My name is Kai and I am 50% Cambodian. My dad's parents are from a country call Cambodia. They came to America because of something that is known today as the Killing Fields. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over the Cambodian government. They wanted to turn the country into a communist, farming society. They accomplished this goal by lying to the Cambodian people and telling them that the United States was going to bomb them and so they all needed to evacuate to the countryside. Once they got all the people into the countryside they forced them to work in labor camps.
The Khmer Rouge killed all the doctors, teachers, artists, well-educated, or anyone else that they thought was against them. My grandfather had worked as a military policeman for the government that had been overthrown by the Khmer Rouge. He survived by telling them that he was a bicycle repairman. He and my grandmother were sent to a labor camp in Bantam Bong. They spent almost two years working there. While there they had a son. He got very sick because they did not have enough food for him and he died of starvation before his second birthday. It is estimated that between 1.7 and 2 million Cambodians died during the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge.
In the spring of 1980 my grandfather heard about refugee camps on the Cambodian border. He and my grandmother, who was now pregnant with my father, hitched a ride on a van to the Cambodian border. It took them 3 days and 2 nights by car and another 2 days of walking to get to the refugee camp. The Khmer Rouge later attacked this camp and my grandparents were forced to flee through the jungle to the Thai border where the Red Cross was waiting. Two months later my dad was born in the Thai refugee camp. In December of 1980 they got word that they had been sponsored by a relative to come to the United States.
Cambodia is just one of many places around the world that has experienced genocide. The most well-known genocide perhaps was the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, US leaders said that we could never let something like this happen again. Unfortunately, there have been many genocides since then and there are still genocides happening today in places like Syria, Sudan and Burma. Albert Einstein once said, "The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." We must not stand by and watch while evil continues to happen in the world, but must stand up for those who cannot stand for themselves so that genocide becomes something that is only found in history books.
Kai
Mrs. Paris's 5th grade
used for Tropicana Speech
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