On a personal level, it was Rosalynn Carter’s 1979 trip to Thailand that was among the hardest things she’d ever been faced with. When The New York Times covered her trip, they quoted her as saying, “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” and when she wrote about it in her memoir, “First Lady from Plains,” she shared how devastating it had been.
Cambodians fled Pol Pot ahead of violence and starvation, and she said that everyone in the camp was dying, mourning, or both. She wrote of walking through the camp and seeing scores of people who couldn’t even acknowledge their surroundings: “All were ill and in various stages of starvation — some all bones and no flesh, others with stomachs swollen as though to burst and with cracked feet. All had malaria, dysentery, or tuberculosis, and were retching, feverish, silent.”
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The worst, she said, was the tent that had been set up for the hundreds of children “with emaciated bodies and limbs so thin and fragile, and they were eerily quiet. There [was] not even any crying, only an occasional whimper.” She shared that she had picked up a little girl, cradling her in her arms and wondering what the future held for her. Tearing up, she put the girl down and continued on her way, but learned that the child’s future was very short indeed: She died before Carter left the camp that day.
