The Cambodia Coup (Part 2 of 2)
tanks. Pretty quickly after that, it was on television. I watched most of the coup on CNN. At the same time, outside my room, I heard the same shots. We didn't see the tanks in our area of the town, but we heard the booming of the machine guns, and we saw flares.
Did you go back and teach after that day?
We were more concerned during those days with having enough food. Many of the Western NGO workers would go to the market once a week and buy their food. Well, we couldn't get to the store. There was somebody there with a machine gun, and we weren't too sure what would happen if we crossed the street. So we didn't know when the market would open, and even then, we didn't know what the price would be. It was gouge time.
On the 9th, we went back to school. Three CPP soldiers -- their dead bodies had been dropped on the school campus. That means it was done by FUNCINPEC, to send the message that we lost, but we're not going to forget this. Right next door to the Faculty of Business, there was a FUNCINPEC hangout that was commandeered by CPP soldiers. That was a little scary, since now I would be associated with the CPP.
What was touching about that day is that the first student to come back asked, his first question, "Are you leaving?" At the time, we had not yet heard from USAID, and I said, "No, we're not leaving." He smiled at me, and to me, that meant that our teachings had worked. He actually came back to school. No one could have blamed him if he had not come back. That, to me, was the high point of the coup. It meant that maybe that generation would behave differently than the present generation of leadership.
We had a meeting at the school, and we were told that USAID required all programs receiving grant money, unless they were absolutely necessary, or humanitarian, to leave. If you stayed, you would not receive any more salary. If you left, you would continue to be paid your salary for a month. So they knocked the program out completely. If we had some humanitarian relationship at some level, we could have stayed, but teaching commercial law, constitutional law, we couldn't.
You wanted to stay?
Yes. Yes. If USAID had allowed
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