my experience in cambodia was one that touched me deeply. the people~every person~is a survivor of the khmer regime. and every person was warm, compassionate, and happy. their smiles were genuine, their hellos frequent and enthusiastic. i've not been so deeply touched by a nation of people as i have been by the cambodians. while there i read several memoirs of survivors. most of the memoirs were written by people who were children during the 70's. i was born in 1970. i often compared my own life with the lives of the children in the memoirs. while i was playing with my sister in the woods in front of our house in york, maine in the middle of april at four years old, cambodian four-year olds were being forcibly marched out of the cities to the family's native village to begin internment. while i was celebrating my eighth birthday, a nine-year old girl in one memoir expereinced her best friend violently dying, and parts of her friend's body being splattered on her before she had to run from the beseiged hiding spot with what remained of her own her family. if you were alive in the 1970's, this was the experience of people your age living in a different part of the world.

i share these photos to bring awareness, i don't know if the images will affect you as they did-and do-me, but i hope they will inspire you to learn even a little~a memoir, a polictical analysis, something-of what happened to these beautiful, peaceful, buddhist people.