For Sang Ha Pry, a 35-year-old Cambodian man, home used to be a few square yards of ground surrounded by bamboo and covered by thatch in a refugee camp called Site Two in Thailand. He survived on a diet consisting chiefly of 24 cups of rice a week. He was surrounded by war, by bandits wielding rocket launchers, and by violence that ignited easily among the refugees in the camp’s crowded conditions.
Now Sang Ha and a friend of his, Chim Chan Sastra, are beginning life as students at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. They will continue studies they started in the refugee camps -- subjects such as political science.
“I love the American law,” Sang Ha says."For 20 years the people in my country have never known about human rights.”
Although more than 300,000 Cambodians live in the refugee camps, only a handful have been able to leave to pursue an education.
Since 1979, civil war has raged in Cambodia between the Vietnamese-installed government and three armed opposition factions. One of those armies is the Khmer Rouge, which is considered responsible for the deaths of more than one million Cambodians when it ruled the country in the late 1970’s.
Although United Nations sponsored talks aimed at bringing peace to Cambodia broke down in December, the United States and the current Cambodian government made their first direct contacts last year. The diplomatic thaw between the two countries has smoothed the way for Cambodians wishing to come to the United States.
Americans who are interested in bringing Cambodians to universities here want to help educate a new generation of Cambodian professionals who could eventually help rebuild their country. Most of Cambodia’s physicians, professors, and engineers were killed by the communist Khmer Rouge, who believed that educated people had been corrupted by Western ideas.
Now organizations such as Refugees International, a relief group based in Washington, and the Institute of International Education, a private, non-profit group that runs international academic exchanges, are trying to bring more Cambodians to study in the United States.
“We hope Sang Ha and Sastra will be the first of many,” says Kathy Charlton, a program manager at the institute.
With the help of the institute and some private foundations, Sang Ha and Sastra -- who prefer to be called by their given names -- first came to the United States early last year to study in a human-rights advocacy program at Columbia University and to work at human-rights and relief organizations in Washington. They returned to the camps last fall, but then came back to the United States to enroll for the spring semester at Gordon.
Most of the eight refugee camps for Cambodians in Thailand do not have anything resembling higher education. A 1989 United Nations report described adult education in the camps as “embryonic at best.”
The conditions make education -- or even productive activity -- difficult. In Site Two, Sang Ha’s and Sastra’s former home, a shortage of water has led to a high rate of skin infections and other health problems. An unemployment rate that has reached 93 per cent and severe overcrowding have led to crime and domestic violence.
“Every problem in a major city is compounded in the camps,” says Berta Romero, a former director of programs for Refugees International.
Both Sang Ha and Sastra have studied at the camps’ only college-level institution -- the Institute of Public Administration -- an organization run chiefly by the Catholic Office for Emergency Refugee Relief, a Thai agency. The institute depends on volunteers from the United States, France, and other countries who usually teach for stretches of three to six months. As a result, classes are sporadic.
Sang Ha learned English from relief workers and then translated their instructions for rehabilitating retarded and handicapped Khmer children.
Both Sang Ha and Sastra made other contributions to the society that sprang up in Site Two. Sang Ha worked as a judge on a justice committee that tries criminals in the camps. Sastra worked as a human-rights advocate, documenting abuses of the refugees by Khmer soldiers and camp administrators.
Such roles are risky. Judges, for example, fear retribution when they punish soldiers or members of powerful families.
“In the camps, when you try to use your human rights,” Sang Ha says, “they will give you one bullet.”
Both Sastra and Sang Ha say new laws, written with the Cambodian culture in mind, are the only way out of the anarchy that has dominated the refugee camps and their country. The two men see their studies in the United States as a step toward being able to help write laws that could be the basis for a democratic and free government in Cambodia.
Although both men were able to work in the camps, they are frustrated by how much of their lives has been spent in the midst of war and semi-captivity. “I have lost 15 years of my life,” says Sang Ha.
He originally expected to start college in 1975, when he had just graduated from the Cambodian equivalent of high school. At the time he was living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, with his father, an architect, and his mother, a housewife.
But the Khmer Rouge army marched into Phnom Penh that year and immediately evacuated all of the residents. Sang Ha was separated from his parents and left the city with two brothers and an uncle. He has not seen his parents since.
The Khmer Rouge executed Sang Ha’s uncle because he had worked for the government, and his older brother for being an intellectual.
In provincial forced-labor camps, Sang Ha says he had to work 20 hours a day for the Khmer Rouge, performing such tasks as planting cotton. He was fed a gruel of rice to which a few plant or tree leaves -- not necessarily edible ones -- were added. Because of Sang Ha’s relatively light-skinned complexion, the Khmer Rouge suspected him of being Vietnamese. “I nearly died so many times,” he says. “They tied me. They shot me.”
In 1979, when the Vietnamese advanced toward Khmer Rouge positions near Sang Ha, he fled to Thailand.
The Thai government has been reluctant to let Cambodians leave the camps to go to other countries because it is afraid the camps will be swamped with more refugees trying to avoid the war. Sang Ha says he did not leave just to escape the camp’s conditions.
“I don’t want to leave my country,” he says. “But I want to get more knowledge so I can go back to help my country when there is peace.”
Those trying to bring more Cambodian students here concede that the small academic exchanges will not be a panacea for Cambodia’s persistent problems.
“Just having two Cambodians come to the United States won’t change the situation on the border,” Ms. Charlton says. “But people in the camps have been able to hear about what Sastra and Sang Ha did, and that should give them some hope that the outside world is interested in what’s going on there.”
