Our In-Country Coordinator, Pheaktra Phouen, has been working closely with our peer leaders across Cambodia to collect powerful personal narratives from communities throughout the country. Since January 2025, thanks to his leadership and tireless efforts, weve received 400+ high quality and life-impacting interviews from Cambodia.

Here are some heartfelt reflections from Pheaktra on the project:

Most recently, Pheaktra made a trip to Kampong Cham province, where he recruited 14 new peer leaders who are now actively conducting interviews in their communities. Were excited to continue building on this momentum and look forward to even more stories being shared and preserved in the months ahead.

Were incredibly grateful for Pheaktras leadership and everything he does to support this important work in Cambodia.

Pheaktra Phouen   

Were thrilled to welcome Dr. Timothy Davis as the new Project Director for the Cambodian Oral History Project. He succeeds Dr. Dana Bourgerie, the projects founder, who will continue to offer support and insight in his new role as Project Director Emeritus given his recent retirement. With Dr. Davis now heading the project, we look forward to the continued growth and impact of the project under his leadership!

Dr. Davis began his journey of exploring Chinese language and culture after serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Taiwan in 1990. Since then, his career has blended scholarship, teaching, and librarianshipmaking him exceptionally well-suited to lead the Cambodian Oral History Project into its next chapter.

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of April 17th, 1975, the beginning of the Khmer Rouge Genocide. Since visiting the killing fields at age 14, hearing stories during my missionary service, and now coming to the close of my time on this project, I am still struck by the horror that took place in that 4 year period. The experiences that the interviewees shared during my time as a project assistant have touched me in a profound way. I wept with them in their retellings and laughed with them as they shared funny stories about their childhood. These accounts are invaluable to their posterity and incredibly powerful for those who have the opportunity to hear or read their story on the COHP website. I feel privileged to have been able to learn from many interviewees firsthand.

Next week, I will be graduating with a BFA in Illustration here at BYU. These interviewees and their stories have inspired my illustrative work in multiple ways. I created this piece, titled Shadows of Survival, on 18 by 24 inch toned paper with black and white charcoal. It features one of our interviewees in Cambodia, Ouy Roety. Ouy Roety was born January 10th, 1969, in Kampong Speu as the eighth of ten children. In his interview he describes what conditions were like for him during the Khmer Rouge, including losing close relatives, and how his experience has affected him to the present.

This drawing shows a portrait of Ouy Roety overlaid with a scene from the Khmer Rouge period. I intentionally included figures as shadows over the portrait to represent his lost family members, with the main figure representing Roety as a young boy. Despite the difficulties of the past, I am in awe of the resilience and perseverance shown by these Khmer Rouge survivors and their hopeful outlook on life. In the portrait, Ouy Roety smiles in spite of his hardships. His past is a part of him, but he has overcome those shadows and recorded his story for future generations.

Working on this project with Dr. Bourgerie and the rest of the COHP team has felt like a beautiful extension of my mission and an incredible opportunity to continue serving the people and culture Ive loved all my life. This has meant so much more to me than just a project, a student job, or a learning experience. It's been the most important, the most impactful, and the most sacred thing I've done at BYU. Truly, this project has changed my life and blessed the lives of countless others.

Hannah Price

Ethan Arkell

Ethan Arkell, a Music Composition major from Gilbert, Arizona shared these thoughts about working for the project:

Devon Crane

Brittin Roth

Sister Nen's mother's interview can be found here:

When I walked in the door for my first day on the job at Sonoma Valley Hospital in 1988, the last thing on my mind was that, on that day, I would meet and start a life-enriching friendship with one of my co-workers.

Savanna is one of the most amazing and strongest people I have ever met. She was born in Cambodia in 1962 and was sponsored to come to the United States with her family when she was nineteen, having miraculously survived the Cambodian Civil War waged and won by the Khmer Rouge, which resulted in Pol Pots leadership that continued for nearly four years.

Outside of work, we liked to take long walks together, and she shared many graphic details about growing up in Cambodia. My mind couldnt comprehend the horrific details, and I wanted to believe she was making them up, but I knew that everything she was telling me was true. She kept saying that one day she wanted to write a book about her life Thirty years later we sat down to write it together.

But why would she want to write about memories that the mind wants to bury as deeply as possible? One of the main reasons she wrote it was for her two daughters. Life experiences contribute in a major way to making people who they are, and she wanted her daughters to understand her better. She didnt want them to forget their roots or their relatives. She wanted them to help keep Cambodian culture alive here in this country, and for them to feel proud of their heritage. As a survivor, she also felt an obligation to document her story in the hopes that the nearly three million people who needlessly lost their livesas a result of mass killings, starvation, strenuous working conditions, and poor medical carewould be remembered.

Savannas account starts with her earliest childhood memories and progresses through the war, continuing to follow her as she and her family finally escape to Thailand and are ultimately able to resettle and assimilate in the United States.

As I have read recently posted interviews, I have been in awe of the resilience demonstrated in the stories. The narratives are often painful and harrowing but also inspiring. Many are epic stories of survival and of unimaginable heartbreak.

Samath Ans path spans from his birth in the remote Oddar Meanchey Province (adjacent to Thailand in Northern Cambodia) to his retirement as a skilled machinist in the Seattle-Tacomas aerospace industry. Along the way, he studied in a Cambodia college, married four times, served in Lon Nols military, fought the Khmer Rouge, escaped genocide, and found faith in God.

Growing up simply but almost idyllically on his village farm, he describes it thus:

But as with millions of Cambodians of his generation, peace was shattered by war, by the horrors of the mass starvation, and by the atrocities wrought by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. He fled his village, narrowly escaping death as Khmer Rouge soldiers executed most of the residents. He chillingly recounts:

Samath An required all his wits in a day-to-day struggle to survive. Feigning ignorance, he buried deep his education while using his military expertise to outmaneuver his Khmer Rouge tormentors:

In a harrowing week-long foot journey to Thailand, he subsisted on leaves of the trees in which he slept, as he strapped  himself to the branches by vines. He sometimes walked backwards over freshly swept dirt roads to confound his soldier-pursuers along the way.

Finally making it across the bordernear starvationhe gorged on watermelon and was taken at gunpoint by a farmer whose field he had invaded. He was turned over to local authorities and detained as a suspected Khmer Rouge spy. As a result he was held in a dark detention cell for three months before being released to a refugee camp at the intervention of the American embassy, which had record of previous work with the U.S. military. After a stay in the Philippines, he found his way to rural Iowa to join the construction team of his sponsor, and finally landed in Tacoma, Washington. Samath Ans journey is as unlikely as it is remarkable.

But the project has documented other of these epic life journeyseach, it seems, would make compelling cinema. Nike Chheang Chabs starving father sold him into servitude to a Thai merchant for a bag of rice. He escaped to a refugee camp, and was later sponsored by an American family in Long Beach, California. Rising from poverty and attaining some education, he found work in the county sheriffs office, established a family, and became a church leader. Still, he was not bitter, but wondered why he had found stability and happinessunlike the family who had sold him.

Nikes quest to understand his fate set in motion a miraculous series of events that led to a reunion on a rainy night at the Cambodia-Thai border with the father who gave him up to servitude. Not only does he hold no malice toward his family but has returnedlike Joseph of Israelto help them as a result of his relative prosperity.

These are stories of survivors who, beyond odds, endured their journeysstep-by-stepwith heartbreak and suffering. They faced painful choices and bear scars from their ordeals.

As a young girl early in the Pol Pot era, Sok Hen survived by crawling from village to village, hiding in holes to avoid gunfire and falling bombs. Faced with an awful choice of fleeing separately or risking life in her village, her father chose to stay together, which cost him his life. The family faced unthinkable choices daily. She recalls:

These heroic stories inspire partly because they are about ordinary people doing extraordinary things in unimaginable circumstances. Often they were confronted with terrible moral quandaries and did not escape unscathed or unscarredthe pain endures. Many whom we interview only now are ready to share the stories of their remarkable journeys.

We are thrilled to announce the addition of a new life story to our project! This compelling account chronicles the life history of Sok Tann, a Cambodian refugee who settled in Utah after fleeing the Khmer Rouge. Sok Tanns life history is a unique type of story for our project, as it was meticulously penned by his friend Randolph Taylor, rather than being done orally like many of our other interviews. Even so, Sok Tanns interview offers a poignant glimpse into life in Cambodia during the upheaval that marked the Lon Nol and Khmer Rouge era, and recounts his harrowing escape from Cambodia to America in the aftermath of Pol Pots regime.

Despite the many difficulties Sok Tann articulately describes, this narrative encapsulates the quintessential immigrant tale, highlighting his relentless pursuit of freedom after surviving the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. While reflecting on the process of compiling this life history, Sok Tanns friend Randolph Taylor shared:

We invite you to take some time and delve into Sok's worlda world defined by perseverance, courage, eventual triumph, and the unwavering belief in a brighter tomorrow. You can read Sok Tanns life story here: Sok Tann's Life Story

The Cambodian Oral History Project recently published its 50th translation, which marks an important milestone for the project. Although COHP's main focus has been collecting and preserving the oral histories of Cambodians in their homeland and heritage communities in the United States, the last couple of years have witnessed an unprecedented acceleration in translating and sharing these special stories with our English-speaking project supporters. As of December 2023, the project has now officially published 50 translations (20 of which were completed this year alone) and is looking forward to the publication of nearly 20 more in the next couple of months.

While this 50th translation has helped quantify the progress of the project, we also wanted to highlight it here because of how stunning this interview truly is. This storyshared by interviewee Kean Hunchronicles an incredible account of risking her life over and over to keep her family members together and finding creative ways to survive everyday life during the Pol Pot regime. Her story comes to a climax when she describes watching her mother being taken away to be executed at the same moment the Vietnamese were invading her village to liberate the residents from the Khmer Rouge. In a fast-paced chase scene, she was able to rescue her mother and escape with her familythis time free from the clutches of the oppressive Khmer Rouge. She recalls her vivid feelings by saying:

This interview stands out as one of the most compelling we've ever published since the inception of COHP's translation efforts, and it perfectly articulates the reason we collect these storiesso that people everywhere can understand and appreciate the unwavering resilience and beauty encapsulated in the life stories that have been shared with each of us. We hope that you will take the time to read Kean Hun's complete story, accessible through her interviewee page here: Kean Hun's Interview

We wanted to express gratitude to all of our translation team members, namely Ethan Arkell, Devon Crane, and Thomas Barrett, as well as our many volunteer translators who have made this and other fantastic stories available to everyone!  We couldn't have done this without your diligent efforts.

We also want to acknowledge the generous, ongoing funding from Brigham Young University's College of Humanities for translation and for general support.