From pain, pepper - and a plan - sprout

That's me in the middle.PHARY, FOR THE REGISTER

The kids at a candy stand outside of Kampong Trach.

Here are a couple reasons we love Cambodia. These kids live in a village outside of Kep that harvests sea salt.

Dec. 30, 2010
BY TOM GORDON
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER (California, USA)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Tom Gordon, an editor at The Register, is starting a nonprofit that will sell Cambodian pepper in the United States. The money raised will help a group that works to help retrain former sex workers in Cambodia This is the last of a three-part story.

I learned something in 2010.

I learned that your life – no matter how orderly and planned – can be turned upside down in seconds.

On the afternoon of May 13 I was sitting at my desk at The Register's Anaheim office doing what I normally do: supervising coverage of murderers, child molesters, traffic accidents, gas leaks and the like. I got message from photographer Bruce Chambers about a traffic accident that had closed Main Street at Sycamore in West Orange.

Close to my house, I thought.

Bruce was on the way. It was one of a dozen accidents we cover during the course of a week.

A few minutes later I got a call from the trauma center at the UCI Medical Center.

They told me my wife had been out walking the dog, waiting at a stoplight, when two cars collided. One car jumped the curb and hit her. Cris was thrown on to the hood of a Dodge Neon and cracked the windshield with her head. Worse, her foot somehow had been caught underneath.

The result: a compound fracture of the left ankle, a broken right leg, more than 60 stitches (the doctors called it de-gloving) to the left side of her foot, and the loss of her left big toe.

She went from the trauma center to the emergency room to surgery and six days at UCI. Then, home where she slowly advanced from a wheelchair to a walker to crutches to a cane. Now, we are at the limp stage.

That brings us to Kampot Pepper Project.

RUNT OF LITTER

Cris and I have an ongoing love affair – with Southeast Asia.

In 1970, I served in a platoon in the 101st Airborne Division that secured downed helicopters. I can't really say the love affair started then. About 10 years ago Cris and I took our first trip together to Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. After that, every year was someplace different and exotic: Thailand, Laos, Bali, Vietnam, Cambodia...

Cambodia is special. It's kind of the runt of the litter. While most of the other nations of Southeast Asia are forging ahead, Cambodia lags.

It's a beautiful country with special people and a tortured history.

A couple years ago we visited a pepper farm – they call them plantations but we are not talking "Gone With the Wind" – in the Kampot province of southwest Cambodia. Mostly small, poor, family-run operations, the farmers work in sweltering humidity to produce their crops

The visit was humbling. It's hard not to be touched when a pepper farmer's wife offers you a bowl of soup cooked over the gas produced from a mixture of cow dung and water.

Back in Orange County, while Cris was perched on the sofa recovering, we came up with an idea: sell Kampot pepper in the U.S. We loved the pepper and wanted to do something – even something small – for the people of Cambodia. Things kind of snowballed.

We hatched the idea with Cris more or less bedridden and me off from work for almost two months. During that time I supposed our priorities changed as well. Things that seemed important before the accident suddenly became less so.

I'll give it to you straight: We had no idea what we were doing. I know news and Cris knows design.

But, amazingly, things started to come together. Hours of planning and research and countless phone calls and e-mails started to pay off.

I even sent a couple of e-mails to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen. Now, Hun Sen may have been too busy to respond, but a lot of really important (and smart) people did.

17 HOURS TO CAMBODIA

So, in November, with Cris getting around better, I left for Cambodia. Physically she wasn't up to the trip, and Cambodia is not the place to be if you might need medical attention. The 17-hour flight would have been too much.

The basic goal: to secure a steady supply of pepper from an out-of-the-way corner of Cambodia and arrange for former prostitutes to make the packaging.

Pepper wasn't my only mission while I was in Cambodia.

We had purchased school supplies, backpacks and small toys at the 99 Cent store in Santa Ana to deliver to the children in a village that harvests sea salt near Kep on Cambodia's west coast. These are kids who have probably never used a tooth brush and don't attend school. I brought them photos from our last visit.

In my job I come in contact with a lot of tragedy and pain. I don't let it get to me. But when I left that village, I had tears in my eyes.

The next stop was a rural health center near the pepper farms.

Cris had been saving unused bandages and other medical supplies from the home-health nurses at St. Joseph's and the orthopedic clinic at UCI Medical Center.

I delivered them on a Sunday. The doctor in Kampong Trach made a special trip in on his motorbike. He showed me around his clinic as chickens roamed the yard and patients sat outside on wooden platforms.

Dr. Peou Sary does what he can with the supplies he has. "This is a poor hospital," he explains. "The hospitals in the city have all the money and get medical supplies."

He gave me his phone number. He doesn't have e-mail.

Over the next few days I will tell our story. There will be no ending.

For close to 40 years in the news business I have tried to remove myself from stories. I have never written in the "first person" before.

But this is different. It seems like a good time to start.