Ling was a fifth-year medical student in Cambodia at the start of the four-year genocide in Cambodia.

Along with her family, Ling was forced to live in war camps, make compost from human feces and witness her husband being taken away. After the genocide, which left only 40 doctors in Cambodia, Ling found the strength to go back to medical school.

Ling chose to remain in Cambodia, seeing how much her country needed doctors. She currently is paid $20 a month by the government.

On Friday at the Campus Life Building, Suite 110, Carol Wagner, a freelance author and human rights activist, presented the inspiring story of Ling and other ordinary Cambodians who overcame their personal losses to rebuild the country.

Wagner, brought to NIU by the Center for Southeast Asian studies and the Graduate Students Colloquium, spoke about human rights in Cambodia.

Wagner has been to Cambodia four times in 10 years and was a United Nations observer during the past elections in Cambodia. Her book, “Soul Survivors,” features stories and pictures of 16 individuals who survived the struggle for existence in Cambodia’s four-year genocide.

On her trip to Cambodia in 1991, Wagner said she saw vacant looks on the faces of the adults who were still experiencing post traumatic stress, 12 years after the genocide.

“I think that Americans were partially responsible for setting the stage for genocide,” Wagner said. “It is important to put a human face on history and see how our foreign policy affected people.”

Wagner briefed the audience on Cambodia’s unstable history and presented a few vignettes from her book, accompanied by a slide show.

Starting in 1969, the United States bombed Cambodia illegally for four years, dropping more bombs than had been dropped in World War II, Wagner said.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge, a communist extremist group, perpetrated a four-year genocide as an opposition to U.S. bombing.

The United States supported the civil war that ensued after the toppling of the Khmer regime and made sure U.N. humanitarian aid was blocked in this period.

The Khmer rule left only 40 doctors, no psychiatrists and 2,000 out of 67,000 monks in Cambodia.

Wagner’s stories about ordinary workers like silk weavers, dancers and farmers who had continued to fight the struggle for existence after the genocide showed the strength of the human spirit.

Slides of the magnificent Angkor Wat temple reflected on a lake amidst Cambodia’s temperate greenery contrasted pictures of little children selling fruits and vegetables in the market-place or trying to gather their dinner from the irrigation canals.

Wagner said many Cambodians are deprived an education because they have to work to earn their living and half of those who go to school drop out by sixth grade.

“I come from Indonesia, which has similar problems, so I think there is some kind of pattern with authoritarian regimes,” said Dini Rahim, a graduate student in political science who found the lecture informative.

Wagner is planning to lead an educational study tour to Cambodia and can be e-mailed at [email protected] DeVries photo

Carol Wagner, author of “Soul Survivors,” speaks at the Campus Life Building on Friday morning about Cambodia and the hardships that the country and its people endured. Pictured in the background is a high school that was converted into a torture center.