CAMBODIA

READ

Near the beginning of In the Shadow of the Banyan, the narrator, Raami, thinks back to a particularly heartbreaking moment from her childhood. She is seven years old, a member of the royal family, and the Khmer Rouge has just won the civil war in Cambodia. Revolutionary soldiers are everywhere, and they view those who are educated, the intellectuals, as their enemies. Raami and her family have fled Phnom Penh and taken refuge in their country home, where everyone is trying to figure out what their next move should be. Everyone, except for Raami:

“But at the moment I saw nothing, heard nothing, nothing that revealed to the world what I alone knew – I’d be shot because I too was an intellectual, an avid reader, a lover of books.”

She isn’t shot, but her life of privilege vanishes as she and her family are rounded up with everyone else and forced to begin a new life of hard labor under miserable conditions in far-flung parts of the country. Raami’s beloved father tries to help her understand what is happening: “Everything is connected, and sometimes we, like little fishes, are swept up in these big and powerful currents.” Her father is not only a prince, but a poet as well, and thus an obvious target for the wrath of the Khmer Rouge. Raami, a mere child, can only watch as her grandmother’s prophecy threatens to become a reality: “There will remain only so many of us as rest in the shadow of a banyan tree…”.

The stories Raami’s father told her and the ideals he espoused help sustain her during this terrible time. She comes close to losing all hope, but in the words of her father, “…if there’s a sliver of opening, a crack in the wall somewhere, you must take it, walk through to the other side.” And in the end, Raami understands “that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity.”

The book’s author, Vaddey Ratner, weaves a moving tale of the horror Cambodians faced on a daily basis during the short rule of the Khmer Rouge. It wasn’t until I finished reading the book and saw the author’s note at the end, however, that I realized In the Shadow of the Banyan, although a work of fiction, tells the author’s own story. She, like Raami, was the daughter of a royal prince, and her family suffered the same hard fate as other Cambodians when the Khmer Rouge took power. Ratner wrote this book to honor her father’s spirit, “to give voice to his memory, and the memories of all those silenced.”

COOK

Raami’s family eats well in the beginning of In the Shadow of the Banyan, dining on things like lotus seed porridge and mango crepes. As the book progresses, however, Raami’s diet consists mostly of watery rice, soggy wild morning glory greens, and insects (so not vegan!).

I decided to look elsewhere for food inspiration, and found a recipe for fragrant eggplant on the Asian Recipe website. Served over rice, it made for a lovely, though somewhat piquant, dish.

GIVE

In one of the villages where Raami is sent by the Khmer Rouge, the children are required to attend school for a few hours each day. All they learn, though, are pro-revolution songs.

“We didn’t learn to read or write a single word, and even though I already knew how, I never let on. It was clear we must keep quiet, keep what we knew hidden.”

When I went to the GlobalGiving website to find a project in Cambodia, then, I knew I wanted my donation to go to an organization committed to educating children. I chose Helping Hands, a project by an organization called Globalteer, which seeks to provide a free education to 300 children in the province of Siem Reap. According to the project description, “We often take education for granted but in Cambodia, where an entire generation of educated people were killed by the Khmer Rouge, basic education is still a luxury.”

The Helping Hands project includes kindergarten for younger children, “free supplementary education for older children so they can complete their state school studies and university scholarships so that high school graduates can go to university.” In addition, training is provided in health and hygiene, nutrition, and agriculture.

More information about the Helping Hands project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/two-new-classrooms-for-300-children-in-cambodia/.

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