Ethnic Chinese Cambodian teacher Yang Weiling, founder of the charity Field Relief Agency of Taiwan, has dedicated her life to helping Cambodians rebuild their daily lives through education and other services, and replace an entire generation of lost intellectual and artistic talent lost in the Khmer Rouge genocide, or to exile. She and one of her teachers spoke to RFA's Mandarin Service about the horror of war years and about their hopes for the future:
Yang Weiling:
The Khmer Rouge killed off a lot of intellectuals, and many more went into exile overseas, so even the brains and the talent that were still alive were draining away overseas, emigrating, or as refugees, or escaping.
From 1991-1993, following a United Nations peacekeeping consultation, they started having general elections. It wasn't until that point that education started up again.
Back then, none of the teachers in primary or secondary schools were qualified. A few still aren't even today. If they were literate, they would just start teaching. They had no formal teacher training. There have only been teacher training colleges in the past few years, so they lacked everything; classrooms, textbooks, everything.
The Taiwan Field Agency has been carrying out education work in Cambodia for 15 years now, teaching children how to fish, so they can have a livelihood, but also with another aim: to regrow the lost intellectual elite.
I didn't get a meeting with the [Cambodian] ministry of education until last month. They really want to start teaching the arts in junior high schools now, because there basically aren't any arts-related classes in the Cambodian education system ... there are no arts and craft classes and no music classes.
When we visit some of the schools, we say to them, come on, kids, why don't you sing a song for the teachers. And, do you know what they sing most of the time? The national anthem!
I also hope that the hairdressing class we offer will equip them, not just with a pair of scissors, but with a toolbox for making a living, for creativity. We can also offer hair and beauty classes in the formal school system.
We also want kids in art class to take their paint and brushes into some of the temples and paint the Buddha statues there. There is also a possibility that art teachers will be hired in the schools.
The teacher shortage could well change in the next ten years or so.
Even though Cambodians endured three years of the Khmer Rouge, even though all their schools and temples were shut down and the entire government and social system was destroyed by them in the name of racial purification, their hearts weren't destroyed.
And I think that their Buddhist beliefs played a role in that.
Field Relief Agency Teacher Lin:
I think they came out of the forest. They were wearing black shirts and black trousers, and they went around arresting and killing people. The Chinese school in the town was shut down.
All of Cambodia's schools were shut down in 1970. The Khmer Rouge was so powerful. They would go to the villages and take people. They weren't allowed to take any belongings with them. They just had to follow them. Any brightly colored clothing was exchanged for black. They split up family members, men and women, old and young, and kept them under surveillance, separate from each other.
They lived in leaf-thatched huts in the forest, and were forced into hard labor, digging and working the fields from 3.00 a.m. until it was dark. They only got rice gruel to eat. All the rice they harvested was taken away in trucks.
All the former capitalists and officials were arrested and killed.
We didn't get enough to eat for three years and eight months. A lot of people died, but there was nowhere to bury them. I have seen human bones everywhere, all over the place.
If you didn't do as they said, they would call your name, and take you away, and you'd never come back. So we didn't dare to protest or speak out. We just shed tears.
After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, I walked for more than 200 kilometers (more than 120 miles) until I got back home. But my home was gone, and the land had been taken over by the Vietnamese army.
My parents' health was very poor, so they couldn't work. I was devastated. My sister managed to escape to Thailand, where she wound up as a teacher in a refugee camp.
Even though the Khmer Rouge was only in power for a little over three years, the Chinese schools stayed closed for more than 20 years. They didn't open up again until 1992.
Reported by Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA's Mandarin Service in Cambodia. Translated by Luisetta Mudie.
