Becoming a stranger on my own homeland

After the Khmer Rouge regime, all the Khmer Rouge survivors in my family including my mother, my brother and myself could not afford to come back home in Phnom Penh. The main reason for this was that we did not have means of transport, and most of all, we totally lacked of food supplies to feed our mouths for our journey back home. We decided to go to the border as it was nearer to travel by foot. From Battambong province, we walked for at least one whole week to get to Sisophon district where we stayed there for so many months before we continued our walking to Cambodia-Thailand border. We finally ended up in the border camp, where we stayed for over 13 years. There is a lot to tell you about life in the barbed wire camp on the border. I will need to write one whole book to describe what happened in the camp. In this regard, I decided not to talk about it here in this chapter. What I would like to tell you about now is my repatriation from the border camp. After 13 years living and growing up in the Cambodia-Thai border camp, here comes the repatriation process under the auspice of the United Nations as the result of the Paris Peace Accord, in which all the Cambodian conflicting parties were signatories. It was in July 1992, when my family together with thousands of the camp people were transported back to Cambodia. Believe it or not, it was the first time that I set foot in Phnom Penh again after 17 years on evacuation. It was full of excitement and anxiety, the feeling of uncertainty, not knowing what to expect as I hadn't been back to the city since 1975 when the Khmer Rouge had taken control of Cambodia. My mother, my brother and I packed all our necessities, which was not that much, to be honest, as we were not allowed to bring too many baggages, and of course, we did not really have so many valuable belongings. What we brought along were some clothes, and some food stuff and kitchen utencils. The most precious belongings that we brought along were books -- the books that we studied for over ten years in the border camp... my brother got quite a number of medical books and I brought all my English books together with piles of cassettes. We had to stay over night in a transit center waiting for a bus to transport us to Cambodia. The next day came, about 10 buses arrived, and our names were called and we boarded one of the buses, which transported us from Site Two through Aranyaprathet and then headed throught the border at Poi Pet. The bus finally dropped us in Sisophon. Where we had to wait not less than 10 hours until after mid-night for a train to transfer us to Phnom Penh. It took us 14 hours on an old, slow train that crawled on an old and partially damaged railraod. The train departed Sisophon at 2:00 a.m., and arrived a Reception Center at the outskirt of Phnom Penh known as Kop Srov at 4:00 p.m. If you've never experienced traveling on an old train through an old railroad, good luck for you, we were totally lost after 14 hours trip. We felf as if we were swinging all the time even though we sat still. After three days there at the reception center, we were transported to our final destination in Phnom Penh. While we were ready to load our belongings on the bus, this is what happened: Hi Samneang, I am glad to see you here Hi Sister Denise, me too, I am glad to see you again here on my home country Samneang, these are my friends. Sister Denise introduced a few friends of hers to me while she also introduced me to them. Her friends started to converse with me with curiosity. How long were you in the border camp? One of her friends asked. 13 years, I replied Where was your hometown? Here in Phnom Penh, but I haven't been here for the last 17 years since the Khmer Rouge took control of the country, this is my first time coming back to Phnom Penh. Are you by yourself? No, I am with my mother and my brother. They are over there safeguarding the luggage as we are waiting for a call to board the bus. Where is your father? I was totally stunned when hearing this question. My emotion started immediately as I was trying to tell the guests that my father lost his life during the Khmer Rouge, but my words never came out of my mouth. Those words were dried up and they were replaced with tears dropping from both my eyes. I did not even think about my father until this question was asked. All the memories had come to my mind -- I left this city with a whole crowd of 10 family members which included my father. Now only three left. The other seven had left this world because of starvation, over workload and they were falling very ill and they all died. Now that we came back, they were not with us anymore... they were buried in the forests, which I had no clue how to go back there to find their graves. I definitely did not want to show this kind of emotion, but I couldn't do any better than this no matter how much I tried to show that I was strong. I know that my emotion had put the guests in a difficult position. They must have felt bad to ask me such a sensitive question. Understanding my emotional feeling, sister Denise quickly patted my back to console me. She continued with "where are you going to go now?" Her question even made me more emotional as I had no idea where I was going to go. I was sobbing while answering Sister Denise'question with my deep emotion.... "I have nowhere to go". It was too bad, I made the whole group feel emotional as well. But I had to apologize that I could not handle the situation any better. I should have been proud and happy that I was finally able to come back to my home city. But it was completely the opposite. I felt so much as being dumped into the sea where I could not see the horizon, particularly for that moment. Sister Denise quickly offered me to go to her house. She immediately went to the bus and explained to the bus driver her address where later he brought me and my family there. Sister Denise was a catholic nun. She was my former teacher in the camp. But she moved to Cambodia earlier with the Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS) to do a project to help Cambodia. It is not an easy situation when you are in your own country but you felt as if you are in a new world where you cannot find any support network, which you need so badly to at least give you some orientation in terms of what you can and cannot do. But in my case, I was totally unstable. I left Phnom Penh when I was 11 years of age, and at the time I returned, I was 28 years old... So it was 17 years away from home. I can hardly put in words how sad I felt at the time I arrived in Phnom Penh, and how much I appreciated Sister Denise's offer for us to stay at her house for one whole week before we could figure out where our next destination.