by Ben Noll, The Goshen College Record
Recent world history will soon be coming into clearer focus for Goshen College students when Sheldon Good, a senior, releases his Pinchpenny Press book, “Surviving the Khmer Rouge: Stories on the Struggle to Stay Alive,” on Sunday, April 5, 2009. Good is a member of the Salford congregation.
Accounts of the impending tribunals and sentencing for Khmer Rouge leaders of the genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s made world news headlines at CNN on Monday, March 30, 2009.
Good’s edited volume tells the stories of Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge communist regime. Most stories in the book are gathered from host parents of Goshen College students from the spring 2007 Cambodia Study-Service Term (S.S.T.).
The interviews detailed in the book sprung from an assignment given by Keith Graber Miller, Cambodia S.S.T. leader professor of Bible and religion. “Keith gave us this assignment the second week we were in Phnom Penh,” Good said. “Many of us were pretty intimidated to interview people about such a delicate subject.”
Graber Miller, in a foreword to the book, comments that Cambodians have adopted a “forget and forgive” attitude towards the events.
Relying on host siblings to translate for Khmer-speaking parents, Good said, that “many of our host siblings heard their parents’ survival stories for the first time through these interviews.”
“These are stories that need to be told, and heard,” Graber Miller said in his foreword. “For our host families and friends – and for all Cambodians – we hope for the authentic healing necessary to truly get on with living, out from under the oppressive shadow of the Khmer Rouge.”
Good hopes that this book can play a small part in the reconciliation process by allowing these survivors’ stories to be shared and encourages us all to look for our own stories of healing and reconciliation to share with our neighbors.
Good’s collection is the 2009 Horswell Anthology Series book. One Horswell Anthology is published each year with the intention that in can be used as a text for a future class. The spring 2010 Study-Service Term to Cambodia will use it as a required text.
Contributors to the book include current Goshen College seniors Abigail Groff, Dirk Miller, Hillary Watson and Greg Yoder as well as 11 Goshen College 2008 alumni.
The opinions expressed in articles posted on Mosaic’s website are those of the author and may not reflect the official policy of Mosaic Conference. Mosaic is a large conference, crossing ethnicities, geographies, generations, theologies, and politics. Each person can only speak for themselves; no one can represent “the conference.” May God give us the grace to hear what the Spirit is speaking to us through people with whom we disagree and the humility and courage to love one another even when those disagreements can’t be bridged.