Chanel Perreault
I pressed the damp soil around the roots of the young tamarind tree. Milky beads of sunscreen-laced sweat dripped onto the little mound I had made. I was at Leng Dei, a community garden a few kilometers from downtown Phnom Penh. With its shady breadfruit trees, its wall of banana plants, and its carpet of squash tendrils, the garden is an oasis of peace in the bustling city. For the first time since coming to Cambodia, I feel almost at home.
Just twenty-four hours before, I had been sitting in a sterile white courtroom. On the outside, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court is a handsome fusion of Khmer and French colonial architecture, with a fresh coat of daffodil-yellow paint and a pair of bright red Buddhas flanking the entrance. Inside, however, it is practically barren: white fluorescent lights gleam off white tiles and reflect onto white walls. The effect is so blinding that you have to squint to see your notes. The only spot of colour to absorb all this light is the red-and-gold painting of a stylized Khmer king meeting with his councillors — the symbol of justice.
I was there to observe the trial of a young activist who had spent nearly two years in pre-trial detention. When he entered the room, clad in orange and shackled at the wrists, I was struck by the youthfulness of his face — the high curve of his cheekbones, the whisper of facial hair beneath his chin, the brightness of his eyes. As soon as he saw our team’s defense lawyer, he performed sampeah, the traditional greeting, bowing and touching his fingers lightly to his nose to show deep respect for a trusted elder. When he straightened, he was wearing a warm smile.
This young man had spent his 23rd and 24th birthdays inside a cell. And yet he smiled.
During the two years he was in prison, I worked on a farm. I spent my days indulging in clean air and wide open skies, surrounded by zucchini leaves and plumes of asparagus. There was joy in that work, but also a lot of unpredictability. I had seen fields of beets rot beneath floodwaters, watched Colorado beetles cut down whole hectares of potatoes, and cried after seven tonnes of carrots were lost to a refrigerator truck meltdown. My counterparts on the farm weathered the challenges with an implacable calm, but my youthful impatience prevented me from doing the same. It was a day-to-day struggle, full of more uncertainty than I could stand.
I saw the law as a refuge from that — a place where I could rely on precedent, contribute to “structural” change, have a “systemic” impact, lay a foundation more solid than my sodden fields.
Now, sweating in a garden half the world away, I ruminated on the trial I witnessed the day before — the first trial I had, in fact, ever seen. As I recalled how little time the judge had spent on our client’s case before dismissing him, I felt the same stirrings of frustration that had overtaken me when I saw the sky reflected in my flooded fields. Suddenly, I recalled what one of the lawyers on our team had said when I asked her about how she manages to keep hope alive through it all. Laughing, she told me, “Sometimes, I tell myself that I have to give blood or something because I feel useless.” Pushing my shovel into the ground, I had a sense of what she meant.
And then I remember what else she had said. My question, she explained, was actually backwards. Often, it is the outspoken defenders behind bars that keep her hope alive — not the other way around. Her job, she explained, was to ensure that they continued to spread that hope, that they had a platform and a voice beyond their cells, that their struggle is neither forgotten nor effaced.
In that way, there is a striking parallel between agriculture and human rights work. Both require vigilance, strategy, and adaptability. Both involve day-to-day perseverance that goes almost entirely unseen. Both are grueling, fraught with risk, plagued by uncertainty.
Yet it is impossible to make change without them. Change is a thing that is cultivated; it does not grow all at once. A better future must be tended, slowly over time. Like farming, there is only so much we can control. But we can plant good seeds. We can water them. We can continue on despite the storms, come what may, because there is simply no other way.