Jungle healing

>> Cambodia Calling recounts the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières Canada’s year
in the backwoods of Southeast Asia

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

It wasn’t long after the Killing Fields nightmare of Cambodia’s civil war had ended that Richard Heinzl found himself bouncing along a pot-holed road taking him north from Phnom Penh to a small town near the Thai border with a Dutchman named Rob. It was July 1991, and as a young Canadian doctor with a bad case of wanderlust and a passion for international health, Heinzl had spent much of the previous several years wrangling with the French administrators of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the international health services organization, about setting up a Canadian chapter.

A series of one-step-forward-two-steps-back bureaucratic manoeuvring eventually resulted in success, and Heinzl found himself in the front seat of a Land Cruiser gazing at the flooded rice paddies of northern Cambodia on his way to a year in Sisophon, one of the many “enormously beautiful and exquisitely interesting” destinations he’d see during his career. His new book, Cambodia Calling: A Memoir From the Front Lines of Humanitarian Aid, is a lively, honest and often funny account of his year in Cambodia, with its ups and downs, sickness and work, drunken revelries with minor officialdom and the sometimes sour feeling of being a perpetual “bar rang”—foreigner—in an area that hasn’t seen outsiders in decades.

“I wanted to tell my own story,” says Heinzl, over the phone from Dominica. “This isn’t any kind of polemic, and it isn’t meant as a recruitment tool.”

If Heinzl does have a fondness for his co-workers, both Western and Cambodian, there is ambivalence towards his superiors. He writes about political fights over control, the reluctance of the French to extend the organization to North America and some irksome strangers who wander in and out of Sisophon. The food is repetitive, the sanitation poor, the heat unbearable. And being close to the low-intensity fighting between government and the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, he can hear, if not see, the war.

“I wanted to show that I’m human,” he says. “Really, what I wanted to show is what it was like, that it was like me—imperfect, full of foibles, but that I had to get through it somehow.” The passage where he struggles with shigella, a food-borne bacterial illness, is clearly and starkly written, even if he does spare us the vivid details of vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps.

And while the war often remains remote in the book—the distant rumble of artillery, the occasional bang of a landmine, usually exploded by livestock, the odd encounter with a soldier or the through-traffic of an armoured platoon—the profound psychological damage the mad regime of Pol Pot inflicted upon a people to whom laughter is as natural as breathing is inescapable. The odd habit many Cambodians have of laughing while they describe the deaths of their parents, siblings and friends is jarring.

At 45, Heinzl now lives in Oakville, Ontario, with his wife and two sons, but still continues his career in international medicine, as well as his love of travel (“I’m looking at health opportunities and possibilities,” he says of his time in Dominica. “I’m totally allergic to all-you-can-eat resorts”), and says he has achieved a certain distance from the young doctor he was in Cambodia.

“I’ve come to a natural point in my life where the experience has been distilled enough to write about,” he says. “The book was written from the viewpoint of my mid-20s. Hopefully I’ve mellowed.”