Tim’s ‘State of the Blog’ Address

Dearest readers, I have been very pleased to receive a lot of emails and messages from you about the blog, some positive, some critical, some thought-provoking, all interesting. And I would like to respond to some of the comments I have received (some, although very important issues, don’t lend themselves to a wider audience).

In the past few weeks, I have written quite a bit about how my life is here and about the process of doing field research, and I will continue to share these anecdotes and impressions with you. A lot of the experiences I am having, many of you will have had also when you have been to another country, whether for field work or to emigrate, or just on holiday, language barriers, adapting to a different way of doing things and so on – I am certainly not special in this regard. Many things are trivial, some would happen to me whether it were in Phnom Penh or Paris, Battambang or Buenos Aires or Berlin, Samlaut or Siena, and I hope that you appreciate my sometimes cynical or bemused musings on them for what they are, small insights into my life here, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes reflective, sometimes boringly straight out. I have been in Cambodia for two and a half months now and I am growing to love the country and its people – like any country in the world it is different, it is special and it is bewildering to the outsider, and I am enjoying discovering that.

But this is not a travel blog, obviously, and while I have been writing about the process of how my research is unfolding here, I haven’t really given you much insight into what I have actually been finding out. As of today I have conducted 57 interviews with 45 different people in nine different provinces, almost all former Khmer Rouge (the odd person slipped in who we thought was Khmer Rouge but turned out not to be!). And their life stories are – as expected – all very different and I feel privileged to have been able to hear so many – and hopefully many more to come. So far, as I mentioned a while ago, only one person has admitted to killing himself, but in interviews with others I have been able to ask a wealth of related questions and thus can slowly paint a mosaic of what motivated people at the time to participate in the genocide; it is still early days and it will be a hectic few months of research still to go. Over the next few weeks and months, I hope to be able to share some of these insights from these interviews with you, probably the reason you decided to read this blog, but given the popular demand I will also continue with the other topics I have been blogging on so far. End of the address. Rapturous applause.

**the long open road ahead**