. Soon, though, it became clear that while many of these families had been torn apart and separated by long distances, many had in fact survived and were capable of being reunited. Consequently these centers, where children are held for a long time while an exhaustive search is done to determine whether or not they in fact have any living relatives before a final decision is made as to their future. It's a long frustrating process for everyone involved and, as Davida points out, has as many negatives as positives in that the children, while here, are temporarily more comfortable but are developing a relationship with the foster mother which will again be severed once a final resolution of their status is reached. In short, it stinks.
 

Davida introduces me to a boy named Heann with whom she has developed a special relationship. He is about ten years old, is blind and has been diagnosed as psychotic. He screamed of slaughter, wept for his little brother, and wouldn't let anyone near him for some time after his arrival. He refused to bathe or to allow anyone to wash him because he was sure he was being covered with blood. After months of patient reassurance, he is much improved, though still has psychotic lapses, and wants to be held by Davida, the house mother and me by turns or all at the same time and keeps asking for something which is either "ball" or "balloon."

    We elect to walk to Section Three, the icy insulated coolness of the car only emphasizing the sense of separation from these people and their lives. Passing a large, rectangular construction that appears to be made up of a number of plastic barrels wrapped in canvas, Davida explains that the camp's water supply is trucked in daily by the UN and that each person has a certain allotted amount to use for cooking, bathing, and other personal necessities. Children, as they would anywhere, climb atop the structure laughing, splashing, and playing.

    Section Three is a more permanent copy of Section Seven, being older. The CONCERN office here has a woven reed mat on the ground instead of a dirt floor as in Section Seven. The structures have a slightly more permanent look as well, with the floors raised and drainage ditches encircling them all. After meeting the staff, which seems to include more men (one in particular, named Dave, is an American nutritionist who graduated from UCLA on a Friday in March and left for Thailand the following Monday), we take a look around the compound. Again the health care unit, the supplemental feeding unit, the classrooms, the workshops and the art center. The chief cook was an airline pilot working out of Phnom Penh. The unit's overall assistant supervisor was a professor at a university there who taught French and English and speaks a number of languages. Here they are a homeless, stateless group with an uncertain future. The professor, a pleasant, young-appearing man tells of having seen his four brothers, three sisters and his mother and father murdered. He tells of pretending to be an ignorant peasant and of having to throw away his eyeglasses because possessing them singled him out as being from the educated classes and therefore targeted to die. Asked what he sees for the future, he shrugs, smiles and expresses a desire to go to America. The atrocities of the Pol Pot regime have extinguished any desire to return to his home. "But what," I ask, "about the possibility of Pol Pot being vanquished? If he is defeated by Hang Semrin people, would you go back?" He shakes his head in refusal. "Why?" I persist. "All of these terrible things are being laid at the feet of Pol Pot. If he is defeated, sent away, perhaps even killed, why not go back to your own home country?" He looks at me levelly and responds. "They are all communists." Can it be that simple, I wonder? Am I perhaps being told what they think I, as an American, would want to hear?

   We next visit the brand new Section Three library, complete with two librarians, plenty of shelf space and about a dozen books, most of them in French, a few in English. Another of the Pol Pot excesses, evidently, was to destroy all printed material in his zeal to return to a peasant agrarian economic structure. Books that are being laboriously printed by hand in the project areas are the only known Khmer language books in existence. The destruction of a culture. Does that constitute genocide? Does it make sense that a genocidal campaign would be perpetrated by one of their own people? Looking around at the smiling faces in the colorful costumes, the playing children, the high spirits in spite of the dreadfully cramped and impoverished conditions makes me wonder if anything makes any sense.

    As the day wears on, the heat wanes only slightly. A stop at the A Unit Hospital affords me a glance in at an actual operating field hospital. In every detail it is a MASH unit, run by a German surgical team. The adjacent hospital has most of their patients, people who have come in wounded either by shell fire or land mines, some caught in the crossfire between contending forces. All of them are young. One begins to realize that most of the older people simply could not make the journey and fell by the wayside.

    The ride back to Aran is mostly silent. Gus and Davida seem to understand that I need some time to try to sort this experience out and attempt to make some sense of it. I again lose the silent contest regarding the air-conditioner and content myself to stare out the window, watching the lines of Thais wending their way back toward their homes after a day of trading. The farmers behind the oxen are perpetual motion machines, plodding, tireless, diligent in their knee-deep rice/mud.

    Back at the Country House for dinner with the staff, I meet still more young, willing people. I avail myself of the toilet facilities, a rudimentary room with a hole in the floor with places to put your feet on each side, and try what is laughingly called the shower. A large urn full of water provides the source. Into that you dip a bucket which your pour over you head a couple of times, then soap up and scrub for as long as you like. Another bucket or two over your head for a rinse and you're as good as new. The water runs down the sloped floor and into the hole, cleaning up after itself, and out I step, feeling amazingly refreshed and ready to face the heat.

    Dinner and more conversation about the situation here is livened up by watching the parade of lizards, called geckos, chase up the walls and around the ceiling of the house. Perfectly harmless, I'm told, if a little difficult to get used to (Mary Kate confides she won't get up to go to the toilet in the night for fear one will fall on her) and very helpful in that they eat the many insects around. The discussion is made more complicated by a rapid dulling of my senses with a combination of jet lag and culture shock. I am shown how to tuck in the mosquito netting around my cot and told to go to bed.