The Very First Post - from June 18, 2012

Keeping a blog during my time away from the US was the first thing I thought about, and the last thing I wanted to do.  It's not that I didn't want to keep in touch with everyone back home and write about my experience.  It's that I knew it was going to take an effort to document my experience and write it out in a way that's entertaining, witty, but also informative.  I wasn't sure I was up for the task.  But experience like this is once in a lifetime and it would help me to keep track of how much I will learn and grow in the next two months.  

For those of you whom I have not had the chance to talk, I will be interning at the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to do some research on the ongoing Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). ECCC is a hybrid court staffed by both Cambodian and international judges that investigates and tries those who were the most responsible for the mass atrocities that took place under the Pol Pot regime during 1975-79.  Rule of Law development has always been my interest and this is my first experience doing research in the country that is doing that very work.   Since I received permission from OSJI to do my internship there in January, I haven’t really been able to contain my excitement. I will definitely continue writing more about the ECCC as I start my internship there on June 24, so stay tuned.

Lastly, here is a quick special thanks to Professor Brian Kritz for thinking of the creative name for this blog, Phnom Penh Pals!  I was so excited when he came up with this name, I went straight home and created this blog (thinking that someone will take the name as soon as I wanted it).  I know that this name itself is enough to make the blog fun to read :)  One glitch though was that I didn’t really do a “preemption check” for the name – a shame to my law school education – and I soon found out that there is another blog called Phnom Penh Pal.  But it’s okay; this gives me more motivation to work extra hard to make this blog as good as, but different from, theirs!