Thread by @julia_wallace

A Cambodian story:

This is Saing Soenthrith. He was born in Phnom Penh in 1964. There aren't any photos of him as a child, because when he was a schoolboy the Khmer Rouge seized the city and sent its entire population to the countryside to do slave labor under brutal conditions.

Rith was so young that his most vivid memory of that day is his devastation at having to abandon his new white puppy, Barang.

He was separated from his parents and siblings. All were put to work in collective units. All but him were killed.

bbc.com/news/world-asi…

This is his own lyrical, miserable account of his evacuation from Phnom Penh and his family's years under the Khmer Rouge.

cambodiadaily.com/news/a-journal…

When the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power in 1979, Rith was a teenager with nowhere to go. He made his way back to Phnom Penh and became a "pagoda boy," living with a crew of other orphans at a Buddhist temple and doing tasks for the monks in exchange for shelter and food.

Cambodia's new government was a Soviet-backed communist state, so Rith studied Russian and won a scholarship to the USSR. He has lots of photos from this period, of Cambodian guys with feathered hairstyles discovering the wider world (and Russian women), and they are great.

Then the Soviet Union dissolved and a UN-brokered peace deal was struck between Cambodia's warring factions. Rith had to start over, learning English. He became a translator for UN peacekeepers, traveling to difficult and dangerous parts of the country, which was still at war.

Finally, in 1993, Cambodia held its first post-war elections and life began, very slowly, to return to normal. Rith was hired at the new Cambodia Daily newspaper. He became one of the country's most respected journalists, spending years developing a deep network of sources.

Here he is in 1997, tending to a dying woman after a vicious grenade attack at a rally held by @RainsySam.

I met Rith years later, still at The Cambodia Daily. He didn't make as much as he could have in other sectors, but stuck with the work because he loved and believed in it, and because the paper's monomaniacal owner, Bernie Krisher, promised staff they'd always be taken care of.

He was known among colleagues for his excellent reporting, troves of experience, sweet nature, and fondness for beer gardens. He treasured a small plot of land he owned, near where he had forcibly dug ditches as a child, and started a school there for local kids to learn English.

This decent and meaningful life Rith built for himself has come completely unwound in the most devastating way over the past few years, for reasons unique to him but also profoundly entwined with the modern history of Cambodia.

Land grabs are endemic in Cambodia, a country with weak rule of law and the most fledgling land tenure system, and Rith's beloved 896 square meters were in the sights of a Taiwanese company. Abetted by local authorities, the firm took over his rice field and filled it with dirt.

As a journalist, he fought back. He enlisted the help of high-ranking officials and wrote a front-page story about his situation. The pressure worked and Rith kept the land, but he had caused local authorities to lose face in a way they would not forget.
cambodiadaily.com/news/drawing-a…

Then, two years later, his kidneys failed.

Rith had suffered from diabetes for years. He was trying to get it treated, but the haphazard and shoddy Cambodian medical system and his own chaotic life meant that he never got the kind of serious, sustained care he should have.

But options for Cambodians with kidney problems are even worse. There are almost no nephrologists, dialysis is expensive and technicians are poorly trained, and transplants cannot be done here. Here's an excellent story on the issue by @MonoKhanS.

voacambodia.com/a/unprepared-f…

Rith needs a transplant badly, but he has no legal means of getting one. Most of his family were killed under the Khmer Rouge, narrowing the pool of obvious donors. There is no registry system. The only option for the desperate is to pay a donor--but this was criminalized in 2016

There are companies and doctors that will still quietly help arrange transplants abroad, but this is all a legal and ethical gray area. Rith was exploring the idea of going through one of these firms, to save his life, but he's never managed to come up with the $50K it would cost

The only thing of value he owns is--you remember--his plot of land. He thinks this should be worth around $50K now, but the Taiwanese company successfully took all the surrounding land from the villagers who lived near him, so its value plummeted. It's just an island now.

The company's land broker is also a prominent government official in the province. Rith says the official is blocking him from selling to anyone other than the company, which is lowballing him. The official warned that if he took the case to the media again, he'd regret it.

So now he's bankrupt and desperate, barely able to keep himself alive. Today he has $7 in his pocket. Like the journalist he is, Rith's been meticulously chronicling his dialysis sessions and symptoms (fluid-filled lungs, swollen limbs) in the most depressing Facebook album ever.

In yet another complication, crowdfunding platforms generally don't allow money to be deposited into Cambodian bank accounts, making it hard to raise money for Rith online. If you know of a platform that might allow us to do this, please let me know.

And if you would like to help, you can DM me for information about how to do so by bank transfer, Wing, or World Remit.

Anyway, that's the story of Rith. There's no ending yet.

An ending to the story: Rith died last night.

Here's his funeral pyre, on the road leading to his beloved land.