Photoessay #2913 - Cambodia....

My 12 year old granddaughter lives with her Cambodian extended family.  She's always seeking information.  Whenever we go to a museum or library, she wants to know if there's anything about Cambodia.  We looked at the University of Washington library and I was disappointed to see there was only one shelf about Cambodia and most of those books had to do with the Khmer Rouge genocide.  As she matures, she knows more and more about it; her family are Cambodian refugees arriving here in the late 1970s.

We are always looking for materials for her.   Not about the genocide or killing.  About the country and its people.  Sites.  We've found a few things, very few.

Dennis and I previewed this movie, "Cambodia" by Mike Shiley.  Most of it was good, showed the filmmaker traveling through villages, talking to kids, about marketplaces, about the temple complex at Angkor Wat.  All good.

But then, it went right down the rathole.  Amputees, weapons, places where horrible torture took place, the killing fields.

Aaack aaack no.  It started out so promising.

Next week, I will start my new class at UW "Intro to Women's Studies."  But I'm not ready to give up some of things from this last quarter particularly Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive in the Warsaw Ghetto.