What we don't know can hurt our children...

When I wrote about Debbie Savage the other day I had no idea what kind of TRUE hardships Cambodian people had been facing for at least the last 30+ years. You know I consider myself pretty educated when it comes to current events and social issues, but no where in any of my studies or my readings had I ever come across the following facts:

• The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country's population)!*
• As in Nazi Germany, and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale.*
• A December 1978 Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge into the countryside, began a 10-year Vietnamese occupation, and touched off almost 13 years of civil war.*
• It wasn't until 2003 that the UN stepped in and finally helped the people of Cambodia with elections, bringing the perpetrators of the genocide to justice, helping with documenting these atrocities and got things on the road towards progress.

Things in Cambodia in no way are normalized, many Cambodian families are still suffering and now Vietnamese refugees living in Cambodia are adding to the problems this young government faces.

How can I teach my sons to be good global citizens if I myself don't know the facts of things like these? How can I teach them tolerance and activism if I don't practice it myself 100% of the time. I told Debbie that I had assumed that she was Filipino and I am so glad that she told me she was Cambodian. It sparked my interest to learn more, to educate myself about how much I need to grow if I want to ever be an activist for human rights.

Did all of you know about Cambodia? I think it is funny that we American's always say, "Thank God we live in a free country. Thank God we were born Americans!", do we really think it could never happen here? It could, it may and it will if we don't learn about how those things came to being, evolved and perpetuated as norms in other parts of the world.

I welcome any posts from readers that know of atrocities happening in other parts of the world. Let's inform one another about what goes on out there in our world. Let's see if we can get ourselves and our government to really act on behalf of these people who really have no means to get themselves out of these terrible situations. What we don't know can hurt our children.

Thank you for reading my words. Blog 2 you later!

*this information is from Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program to learn more please Click Here!