A Study in Contrasts

On Thanksgiving morning I was heartened to read of Jack Smith’s return to La Bocana and the Corporate/Community School venture in Chicago.

But I was wholy unprepared for the sadness and utter desolation of the Site 2 refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border (“Site 2,” story and photos by Kari Rene Hall, Nov. 24). I have read many times of this situation, though this was more difficult than all. Couched in the midst of opulent advertisements for post-holiday shopping were two 9-year-old faces. What words to name the pain they share fingering the tiny barbed spires that circle Site 2?

Half of the camp’s internees are children. By sheer caprice, the boys and girls in Site 2 will grow up malnourished and without a country, but my children sleep upstairs (one not yet born) in a warm room and we in the West are left to reconcile the disparity with which all of us on this planet live. Yet each child is knotted to a culture they had no part in making, a culture that alternately strips from one, and builds for another the dream of a future.

I am thankful to all of you for your reporting; you have altered what I was going to do today. Now I must go and dress my son for the rain, thinking of the 18 liters of water allotted to each person at Site 2. There are no words for these differences; they merely ration the way in which we articulate sorrow.

SHAUN T. GRIFFIN

Associate Director

Youth Opportunity Program

Stanford University