I can remember the night that I packed up all of the letters and pictures that represented my relationship with Isaac and put them into a box. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away, but I knew I needed to try to get over him; to accept that my life was not going in the direction I thought it was, and I was not going to marry the man I thought I was going to.
When Isaac asked me to get back together with him, I had shocked myself by saying no. I had already had one fickle boyfriend, who broke up with me and got back together on a whim, and I wasn’t about to let that happen again.
After turning Isaac down, I went home and finally threw that shoebox in the trash.
And then got it out again two hours later.
As the school year started, I found Isaac in my life more and more. We saw each other at church. He’d make sure to talk to me for a few minutes at lunch after church. I went to a weekly meeting at USC where my college pastor, and basically my boss, was, and I’d see him there. I was fully involved in Orange County, 50 miles away from Isaac, with a group of 12 girls in the new Christian Challenge Bible study I’d started, yet Isaac still managed to be around, helping out and making himself useful.
One weekend I took three girls to a conference that many of the Christian Challenge and BSU groups were at.
My next door neighbor?
Isaac.
We ended up sitting outside our doors and talking for hours. I don’t even remember about what, but I know that by the end of the weekend I knew that I’d never fallen out of love with him, he’d never fallen out of love with me, and he had just been trying to be obedient to what he thought God was doing in our lives when we broke up.
We both also saw that while it would be difficult to be living 50 miles away from each other, it was possible to still spend time together without sacrificing the separate ministries we were involved in.
And we both knew that no one else out there held any interest for us.
We still weren’t in any position to get married. I was raising support in my job as a director for Christian Challenge and had just started a Masters program, and he was still in college and had no income. We were careful with our time, and soon the year was over and Isaac graduated and was heading from California to Rhode Island for Surface Warfare Officer School. He was there for five months before being stationed in San Diego on a ship.
Isaac returned to California and…didn’t propose. Months went by of commutes between Orange County and San Diego, and weekends where we wanted to see each other but couldn’t because one of us had obligations. My heart was becoming more and more torn, and I finally had some sympathy for Isaac’s decision to break up with me two years before.
A heart can’t be in two places at once.
I was down to only about 9 months left in my program, and would soon have to decide if I was going to continue on as Campus Director, and realized that something had to change. And since I didn’t believe I should be the one to propose or to push for a proposal, I began to prepare myself to break up with Isaac so that I could be fully committed in one place.
But then something was different. Isaac had this…look. And I started tormenting my roommate, knowing that if Isaac was going to propose, she would know.
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.
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