a very strange full circle: cambodia

*originally posted on my travel blog back in march, i wanted to preserve this here on my regular blog as i complete training.

one month ago, chris and i were tossing around the pros and cons of a new departure date.  our placement officer had informed us that the old date for the august program we'd been nominated to had been moved, and we now had the choice between a july 1 and july 19 departure.

what's funny is that, all along, over the last eight months of applying, interviewing, medical-ing, and waiting, waiting and more waiting, i had always been slightly preparing myself for the possibility that july would end up being our invitation, and thus, we'd likely be heading to cambodia.

what's amazing and wonderful to me now, just as it was when chris and i sat on the phone debating the choices we had before us, is how genuinely right going to cambodia feels.

it's as if we've come, or begun to come, full circle.  you see, each year at the university at which we met, freshman are required to read, over summer, a common book for a college writing or honors course.  the text is meant to spark discussion, fling open the eyes of the naive teenagers entering higher education, and serve as a common language as we embark on the great journey of college.

in addition, each year, the author of the chosen text is invited to a "writer as witness" symposium to speak to the freshman class.

the year that chris and i entered college, 2003, the book that was chosen for us was "first they killed my father."

the novel relates the true story of loung ung's survival of the khmer rouge occupation and destruction of the cambodian way of life from 1975-1979 (and beyond, but that's a topic for another day.)  loung was just five when the khmer rouge's "year zero" began, and the text, told from the perspective of a child, is remarkable.

source

when i was just seventeen, entering college, i was enthralled by this woman's harrowing journey that brought her to our little stage at our university.  i soaked up her every word, and believed myself changed in world view.

i am not sure if i truly understood, at the time, what changing my worldview would mean or how it would shape my future.  but it seems oddly remarkable that here i am, eight years later, about to enter the country that loung escaped in 1980, with the husband that i met in college, who also engrossed himself in loung's words and story in 2003.

i re-read "first i killed my father" over the weekend, and the story, along with a fair few others, are giving me great insight into the culture and way of life that was decimated in 1975, and the scars the likely still run deep in cambodia (though, it seems, hidden from view for many reasons.)

being given the chance to live in cambodia has a feeling of "right," as if the last eight years have been readying me for the extraordinary journey.