Meet Mai (which means mom in Khmer). My team and I met Mai when we were in Cambodia. She graciously shared her story with us and my former teammate Lindsey graciously wrote it all out. Here is the captivating story of one of the strongest women I have had the privilege of getting to know.
Mai offered us so much more than love, prayer, support, and a welcoming home. She has a story that truly inspires, one that deserves to be told. While her story is like many other survivors from the Khmer Rouge, the overall lack of awareness about this genocide goes to show just how few stories have made it out of the country. If you are like me and aren’t very familiar with the Khmer Rouge or the name Pol Pot, I hope this story gives you a small view into what the Cambodian people had to endure for over three years.
It was 1975, Mai was 13 years old, she had 11 siblings, and they were all living in the countryside right outside of the city (where we are staying now). When the Khmer Rouge takeover occurred, everyone had to evacuate their homes. Mai and her family moved from their home to another district near the edge of their village. For five months, she was put to work in the rice fields. She would work hard every day cutting the grass, clearing the fields, and planting the rice. As was typical during this time, the family was told to move again without much of an explanation. They started walking towards the new province and came to a waiting station where each family member was taken in, one by one, for questioning.
To give a little background, the Khmer Rouge was directed by Pol Pot. He wanted to create a utopian agrarian society, free of any western or foreign influences. The Khmer Rouge decided to obtain this by brutally executing anyone who held high position jobs, worked in the government, past armies, medical field, or had any education.
The soldiers questioned each member of Mai’s family about everything that they did before the revolution began. Mai’s family were farmers who would go into the city of Phnom Penh to sell their goods, but the soldiers didn’t believe them. The family continued to be questioned; with the soldiers intent on hearing them say they were a wealthy family.
The last sibling to be interviewed was her oldest sister, who went into the interview with her husband. Her husband was a security guard at a bank in the city before the revolution, which was considered to be enough of a high position job to alert the Khmer Rouge. After the interviews ended, the entire family was together for 3 days until the soldiers came and took away her oldest sister and her family. They were told they were just going to a different work camp but in reality they took the parents and their two kids to a jail in the city, one jail for the husband and a different jail for the mother and two children. Both the husband and the wife were told the other was alive but they had little hope that the news from the soldiers was true. The husband couldn’t handle the sadness. He couldn’t make himself eat the pitiful meal that was offered to him (who knows what it actually contained) or drink the dirty water given. His cell was a small block, with the hole for the toilet taking up a quarter of the space. The smells and sounds of the jail were unbearable to most, and eventually the husband died in his cell.
Mai and her family were completely unaware of where their family went and had no way of contacting them throughout the Pol Pot regime. This was true every time another family member was separated from the group, and next was Mai.
A few days after her oldest sister was taken away, the family was moved again to a city called Battambang. Once they arrived the family was sorted into their different work assignments. Mai’s mother stayed in the village to help cut grass to make compost while her younger siblings were sent to a children’s camp in the same village to do smaller jobs. Mai was the only one in her family sent off to a work camp in the rice fields, where her daily task was to pick up dried cow poop from the time before the sun came up to long after it went down. She didn’t know it then, but she would not see anyone in her family again until after the Khmer Rouge ended. She was on her own now for the next 3 years.
Food was scarce in the work camps, with their daily rations decreasing every few months. Mai was given a bowl of porridge each day that had only a spoonful or two of rice inside. It was simply not enough food to stay healthy, barely enough to survive on. So while Mai was working, she would try to pick up leafs to put into the porridge at night to help add some nutrients and fill her ever-hungry tummy.
The Khmer Rouge was said to work people to their deaths. They required hard, back-breaking work, with no rest allowed, and not enough food to provide the energy needed to continue on. The only time to sleep was after dinner until midnight, when the bell would ring for them to get up and go back out to work until 4:00am.
Mai is in Battambang in a work camp for older girls. She is 13 years old and separated from her entire family. One of Mai’s new job assignments is to uproot trees and dig trenches in the field. If she finished digging her trench before the bell for lunch rang, she would use her off time to go fishing.
During the Pol Pot regime, there were very strict regulations about what you could and could not do and if you wanted to leave your work camp you had to get it approved by the managing soldier of the camp. Mai was brave. She had accepted that she needed to take care of herself at this point and she would do anything she had to survive. With the malnutrition catching up to her, she decided to take the fish she caught and sneak into the local village to trade for rice.
While Mai is telling us this part of the story she grabs her scarf, gets up and starts reenacting how she would have to sneak around the woods to get to the village and back. It is amazing to watch her emotions change as she takes herself back to relive the moments of this story. You can see the fear in her eyes as she shows us how she would have to keep her eyes on everything and drop to the ground to crawl at the slightest sound.
Trading for goods even within your own camp is illegal, because it allows you to get something that others don’t have and the Khmer Rouge wants everyone to be equal and have equal parts of all things. Trading with people in a different village is even more illegal. If Mai was caught at any point she would be considered a traitor and killed. She knew the risks ahead of time but it was this or die of starvation.
Once she made it back safely to her camp, she would dig a hole, put the food inside a stolen steel army hat, put the hat inside the hole and cover it with leaves and old clothes. One day the soldiers came by and discovered the food. They tied Mai’s wrists behind her back and held her at gunpoint while they threw out all the food. Luckily, they let her live and they never found the food again.
Can you imagine soldiers just throwing away food while hundreds of starving children stand by and watch?
Mai survived in the harsh conditions of this work camp for 3 years. She is 16 years old when a truck shows up in the middle of the night to take her away to Siem Reep, again with no explanation. On the way to Siem Reep they stopped for 6 hours in her mother’s village and Mai sneaks away to try and find them. She has not heard from anyone in her family for 3 years now. She has no idea if they are even still in this village.
Mai still had extra food she traded for and she brought it along with her in the hopes of finding her family and giving it to them. Eventually she finds her mother and her youngest sister, they embrace each other tightly with tears streaming down their faces. It was the first time they had seen each other in 3 years. Her mom was emotionally and told Mai not to go back, to stay with the family in the village. But Mai knew the soldiers would find her and if she stayed they would kill her and maybe even her family. So Mai made one of the toughest, strongest, moves and says goodbye to her family once more.
Can you imagine making that kind of decision when you were 16 years old?
Tired, scared, hungry, and alone Mai started walking back to the truck. Her youngest sister follows her to the truck because Mai wanted to give all her possessions to her family. As Mai climbs into the truck to grab the rest of her things, the truck begins to take off. She is only half in the truck and she scrambles to throw out everything to her sister who is crying and screaming from the side of the road.
Once again, while Mai is telling us her story you can see the emotions coming back up again as she has to relive the moment. Her eyes are distant and begin to tear up as she sees the face of her sister from the truck and hears her cries once more. It has been over 30 years since these events happened, and yet for Mai the details will never be forgotten.
As Mai is in the truck, watching her sister fade into the distance she truly begins to feel alone. She is overcome with fear for her younger sister, thoughts of whether or not she will be able to make it back to her mom alone wander in. If she is caught with all the goods Mai gave her, she could be killed. She has no way of knowing whether or not her sister makes it home, if the food will help keep them alive or not.
Once Mai arrives in Siem Reep she runs into two of her other sisters and a brother! She quickly finds out one of her sister’s daughters is in the hospital. The Khmer Rouge soldiers have already executed all the doctors and nurses at this point so the hospitals are run by local people who have very little education in the medical field. Needless to say, most hospitals are just where people go to die. Her sister is distraught and wants Mai and her brother to sneak in and steal her daughter away from the hospital so they can escape to better healthcare in Thailand.
Mai is once again faced with a dangerous decision, does she risk her life to save her niece? Like I said before, Mai is brave, braver than I could ever hope to be. So her brother and her sneak over to the hospital and manage to get their niece out of the compound and over to her mother. Once they are reunited, Mai’s sister and niece take off for Thailand to seek medical help. Mai is then sent off to a new work camp the next day, alone again.
Her new work assignment is to help with the rice harvest for the first six months. While she is working she steals rice to eat, she no longer has the luxury of worrying about whether the rice was clean or not, she just needed to survive. An old man she met in the village gave her a hollowed, steel-lined bamboo shoot that helped her to create a fire to cook the rice.
After the rice harvest is finished, she is moved to a new mountain camp to collect bat poop from inside a cave. A group of 12 girls would be lowered down into a cave by a string made of buffalo hair. They were given a small lamp and left down in the cave all day to gather the poop. There were lots of poisonous animals at the bottom of the cave but Mai says the Lord was always watching out for her (even before she knew who He was). She would work in the cave every day for a month and then rotate to a month on the cotton farm where she had to spray pesticide on the trees.
This camp was situated way up on the mountainside in the jungle. Every night she would hear the monkeys cry and while she stared at the moon above her, she would let her walls down and cry along with them. She missed her family, her mom most of all. She had no idea when her misery would end, when or if she would see her family again.
She lived in constant fear. They slept in hammocks in the trees to avoid the tigers or other animals that would attack. Mai would dream about going away on the helicopters that passed above the trees. One night when she was dreaming about the helicopters, she awoke to gunshots and fire. The Vietnamese army had arrived.
As the attacks were getting closer, the girls at the work camp began to flee. People were running everywhere, it was pure chaos. Mai was asked to go into Thailand with a few coworkers from the camp but she refused because she wanted to find her mom.
When the Vietnamese army attacked, Pol Pot’s army fled to the mountains or to Thailand. The Vietnamese helped the locals through the transition but had a difficult time separating who was a part of the Khmer Rouge and who wasn’t since Pol Pot had made everyone dress exactly the same (black pants, black shirt, and a red checkered scarf). So every person was questioned to see if they were a part of Pol Pot’s army or not, and the Vietnamese had to go off of their words, although their appearance probably helped the locals stand apart due to the malnutrition.
People didn’t know where to go or what to do when the revolution finally ended. The Vietnamese army wanted everyone to stay in one place as a refugee camp but Mai wanted to go back to her mother’s village to find her family. The Khmer Rouge still had certain parts of the countryside under their control so not all routes were safe to travel. Regardless, Mai walked five nights to reach her mother’s village.
Along the way to the village, Mai had to walk carefully to avoid gunshots in the woods. Pol Pot’s army knew they weren’t going to win, so they started killing anyone they came across because they viewed them all as traitors. The killings became more and more brutal as the war came to an end. You were lucky if you died by a gunshot instead of the hook or disembodiment torture.
“Better to kill an innocent by mistake than to let an enemy survive by mistake.” -Slogan by Pol Pot
One day she was caught in an attack and as she was trying to get away, she noticed a man running next to her get shot. She couldn’t make herself leave the man behind so she made a few other people around her help her carry the man to the nearest Vietnamese army base where they had a hospital. The man lived on and eventually wrote a book about how Mai saved his life. Have I mentioned how incredible this woman is?
When Mai arrived at the village it was nighttime and they were so many people she couldn’t recognize anyone. She decided to go to the water to get a drink before she went looking for her family. As she was getting a drink, she found an old woman struggling to get out of the water. Mai rushed over to help her and the woman asked her what her story was. As they started to share stories, Mai realized this woman was her mother! They were reunited at least and began to cry, never wanting to let go of each other again.
It turns out Mai was the last person to arrive in the village. Her brother and sister made it home a few days before and since no one had heard from Mai in so long, the siblings tried to convince the mother to leave the village to find a safer place. They didn’t think anyone else was left, they assumed Mai had died.
Once she was reunited with the rest of the family she learned that her older brother was executed for being in the army before the revolution and her oldest sister was very ill. Mai created a yoke and a cart out of palm branches to carry her sister. The family needed to leave the village soon because Pol Pot’s army was still raiding local villages, killing everyone they found. They escaped together and made it back to their original village, outside the city of Phnom Penh.
Mai was 18 years old when Pol Pot’s regime finally ended in 1980. The Khmer Rouge lasted for over 3 years but the memories will last forever in those who survived the genocide.
Just to give you a comparison, the current war in Syria has been going on for 6 years and there have been 400,000 deaths. The Khmer Rouge was 3 years 20 months and 8 days long and more than 2 million people died. People all over the world have been aware of the ISIS attacks since it began; 42 years later and few people are even aware that Cambodia went through such a horrific genocide. Their stories need to be told.
Mai’s story is only one of thousands, each with a sad similar theme but also with a glimpse of hope as you hear how they are living now. They are all survivors. They have fought for their lives and they won. They pass on the stories to their children and hope they will never have to experience the same pain that they did.
Driving down the streets of our village, I have a new appreciation for this generation of people. You can see the wrinkle lines of hard work and when you look in their eyes you can tell they are overcomers. They don’t let the fear or sadness of their past stop them from living a new life now.
