The benefit of being a man is that you get to have a really bad memory. Isaac barely remembers conversations we had yesterday, while I remember every embarassing incident in my whole life in such minute detail that I get embarrassed all over again when I remember it.
Although, since having kids I can no longer remember what I went to the grocery store to buy, or why I opened the refrigerator door.
But it’s a good bet that chocolate answers both those questions.
If I ask Isaac today why he broke up with me 10 years ago, he really doesn’t remember. It had something to do with me graduating.
And really, that’s about as much as I understood when he broke up with me.
It was sudden, and oh-so-unexpected. It was March or April of my senior year. I had agreed to be part of an intern program with my college pastor after graduating, and was starting a new Christian fellowship at a university in Orange County. I also decided to get my Master’s Degree while I was there, since we really needed a student to participate in starting the group. Isaac had one more year of school, then had to go to Rhode Island for training, and after that we didn’t know where he’d be.
And somehow in his mind this translated to us taking separate paths in life.
It was absolutely shocking to me. We had known since before we started dating that we wouldn’t be getting married any time soon, and that he would be going into the Navy right after graduation. I was only moving 50 miles away from him. Granted, in Southern California traffic that is more like 200 miles, but still, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the concept that the person I thought I was going to marry had changed his mind.
And until that day I never understood that a broken heart isn’t a figurative description, that your chest can actually hurt, you can feel like you can’t breathe, that you are drowning in a sea of pain and don’t know how to get out. For months I would beg God to just let me get over Isaac, because no other guy I met or knew or who asked me out after that compared to him.
About four or five months after we had broken up, Isaac asked me to go to dinner with him so we could talk. We still attended the same church, so we’d seen each other fairly regularly.
He wanted to get back together.
And I told him no.
Have you ever seen the movie The Saint with Val Kilmer and Elizabeth Shue? Near the end, she is running from the Russian Mafia, sprinting towards the American Embassy yelling, “I’m an American! I’m an American!” and falls into the strong arms of a tough Marine, safe behind the closed gates of the protective American Embassy.
Yeah.
For us?
Not so much.
P was able to reach the US Embassy. They told us that they were evacuating Cambodia and advised us to leave Cambodia if possible. However, they would not be able to help us.
Thank you and have a nice day.
With 40 people in one house things got pretty close. We had to ration food and drink, as we didn’t know how long we’d be stuck. The biggest concern was whether we’d run out of fresh water. We all got sick, mostly the expected third-world travel-related stomach complaints, but when you put 40 people with travel-related stomach complaints into a house with two bathrooms, things can get, well, icky.
Sleeping space was also an issue. The first night a friend and I slept on a bare box spring. After that first night enough blankets were found for everyone. At some point after the first day a brave soul had taken a trip back to our house. One of the men on the team had heart medication that he couldn’t do without, and I think they picked up some extra supplies then also.
I spent a lot of my time with P’s daughters, playing with them and watching Veggie Tales. We were there for three or four days, and at one point we knew we had to get out of the country but there was no one to help us. There were so many of us that we were divided into smaller groups. We didn’t really know how we were going to get out, but the plan was to get to Los Angeles however possible, and then we would contact my college pastor there to regroup.
And each one of P’s little girls got to pick one of us to be her escort and protector. I had a little girl named Hannah, and the responsibility of that was enormous.
Finally, it turned out that the Red Cross sent in two planes to evacuate people to Thailand. There weren’t going to be any others. The airport had been damaged so there were no commercial flights. No one got priority and we had to buy our tickets. Thankfully, we’d all come armed with cash for our food and utility expenses as well as money for gifts and souvenirs. Since we’d barely been there a week, and most of that was spent in hiding, we had plenty of money.
The Red Cross, or whoever handled the ticket sales, didn’t allow us to purchase tickets as a group. Our team leader had to hand over one passport at a time, while we all stayed at P’s house and prayed that no one would be left behind.
Miraculously, no one was. Out of the thousands of foreigners wanting to evacuate, our whole team was able to get on one plane.
We went to Bangkok, where P was able to reunite with her husband and girls. We were met by teams of people to debrief us and check us for signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.
There, we were able to call our family and let them know we were safe. I called my parents, and then Isaac. He told me that he loved me for the first time. And didn’t say it again for another three years.
After a couple days in Bangkok, Thailand, we finally flew home. We all flew into Los Angeles. There we were greeted by friends, family…and the media. Being the only person on the team from California, the media there were looking for me.
I was reuniting with my family when suddenly a harsh light was glaring straight into my eyes. It didn’t register with me what it was, and I put my hand up to shield my face. Without a word, Isaac walked over to the camera that was being shoved into my face, stepped into its path, and turned his back on it. He simply stood between me and it, arms folded and legs braced apart.
To this day that one action still represents to me all that a man should be.
Plus, it was really, really sexy.
And then about eight months later he broke up with me.
We continued on with our tour for a few more minutes, until someone came up and spoke to our tour guide. He quickly left us, and P, an American who lived and worked in Cambodia full-time, told us that fighting had broken out in the city and we needed to leave immediately.
We all piled into the cars and headed to her house. Along the way we noticed the increase in soldiers on the streets. We even passed tanks on street corners, with obviously well-armed men on top.
We got to P’s house and were waiting to hear what we would do next, when suddenly fighting broke out just down the block from us. We all had to run into her house to take cover.
We didn’t leave again for days.
There were about 40 people in her one house. My team, a few Cambodian girls who had been hired to cook and help out, P, and her young daughters. Her husband was in the States, so she was handling everything by herself.
Now that I’m a mom, I can’t imagine the fear she must have had, taking care of 30 college students and her daughters all by herself in the midst of war.
We soon learned that a faction of the government, a man named Hun Sen, had accused Prince Ranariddh of conspiring with the Khmer Rouge, a political group that had killed thousands in genocide. He was taking over and the Prince was out.
Oh, and across the street from us? Large radio/tv tower. For someone in the government. The fighting was so close because someone wanted that tower destroyed.
A few other girls and I tried to entertain P’s daughters. They were the sweetest things, and easily distracted by the video camera we showed them. We played games with them, while around us people were panicking, praying or singing.
At one point the fighting came too close. The little girls and my friends R, N, and I were barricaded into a space underneath the stairs for their protection.
Can you imagine having to lock your children away, and not being able to be with them?
While you wondered if your house was about to be blown up with you in it?
Our arrival in Cambodia was fairly shocking. It was 1997 (was that really 10 years ago?), so it was pre 9/11 and tight airport security.
Soldiers walking around the airport carrying large automatic weapons was a strange sight. I was told they were ak-47′s. There were also soldiers posted on several streetcorners, and guarding a few compounds.
My fear was gone by this point, and the soldiers added to the feeling of adventure. We all crammed into a few tiny vans, and immediately thanked the person who had invented deodorant.
It was really hot, and we were really crammed. And a few people’s deodorant had unfortunately failed them.
The streets were terrible, unpaved and potted so badly that we would bounce up and hit our heads on the top of the van. Plus, the drivers seemed a bit crazy. They relied more on their horns than on any laws we could figure out. And we all were shocked at the motorcycles and mopeds zipping around carrying entire families, loads of chickens, even baskets upon baskets of fresh bread.
And one of the American workers who lived in Cambodia zoomed by on the back of one that was used as a taxi.
And she was riding sidesaddle.
Holding onto nothing with her hands calmly folded in her lap.
Two years later, I would find myself in the same position, sitting two or three people on a moped, hoping the driver didn’t hit a pothole and bounce me right off the back. But at that point we had so many people on the team that we traveled in vans and SUV’s.
The first few days of our trip were set aside for sightseeing. We visited outdoor markets, where women squatted on tables and hacked the heads off chickens to give you fresh meat.
And they sold some sort of cockroach-looking bugs in large baskets as snacks.
About three or four days into the trip we took a tour of the Royal Palace. The wealth of it was staggering after the poverty outside the gates.
The rainy season was beginning, and being from California, I hadn’t ever experienced the huge thunderstorms that could happen in Cambodia. Even inside the palace and the temples we could feel the thunder shaking the walls.
And then, one of the older men who was with the team turned to his wife and murmured in her ear, “I was in Vietnam. And that wasn’t thunder.” I looked around, but I was the only person who had heard them, and we all continued with the tour, until we were greeted by a strange sight.
A group of Japanese business men, all in their staid black suits were leaving the temple. But they didn’t stop to put their shoes on.
They ran barefoot for the exit.
The summer after our junior year of college was busy for Isaac and I. He spent four weeks on a ship with the Navy, and shortly after he returned I was heading to Cambodia to teach English with a team of 30 college students and a few adults.
I had met everyone on the team at an orientation. Most of them were from Oklahoma, and I think there were only two of us who didn’t know anyone else on the team. I was the youngest person on the team at 19.
I had some strange dreams before leaving. In one, I was hiding behind a broken wall of some sort with some children. War raged all around us, and I was trying to protect the kids and get them away from the fighting.
Despite the dream, I wasn’t scared. I was so excited.
Until I got to the airport.
A bunch of people came out to the airport to see me off, but the trip that I had been excited about for months was suddenly terrifying to me.
If someone had pulled me aside and said, “You know, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” I probably would have gotten in my car and gone home, despite the two thousand dollars I had raised to go.
Instead my BSU director pulled me aside and said that he thought that God was allowing me to feel the fear at that time for a reason. That later, I would be able to be calm and clear-headed when it was necessary.
It wasn’t all that reassuring at the time, but he let me cry on his shoulder, which helped some.
But he turned out to be right.
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