Word: cambodians
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They call it the heartland, a term with appropriate connotations. When the Vietnamese boat people came to the U.S. last spring, the state of Iowa actively sought 1,500 for resettlement. When Governor Robert Ray toured Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand and returned with tales of starving children, offers of aid from lowans flooded the statehouse, the Des Moines Register and churches. The interest was so great that just before Thanksgiving the Governor announced a program called Iowa Shares, an acronym for Iowa Sends Help to Aid Refugees and End Starvation...
...donations," says Ken Quinn, an assistant to Ray. "But we wanted all of the people of the state involved." In just a month, lowans contributed $250,000. On Christmas Eve a ten-truck convoy loaded with rice, salted fish, soybeans, sugar and medical supplies left Bangkok for the Thai-Cambodian border. On Christmas Day, William Simbro, a reporter for the Des Moines Register, met in a jungle clearing with representatives from Sok Sann, a refugee settlement just inside Cambodia, and presented them with some surgical instruments. The rest of the supplies reached Sok Sann last week...
Department officials, who asked not to be identified, confirmed reports that the U.N. agency plans to discontinue shipments until Cambodian authorities arrange to distribute food already in warehouses in Phnom Penh and Kampong...
...seems that not enough Cambodians are capable of driving trucks to carry the food into the countryside, department spokesmen said, adding that Cambodian authorities should allow employees of international relief agencies operating in the country to travel freely to distribute food...
Because Labbe did not visit the war-torn regions of Cambodia, he saw no actual starvation during his tour, though he says that people are eating "very bad-ly." The Cambodians working for the new regime are being paid in rice and corn. Still, Cambodian refugees in Thailand report that there are hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the outskirts of every Cambodian city because the Vietnamese have forbidden them to return home for fear of encouraging un rest. These families are threatened with starvation, as are the 600,000 refugees along the Thai border...