The wailing siren of a motorcade cut the air near the Sunway Hotel last week every time the Lowell delegation emerged from their rooms to see the city.
From Hun Sen’s private quarters at the Council of Ministers to the offices of ministers Princess Bopha Devi and Tol Lah, the delegation’s itinerary was the stuff of world leaders.
Strange then that the people of Lowell, a city in the US state of Massachusetts, come not from a major metropolis but from a smallish town that many people have never heard of.
Home to the second largest population of Cambodians in the US, Lowell is the kind of place where leaders are not feted.
Here in Phnom Penh last week, it was a different story.
“The lunches are phenomenal,” said one of the delegation’s members, Garrett Thurston. “We just drive up to places and they rush over and set stuff up for us.”
The perks visited on the 21-member delegation—which included killing fields survivor Rithy Uong, now a city councilor in Lowell—included private audiences with Hun Sen, who left a 50th anniversary celebration of the CPP to spend more than an hour with the group.
Senate President Chea Sim and Phnom Penh Governor Chea Sophara met with the group as well.
The weeklong stay concluded Sunday with a City Hall signing ceremony to make Lowell the sister city of Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and the province of Pursat.
The highest-ranking official in the Lowell delegation, TJ McCarthy, the assistant city manager, said he was overwhelmed by the attention he received on his first official visit to Cambodia.
“It’s been surreal,” he said, before motorcading off to meet with the vice governor of Phnom Penh. “It’s been like this the whole way. No one expected it.”
The Cambodian government has struggled with its relationship with Cambodians overseas: it was a Cambodian-American group from Long Beach, in the US state of California, that launched the failed raid on government buildings last November in a bid to topple the Hun Sen government.
The Prime Minister has also had to rebuild his tattered country without the benefit of aid dollars from the US. The US Congress banned all financial and technical assistance to Cambodia after the 1997 factional fighting as a show of disapproval for the seizure of power that placed Hun Sen at the head of the national government.
The Lowell delegates suspected that both cultural and financial reasons played a role in their warm welcome in Phnom Penh.
“For me the Cambodian government through this reception is making a sincere effort to reach the Cambodian community in Lowell,” said Patrick C McCrary, the superintendent of the Lowell National Historical Park. “Not just to reach the people on the delegation to make a big financial catch, but to reach to the people in Lowell and say ‘Good for you, we still want to keep you a part of us.’”
The trip was funded by the US National Park Service—it picked up the airfare for the city and elected officials—because the park service has begun planning a museum in Lowell that would commemorate genocides around the world, with a focus on Cambodia, McCrary explained.
The museum, not yet named or fully funded, would build on efforts to create harmony in the racially mixed city, where Irish and Hispanic residents live side-by-side with their Cambodian neighbors.
That was also a goal of the delegation’s stay last week.
Many of the Lowell delegates had never been to Cambodia, including the headmaster of the city’s high school, where half of the 3,000 students are Cambodian.
“It was very dramatic for me at one point to hear that the education system had been shut down for five years [during the Khmer Rouge era], said William Samaras, the headmaster of Lowell High School.
“I don’t understand how they can rebuild. It’s not just bricks and mortar. You have to rebuild the mind,” he said.
Samaras said he was touched by the reception he received at a school in Pursat province, where the group traveled last Friday. Students there lined up to meet him, showering him with smiles and kind words, he said.
Lowell school officials hope to establish a summer exchange program someday that would send Lowell students to Pursat, and students in Pursat to Lowell.
Other future collaborations that were discussed last week include a faculty exchange between the University of Massachusetts in Lowell and the National Institute of Management in Phnom Penh. The Cambodian school needs help to create a PhD program, and perhaps faculty from Massachusetts could be of service, said Mark Cote, a delegation member and a professor of sociology at the school.
“I think it’s long overdue for Lowell to take this step,” he said. “We’ve had Cambodian folks in the city since 1976 and 1977.”
Cote was on his second trip to Cambodia. He came here last year to help a friend make an adoption. He planned to visit the adopted baby’s home village this week with photos of the child growing up in the US.
Someday, more non-Cambodian people in Lowell may be like police officer John Boustelis, who married a Cambodian woman and can speak Khmer.
Last week’s trip, in which he represented the Lowell police department, was his seventh to Cambodia, he said. His knowledge of Cambodia and Cambodian culture have helped his work in untold ways.
In his office he hung a photograph from a past trip that shows him standing in front of Angkor Wat.
Boustelis said he often brings troubled Cambodian youth into his office, where they see the picture. Agitated when they first meet him, their mood changes when they realize what he has done.
“You can just see their face change,” he said. “They ask, ‘You’ve been to Angkor Wat?’”
