I have previously written about my “lucky escapes” in Cambodia in 1974/1975 –The Bomb Went off Before I Arrived – where I worked on a World Vision medical team as a radiographer training two Khmer lads. With them I set up a very basic medical imaging program that with limited knowledge and skill could provide some kind of diagnostic assistance to clinicians. It was short lived and I have no idea what happened to these two after the fall of Phnom Pehn and the sweeping atrocities of the Pol Pot killing fields. After almost 50 years though, I have memories that persist. Some things are clear some things are cloudy. Some things are lost.

I suppose in the light of the horrors of Gaza and Ukraine at the hands of dictators and idealism, the murder of children and the annihilatioin of olive trees, Palestinian culture and more I found myself reflecting on my small involvement in Cambodia. Yesterday I sketched three of my experiences that have stayed etched in my memory.

Making meaning out of these experiences can be easily explained away by a war journalist or a politician. “If you didn’t want these experiences you shouldn’t have volunteered.”

I was given the lifeless body of an orphaned child wrapped in a blanket to take down to the morgue at the orphanage in Phnom Pehn.

I came across the carnage of a family feud exploded onto the streets with a new Vietnamese plastics bomb on my way to the orphanage.

I was with friends and workers on the front steps of our house in Phnom Pehn when a rocket flew over the house we were in and hit the Red Cross house two doors down.

The making of meaning is not an indulgence for me but a pathway to break open the understanding my self and the constructs that have made me and of making a meaning approximation in respect of the essence of the experiences. And continue to.

My parents – the “Builder Generation” – were building, working, making and finding meaning in those constructs. As a “Boomer” I fell under the spell of Freud and Woodstock and free university education not to mention the overwhelming multi-layered Christian views, preachers and church life. Books and films, experiences and friends, loves and conflict, achievements and disappointments, silence and prayer all concoct to make my “selves”. As do the shock of dead infants, exploded families and narrow escapes.

All experiences are the constructs within other frameworks. Some frame works can be dismantled slowly and some are reimagined and rebuilt. The 3 month experiences of war, idealism and colonialisation in my life have stayed as memories that evolve and morph into gratitude, horror and and continue to frame my views and responses to life’s injustices, social injustice and ongoing colonialism. And for that I am thankful.