Lasting Impressions

Remembering where I was this time last year, zooming through the streets of Phnom Penh in a tuk-tuk, about to leave for the eastern part of the country, where I would have a strange and unforgettable experience with bats.

The trips I've taken the last few years will never leave me. Though the reporting I've done has long since been turned into articles, the impressions it left will always be part of my writing.

They come in especially handy when I need to remind myself that the world is much larger than my little corner of it. The last few days I've been remembering a woman who seemed the incarnation of sadness. She had been trafficked, beaten and abused. Through a series of remarkable occurrences she found her way back home. But the poverty she returned to was so severe — her kids ate rice and roasted rat because that's all they had — that it wouldn't surprise me to learn she'd once again taken her chances with a job offer abroad.

She was a beautiful woman whose children hugged her tenderly. They seemed to know what she had done for them. How could they not?