The Caring Fields : Nurse Lisa Bohm of Huntington Beach struggles to brighten lives in a Cambodian border camp.

These are not the “killing fields,” but Lisa Bohm knows they can be deadly nonetheless.

As 1992 dawns along Thailand’s border with Cambodia, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians--those who have lived in political limbo since fleeing the murderous Khmer Rouge--are burdened with the horror of the past and now, perhaps more than ever, fear for the future.

At last the time has come to return home, after the signing of a peace treaty last October. But the good news for many, including the 200,000 residents of the Site 2 refugee camp where Bohm works, is tempered by dread that their suffering is far from over.

For all the terror the Cambodians have endured, “the anxiety is higher now--the anxiety about repatriation, not knowing what they will have when they go back home, the uncertainty of it all,” says Bohm, a 26-year-old registered nurse from Huntington Beach.

Those at Site 2 have no choice: They are legally classified as “displaced” and are ineligible for permanent resettlement in a third country. For 10 months, as coordinator of the camp’s American Refugee Committee Hospital, Bohm has witnessed the day-to-day suffering of the Cambodians, also known as Khmer. Her duties primarily involve hospital administration, but she still sees children with respiratory problems, sepsis, malnutrition, gastritis, meningitis. Adults come in with cirrhosis, tuberculosis, pneumonia, malaria and dengue fever. Parasites are endemic. The camp’s first two AIDS cases have been recorded.

What was intended as a temporary asylum from the 13-year Cambodian civil war, in which more than 1 million people died in Khmer Rouge “killing fields,” has become the world’s second-largest Khmer community after Phnom Penh. It has one of the highest birth rates in the world. Days are filled with boredom and frustration, and extraordinary brutality--from the raping of an 11-year-old girl to the ax murders of two children by their father--is common.

Thus Bohm, like other relief workers before her, faces a monumental task. A 1988 graduate of Biola University in La Mirada, she had worked at Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Long Beach Memorial and had completed short-term stints in clinics in Honduras and the Dominican Republic before deciding she wanted to “live long-term in a different culture and get a better understanding of a developing country’s health needs.”

Often, those needs are mind-boggling to Westerners. The American hospital, operated by the Khmer themselves under the auspices of the United Nations, deliberately has no high-tech equipment and no electricity--because those luxuries will not be available for follow-up care in the rural clinics of Cambodia.

“The first time I walked in,” Bohm recalls, “it shocked me. The whole hospital was made of bamboo. Unclean conditions. No beds, no mattresses, no sheets, a dirt floor, babies peeing anywhere, chickens running around and dogs running through. . . . I was seeing these huge, unsolvable problems that I would be facing.”

And those problems can be heartbreaking, she concedes, such as “knowing that a baby could be saved if you had equipment you would have in the States. If we knew what the diagnosis really was, we could treat better.” She sighs. “We just do our best.”

Still, there is relief for the relief workers. Strictly regulated by the Thai military, they are permitted at Site 2 only from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Bohm lives 1 1/4 hours away, driving each day past bucolic scenes of farmers working their water buffalo in rice paddies before reaching Site 2’s camouflaged bunkers and military checkpoints.

For the Khmer, however, there is no respite.

Shortly after the foreigners leave each afternoon, patients who are able flee the hospital for the relative safety of their family huts. At night, artillery attacks still occur nearby despite the cease-fire in effect since May. At the same time, large bands of former resistance soldiers have turned into bandits, terrorizing residents of rival camps. Even a simple walk can be a deadly menace: Up to 2 million land mines remain scattered along the border and inside Cambodia.

Bohm will be leaving the terror behind in March, when she plans to move to Long Beach, which includes the world’s third-largest Khmer community, to work with Khmer there. But her Khmer medical colleagues, like others at Site 2, are scrambling to brace for the future.

If Khmer nurses and medics pass standardized U.N. medical programs, Bohm says, they will be given certificates attesting to their professional competence--but many are concerned that the certificates will not be honored when they return to Cambodia. Some are so worried that they have quietly asked relief workers to teach them to drive.

If they can’t be doctors in Cambodia, the reasoning goes, maybe they can be taxi drivers for tourists.