No Trace

We’ve all gone back to visit a place years later and said, “Whoa! I can’t believe how much they’ve built this up since the last time I was here … and nobody asked my permission.” Much rarer are the visits when we’ve said, “Whoa! Where did everything go?”

Some friends and I had that kind of experience last weekend, returning to the site of the refugee camp where Jip and I used to work back in the ’80s. I wasn’t expecting to find much—somebody had told me that the formerly huge Cambodian city (at that time it was the second-largest concentration of Khmer on the planet, after Phnom Penh) had become mostly rice fields. But even being prepared to find nothing familiar, we were shocked at the emptiness.

Back then the land held nearly a quarter million people. Today there’s a just a small settlement under the patronage of the king’s youngest daughter—sort of a planned community, with roads, electricity, and water all subsidized. Buffaloes there probably outnumber villagers.

About 95% of the land that I remember as being packed shoulder to shoulder with refugees is now filled with rice, taro, or papaya. No trace of foundations for hospitals, or pieces of leftover blue plastic, or signs that a rice distribution took place, or anything that would let a first-time visitor know how much life had once been lived there.