Four years earlier I had been selected, with Kay Boyle, the writer, and a number of others, to go to Cambodia and come back and prove that there were no sanctuaries in that country.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Going to Cambodia to cover the genocide trials, I did read a lot about the Khmer Rouge; I read a lot about the country and its history.
Most people I know don't even realize I'm an award-winning author, but I have gotten many opportunities to travel to places I'd never have visited otherwise.
Actually, I wanted to become a journalist, but no matter who I imagined myself to be in the future, somehow I was sure: I would leave my hometown. I felt it was my destiny.
I arrived in Bangkok in 1980: I was 23 years old, and it changed my life.
I quit my job, and went ashore to become a writer.
I travel to Cambodia, Thailand, Bali, and Nairobi for my charities: Somaly Mam and Friends to Mankind.
I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.
I applied for funding to embark on an overseas field trip in Iceland, and spent six weeks there happily holed up in the national archives, museums and libraries, sifting through ministerial and parish records, censuses, maps, microfilm, logs, and local histories.
I would like to dive in Vietnam and Cambodia.
I first went to Indonesia in 2001 for six months. I was to help a community of plantation workers to make a film documenting and dramatizing the struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship.