Stranded in Camps : Cambodian Refugees--Life in Limbo

“I just stay here, in my place,” the old man mumbled, his hand flicking listlessly at a fly that buzzed around his young wife and their infant daughter in the shadows of a palm-thatch hut.

Sem Seak, a 63-year-old farmer from Cambodia’s Battambang province, has been a refugee for nine years now, moved from camp to camp along the Thai border. His life plays out day by day. He’s going nowhere, waiting for nothing.

For more than 250,000 Cambodians in the border camps, even the future appears a limbo. Fugitives from war in their own country, they endure a tightly controlled asylum in Thailand. Only a handful will be resettled in the West.

For almost all, the life is unproductive, aimless and increasingly stressful.

Wasting Best Years

“They won’t talk about it much,” said Rudi Coninx, a young Belgian physician who coordinates medical care for the refugees under the U.N. Border Relief organization. “But now and then, one of the men will loosen up. They’ll tell you they’re wasting the best years of their lives in these camps.”

An American volunteer nurse, who has worked at a camp clinic for less than a year, has already felt the undercurrent.

“Dependency here is enormous,” she said, walking across the dirt floor of the maternity ward. “There’s a sense of despair, of hopelessness.”

The medical problems in the camps are familiar: malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and other respiratory diseases, skin diseases and diarrhea. Crowded quarters, limited water and one-dimensional diets all contribute, but conditions have improved markedly in the past three years. Nine years ago, when the first great surge of Cambodians crossed the border, the situation was abysmal. Hundreds died of malnutrition and disease in the first few days at one camp.

Stress Sparks Violence

While time works in favor of improved medical care, however, the passing months and years often add to stress and other psychological problems.

“Stress forms a background to life in the camps,” Coninx said. “There is no privacy. There is little to do. Shelling along the border presents a danger.”

The uncontrollable circumstances add up to a prescription for irritation.

“We notice an increase in domestic violence; husbands beating wives,” the U.N. doctor said in an interview at his office in the border town of Aranyaprathet. “There are also a number of suicides and attempted suicides.

“But overall they cope remarkably well. They suffer stress but deal with it. You have to remember, these people are survivors.”

Severe psychological cases are handled by a group of West German volunteers called the “Malteser-Hilfsdienst.” But lesser problems are handled by the Cambodians themselves.

Stress problems are often societal in origin, according to Coninx and other refugee workers, and Cambodian society, particularly rural people, turn to traditional healers for relief. Treatments range from herbal potions and massages to the more bizarre.

One is what the refugee workers call a “spit shower,” in which a healer sprays a mouthful of curative concoction over the victim. Another is “cupping,” a popular Cambodian remedy that uses a suction device--sometimes just a drinking glass--to draw from the body its noxious humors. Refugees with a suction bruise in the middle of their foreheads are a common sight in the camps.

Confinement, crowding and lack of work are the major causes of stress among the refugees, according to foreign volunteers who work among them, providing food, medical care and education.

It begins within the family. Sem Seak, the 63-year-old farmer, his second wife, Ros Noeum, and six children live in a hut that provides, by formula, one square meter of living space per person.

The floor is dirt. A raised bamboo platform serves as both chair and bed. Cooking is done on a charcoal burner in a separate room. A drainage ditch separates Sem Seak’s hut from his neighbor’s. A simple outhouse toilet is shared by 10 families.

Children Born Refugees

Two of Sem Seak’s children were born as refugees. Seak Rath, a 3-year-old girl, was born on the road as the family fled a Vietnamese army attack on Nong Samet, a guerrilla base camp on the Cambodia side of the border. Seak Thy, another daughter, was born last October in her parents’ Site 2 hut, with the help of a Cambodian midwife.

Sem Seak’s is a typical Site 2 family. A child is born every hour on average, and the newborn alone increase the camp population by 5% a year.

“It’s seasonal,” remarked the American nurse. “When the young men are in the camp around Cambodian New Year (in the spring), there’s going to be a lot of conception.”

At other times, many of the men are away, fighting a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese-supported government in Cambodia.

There are more than 162,000 Cambodians and 2,000 Vietnamese at Site 2, in an area covering less than two square miles, just over one mile from the border. The perimeter is fenced with barbed wire and guarded by nearly 200 paramilitary Thai rangers.

Recreation centers, women’s centers, schools and vegetable gardens are designed to make the refugee population self-supporting and self-reliant. Management of the seven sections within the camp lies in the hands of the refugees themselves, with each section having its own chief.

Leader a Former Activist

The boss of the 70,000 people from Nong Samet is Thou Thon, 47, a former student activist whose followers now address him as da , or grandfather. He has led this group for nine years, ever since they came to the border. And what does he tell them about the coming year?

“I hope sometime the war will end and we will go home. Maybe this year, maybe next year,” he said. “But if we go home now, I will become another kind of refugee, a refugee in my own country.”

So for now, Thou Thon will run a tight little island of Cambodians behind a wire fence. He has his own police force of 620 men to maintain camp security, and he has his own jail. Site 2 is probably no more violent than many American cities of 160,000 population, refugee officials argue, but it has its share of murder, rape and robbery.

“Of course we have some bad men. Who doesn’t?” Thou Thon noted.

Domestic Quarrels

But domestic quarrels take most of his policemen’s time.

“The people get frustrated,” said an experienced refugee official at the camp. “There’s fighting between family members, between neighbors, usually with fists but sometimes with an ax or a grenade.”

The U.N. Border Relief organization, working with the refugees, has tried to broaden the opportunities for work, both to provide a little income for the refugees and more importantly to give a sense a meaning to their days. New projects include expanded production of large ceramic jars to catch rainwater, the manufacture of clay stoves, the weaving of mosquito nets.

Many refugees now receive small allowances from relatives abroad, a maximum of $20 a month under Thai regulations. Extra income from camp jobs can buy candy, trinkets or batteries from the black-market vendors who operate in the camp.

But a job would also give men like Sem Seak something useful to do with their time.

“I play with my children,” the old farmer said laconically. “Sometimes I go to visit my son (who lives in a nearby hut.) I’m not bored, but I do get tired.”