For this whole year, in Khmer class, we are researching on a topic to write a book in Khmer. There would be a team of three to four students who will work on it and also decided on a topic themselves. I was on a team four and our topic was on Refugees. Since our country has a lot of refugees during and after the Khmer Rouge regime. We want to write the story of their life for the world to know and also to understand more what had really happened during those horrible time for Cambodians.
Our team did an interview on skype with Chhay Lem Lim, Chhay Lin Lim and Sophy Pal (one of our team relative). We also research about Loung Ung and Arn Chorn Pond because they are Cambodian – American and also there were books written about their stories. We have five people to write about in our book and Chhay lem Lim and Chhay lin lim are brothers so we gave each one of our teammate a person to write for. I am writing for Arn Chorn Pond since I meet him once at Kampot Reader Writer festival.
After we gather all the information, we started to translate it into Khmer. The following step for us right now is to write it into the stories and making it interesting for others to read. Which is the hardest part for us to start writing the book, We also need to write an introduction for the book which will talk about the overview of refugees in Cambodia.
So far I have written about 1/3 a story of Arn Chorn Pond, I didn’t talk about the stories of him at America and how it changes his life yet and so what did he helps Cambodians and when we come back. Maybe the start of next year we will need our friends help to edit than our team is all finish. I so excited to print the book and share it to all Cambodians.