Friendship lasts through years, crises

March 18, 2009
By A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
Pacific Daily News (Guam)

Someone says friendship is a distinctively personal relationship founded on each friend's interest in the other's welfare and in "the other's sake." And someone else writes that friends "come and go like leaves."

I have friends in my life. There are those who never left our friendship; but some have come and gone. I think about many whom I no longer see and, sadly, I give not a thought to some others.

I cherish what someone wrote: "The friendship that can cease has never been real." That expresses a thought far better than I could.

Some time ago I wrote about a "lightning bug" friend of five decades who popped in and out, now here, now there, sometimes for years without news. But when we meet, we feel no estrangement and easily pick up where we left off as if it was only yesterday.

"A good friend is hard to find, hard to lose, and impossible to forget," so they say.

Last month, after more than 30 years absence, a former busboy in many Virginia restaurants, who graduated from Cambodia's Medical Faculty in 1973 and came to the United States in the same year, sat in my living room with my cocker spaniel lying by his side on the couch as if they were long lost friends.

He is a general surgeon at the Interfaith Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.

He was born in Cambodia's northwestern Siem Reap province. His mother and father were trapped under Khmer Rouge rule until they escaped to the Khao I-Dang refugee camp, and finally resettled in 1980 in Florida.

My friend the surgeon is now 60, married, with two girls -- one married, the other a University senior -- and one boy, the youngest, a blind college sophomore in New York, who walks the streets, rides buses and trains, and cares for himself.

Dr. Samrang Kchao thanks God and destiny for the luck that life has brought him.

"It seems like a century that we never get in touch," Kchao said in his first e-mail, telling me of my Pacific Daily News column that was posted on a Cambodian Web site for group discussion. "I remember the good old days when you and I spent nights and weekends to help those Cambodian refugees" -- those evacuated by the U.S. to Pennsylvania's Fort Indiantown Gap after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975.

It was then that Kchao and I became friends and co-workers.

He was a respiratory technician making rounds at Washington Hospital Center to check oxygen and clean medical equipment. I was a diplomat at the embassy of the fallen republican regime in Washington, D.C.

Following my sleepless nights working via telex with some government officials who died after the Khmer Rouge takeover, and unknown faces in the press corps and nongovernment organization in Phnom Penh, an effort to airlift some Cambodian children out of the capital as Khmer Rouge soldiers approached. Following busy days seeking to facilitate the children's adoptions in the Washington metro area, the energetic Kchao and I met to work out activities to help resettle refugees.

With help from a few hands -- they were all we needed -- we worked through the relief agency, the American Council for Nationalities Services, rented and created a "halfway house" for different groups of male refugees, oriented them to American ways and American culture, enrolled them in classes to learn English, introduced them to local social services, took them to job sites, helped to give them wings and independence.

It was Kchao who said, "Let's keep doing what's right to do." What "craziness," as he later lamented.

In his e-mail, Kchao spoke of the great "feeling inside" for having helped those to get on their feet -- "all these small stuffs" we did that made a difference, he wrote.

A lover of photography who professed no interest involving politics, Kchao has busied himself with charitable activities such as fundraising, a computer literacy program and, in 2007, with his dream to provide "encouragement, opportunity, and access to higher education to poor but deserving Cambodian students."

He initiated a Google discussion group and in a few months he will launch a Virginia-registered Cambodian Education Excellence Foundation with him as president. Today, its members and supporters are said to span across the U.S., Canada, France and Cambodia.

The ceefoundation.org newsletter of January deserves a reading. It gives a snapshot of scholarship awards of $22,500 for 188 students in 2008-2009 to attend various institutions of higher learning. As stated in the newsletter, education is the country's "poverty reduction, ... critical component."

An e-mail that has gone around cyberspace many times, which I tucked away for use on a special occasion such as this reunion of two friends, reads: "People come into your life for reason, a season or a lifetime."

Our reunion ended with lunch at a local restaurant serving the food of America.

The e-mail I quoted above reads, "Thank you for being a part of my life, whether you were there for a reason, a season or a lifetime."

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.