Page 264 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

THE WHY OF WORK

torture. The oft-repeated phrase from the government to
the populace was “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy
you is no loss.”
Teeda Butt Mam and her family were among those evac-
uated from the city and sent to the rice fields to eke out a
meager existence. Despite being well-educated profession-
als, they survived by working hard, adapting skillfully, and
carefully hiding their background. As they became more
aware of the relentlessness of their oppressors and the impos-
sibility of escape, however, Teeda became more and more
despondent. Though suicide meant sure punishment to
surviving family members, when Teeda’s friend was raped
brutally and repeatedly until she died, Teeda began plot-
ting her own death. Life had lost all meaning, and she felt
dead inside. The months and years of horror and exhaustion
seemed impossible to endure any longer, even for the sake of
her mother and siblings. But then the story takes an unusual
turn. Teeda states:

Then, unexpectedly, on my way to the rice fields one morning, I
glanced up, just as the sun rose over the paddies. The sheer beauty
of heavy ripening rice silhouetted against the glorious orange sky took
my breath away. A massive, plodding buffalo moved across the scene,
giving a sense of the continuity of life from former times to now—an
instant lesson in patience and perseverance. All nature affirmed that
some things were beyond Angka Loeu’s [the Khmer Rouge’s] power to
control. Neither sunrise nor storm, neither cloud nor wind nor bamboo,
nor I, would be controlled by Angka. Angka Leou was not omnipotent.
I felt—for the first time in months—that life might still hold some-
thing worthwhile. 4

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