Meeting the maimed on the road

Koh Kong, Cambodia

One of my favorite travel books is Tiziano Terzani’s A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East. In one section he writes, “Memory can be a wonderful refuge, and if I ever live to be old, as the fortune-tellers predict, I shall enjoy rummaging around in it as in an old family chest forgotten in the attic; but it can also be a terrible burden, especially for others.”

He writes this while reflecting on his return to Vietnam, which he hasn’t seen since 1975 (when he was a journalist covering the war). Now, as he walks the streets of Saigon all these years later, he is “constantly haunted by one recollection or another.” The war did not scathe him bodily, but it did, he says, take from him. He compares what he lost to what others have lost:

In that war I had lost only some illusions—a loss that was not even visible. But what about those who in that revolution—a failed revolution, like all the others—had lost legs, arms, eyes, or even just their youth, and who now dragged themselves around the streets, begging? They were really obnoxious, with their memories so physical, so visible, such a burden for everyone.

When I recently reread this passage, I remembered the many people I’ve met in my travels who were physically maimed because of how history and policy had once played out in their cities and countryside—places which we travelers tend to experience in a more light-hearted manner. Part of traveling well, I think, is to sometimes stop beside the maimed, to hear their stories and better understand what it means to carry such physical memories.

In 2007, I met the family above while crossing from Thailand to Cambodia. Depending on who is counting, one out of every 236 to 425 Cambodians—one of the highest ratios in the world—is a landmine victim (i.e., an amputee). Many, like this man, now beg for a living. But with the help of someone who can interpret, many may also tell you their story. And so while I hope our travels will never include landmines or traumatic injuries, if venturing through a country like Cambodia, I suppose I do hope they will include talking with someone like the man in this photograph. It’ll be a memory worth having in our attic, from time to time retrieving once back home.