More on Dara's Times. His TImes and Mines !!!

This extra bit on Dara's life during the Cambodian dark tunnel of life is taken off the internet from this letter by another of his students. I am attaching a short selection of what it said The letter is only 2/3 pages long.

Before the Laughter Began – Dara Than’s Story

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Gabrielle Yetter

“The word refugee is a beautiful word,” he says. “It sounds lovely and it’s easy to say. But the reality of it is like being buried alive”.

Dara’s brown eyes cloud over as he recalls the 12 years he spent in a refugee camp on the Cambodia border in the 1980s.

Gone is the jovial laugh and constant sparkle which identify him among the expat community in Phnom Penh as a good-humoured Khmer teacher. Instead, there’s a rarely-seen seriousness and a touching poignancy to his speech as he talks about his past.

There were days when he was not sure if he’d see tomorrow. Hours spent working in rice fields, trying to survive. Months on the front-line, holding a gun, in defense of his country that was being torn apart.

“Sometimes when I talk about those days, I can’t stop the tears. After 30 years, it may be forgivable but will never be forgettable.”

Dara was only 10 when war broke out in Cambodia and 15 when the Khmer Rouge invaded. His mother had given birth three days earlier to a baby boy, who his parents named Santapeep (“peace”) because they thought the country’s troubles were over, but suddenly the family was thrust into the chaos and tumult of a country ripped apart by conflict. Dara’s mother was forced to escape with a newborn baby, his father was imprisoned in a labour camp and Dara sent to work in the rice fields.

Two years after the invasion, in an attempt to find his father, Dara was arrested by the Khmer Rouge. He was marched to an abandoned rice mill, shackled and locked in a dark room. Later that night, the door opened and he was pushed outside with an AK47 at his back.

Walking barefoot through a banana plantation, he feared his last moment had come. He’d heard the Khmer Rouge killed people in these fields because their decaying bodies made good fertilizer and he fearfully anticipated the gunshot.

Urged on by his desire to escape, Dara sprinted toward the fence, leaped over it and kept running. Once back in his village, he looked for his mother who’d been sent away to work and, after he found her, learned she’d been told Dara had been shot, his liver eaten and his body dumped in the river.

In the meantime, his family was living in Battambang and starving – five people surviving on handfuls of rice. They heard they could get handouts of free rice from a town near the Thai border so Dara walked – at night, along with hundreds of people, barefoot, 100 kilometers to the border – to get rice for his family.

“We were allowed 15 kilograms at a time,” he said. “My shoulders were red and swollen from carrying it so far, but there was nothing else I could do”.

At that point, Dara moved to a refugee camp where, in 1983, be began learning English and applied for a job with the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO) to teach in primary school in the camp.

Since it was no longer safe to remain in the camp, he paid a guide to get him across the border and navigate a route through the mine fields. He finally made it to Phnom Penh, without ID documents ,where he found his uncle and grandmother but was turned away from their home as they feared for their own safety by harbouring him.

On his uncle’s advice, Dara went to the police and confessed he’d escaped from a refugee camp. He was immediately arrested and spent the next 17 days being interrogated before he was set free.

Now Dara seems to have his life under his control and continues to be a gifted teacher. His country is going through a period of rapid change but a major legacy of those troubled times is the millions of land mines and ordinance still around the country.

Cambodia is a country that has a major problem with landmines, especially in rural areas. This is the legacy of three decades of war which has taken a severe toll on the Cambodians; it has some 40,000 amputees, which is one of the highest rates in the world. The Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC) estimates that there may be as many as four to six million mines and other pieces of unexploded ordnance in Cambodia.

The landmines in Cambodia were placed by different factions (the Khmer Rouge, the Heng Samrin and Hun Sen regimes) that clashed during the Civil War in Cambodia in the 1970s. They were placed in the whole territory of the country.