A famed refugee camp in a remote corner of Thailand, not far from its border with Cambodia, captured my imagination six years ago when doing research for a novel set partly in the 1970s. Until recently, I had no idea I could visit the area, much less the specific place where this camp once stood as a beacon of safety, promise, and international cooperation. Now it has a Facebook page and an Instagram account and, best of all, welcomes visitors to its new museum and grounds by appointment.
After my own visit last April, I posted a photo and a brief statement on the Facebook page; the comments it elicited were brief and heartbreaking: “I was born in this camp. I would love to visit it one day too.” “My family and I lived in section 2 group 108 from 1979 to 1981.” “Our family spent part of our life in this camp so much memories.”
From 1979 to 1993, the 2.3 square kilometer encampment at the foot of the Khao I Dang Mountain – 125 miles east of Bangkok – was something of a model refugee camp for about 160,000 Cambodians fleeing war, genocide, and starvation after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Known by aid workers as KID, for the Khao I Dang Holding Center (pronounced cow-eee-dong), today it’s the Khao I Dang Learning Center. It’s twelve miles north of the Thai border crossing at Aranyaprathet, known to many locals as Aranya.
Most of the 350-plus people who have toured the site since it reopened two years ago lived there with their families for many years as they waited to learn what countries would take them in. The U.S., France, and Australia welcomed the lion’s share. The former residents return now with children, grandchildren and spouses to revisit their pasts in ways they never imagined possible. There are others throughout the world – volunteers who once worked there, history buffs, refugee professionals, even a novelist or two – who will want to visit the Learning Center while touring Thailand or going to or from the temples of Angkor Watt, about 100 miles south.
Many of us still remember harrowing media footage from late 1979: Tens of thousands of people in dire need of food, medical care, and shelter, arriving in Thailand and sleeping on grass mats while the government and NGOs built camps that would accommodate them. This was when the worldwide refugee population was eight million – not today’s 65 million.
My guide for my visit to the Learning Center, Mr. Lek, is a gentle, soft-spoken resident of Aranyaprathet who was the camp’s electrician for the years it operated. He picked me up at my Aranya hotel, a few miles north of the border crossing, and we drove in his late model Toyota farther up Highway 348, two-lane blacktop cutting through mostly deserted countryside. We turned off the highway onto a dirt road into what felt like a heavily wooded park, dotted with wooden signs in Thai. Moments later, we were at the modest, modern wooden structure that houses the museum that teaches the history of Khao I Dang through text, photographs and videos.
Neither the museum nor the grounds bears much resemblance to a crowded, bustling refugee camp, but just being there, walking and driving through the open fields and patches of forest, is a stark reminder of what is not there. Gone are the rows upon rows of thatched huts – thousands of them – that sheltered refugees, and the famed 400-bed hospital. In their place are the museum and several informative historic markers, including one that describes the medical and surgical achievements in this unlikely setting: “During its first 54 days of operation, 521 surgical procedures were performed, 162 related to war injuries.” Down a winding dirt road is a replica of Angkor Wat, sculpted decades ago by Cambodian artist Yary Livan, who now lives in Lowell, Massachusetts. In 2015, he was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship by President Obama.
Mr. Lek spent a little more than hour showing me the museum and the grounds, with Khao I Dang Mountain, a craggy, misshapen, solitary landmark not far in the distance. As we drove down dusty roads and checked our location against the maps Mr. Lek used 40 years ago, in his soft voice, he explained that it made the refugees “a bit crazy” to be cooped up on the property, never able to leave the grounds, for years on end. “For one year, all right,” he said, “but it was many.” Sometimes as many as ten.
Even with the thatched huts gone, these details of being confined for years on end to the land that surrounded me were sobering. They stripped away the slightly romantic haze in which I’d come to the Learning Center. I had been steeped in the idea – which was also true – that KID had been a model refugee camp, that it boasted facilities and services that had existed in no other camps, including the hospital, a dental clinic, and education and jobs training for its residents. I’d been swept up in the nostalgia of refugees returning to KID, evidence of which I’d seen in the Visitor’s Log book.
One entry suggests KID’s mythic place in the lives of some former residents. “I have waited most of my adult life to visit K.I.D.,” wrote Peter Pin, who was born there and now photographs Cambodian communities in New York City and beyond. “It was always, for me, intangible, existing in the memories of my parents, the stories they told me growing up…. I can feel the presence of the countless men, women, and children who called this home. I am grateful that the site still exists and that I can journey here, be present here, and feel the many complicated feelings I feel now.” While there, he spent two days photographing the property.
I had nothing like Peter Pin’s deep connection to KID, but the year of research I had done for my book – talking to people who had worked there, studying troves of photos, and reading every account I could find – had made me care intensely about this distant place to which I had had no personal connection. And when I discovered, by chance, only shortly before my recent trip to Cambodia and Thailand, that Khao I Dang had reopened and included a museum, that I could visit it – when for years I’d assumed all traces of it were gone – it was as though someone dead had come back to life. No wonder I’d gone there with a pocketful of nostalgia for a place I’d never been. Yet the grim reality of people living for years on end in a thatched hut, trapped on a small piece of land in a foreign country, took on a new reality as I criss-crossed the property with Mr. Lek.
Yet my overall feeling – like Peter Pin’s – was gratitude that the vestiges of KID were here for inspection and contemplation. Its new incarnation is the work of two NGOs that were fundamental to its original operations, the United National High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which built and ran the original 400-bed hospital. Both groups teamed up with the Thai Department of Forestry to repurpose and run the new site.
Mr. Lek drove me twelve miles back to the parking lot by the border crossing in Aranyaprathet, where taxis and tuk-tuks linger, looking for customers. He negotiated a taxi to Bangkok – only 125 miles away, but almost a four-hour ride. Days later, in central Bangkok, I met the woman at the ICRC who runs the Facebook page and had been my go- between with Mr. Lek, Ms. Varaporn Dechatiwong.
She has worked for the ICRC in Bangkok for decades, and when KID was operational, she was a secretary deeply involved with camp matters because she speaks French, as did many of the refugees. In the last few years, she’s put her institutional memory to work creating the Center’s new museum. She hopes to add more attractions and aides-memoirs. Building replicas of the thatched huts and other structures would raise the Center’s current status as “mini-site” to a destination with wider appeal.
Given its location and the quiet nature of the attractions, it’s unlikely that the KID Learning Center will ever be a major tourist destination, like the nearby temples of Angkor Wat. Yet for those who make the trip, it is likely to have meaning beyond measure. Like visiting anyplace where history happened – from Auschwitz to Waterloo – much of what you take from it depends on what you bring to it and what you are willing to absorb and imagine while you’re there.
~~ Elizabeth Benedict, New York City
~ Khao-I-Dang Today ~ 