CAMBODIA: A Devastating Trip

At last, a genuine international refugee relief effort is under way

"It's like nothing I've ever seen. It's overwhelming, emotionally overwhelming." So said Rosalynn Carter last week in Thailand, where she had gone to see for herself what she called "one of the great moral issues of our time," the agony of the refugees spilling out of Cambodia and the other Indochinese countries. She plunged into camps housing thousands of sick and dying people, cradled undernourished infants in her arms and tried to feed them, kneeled before rows of hunger-weakened human castoffs lying on the ground. Toward the end of her three-day tour, she conceded that the experience was "devastating." It was very difficult for her, she said, "as a wife, as a mother and as a human being."

The First Lady was acting as a stand-in for President Carter, who had considered making the journey himself. Though her trip was labeled an "informal fact-finding" mission, it took on some of the appearances of a state visit. She was greeted at Bangkok airport by Thailand's Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, Premier Kriangsak Chomanan, and a slew of Cabinet ministers. Responding to a welcoming speech by the Premier, she said that Americans were "filled with alarm" over the thought "that the Cambodian people are facing extinction as a result of war and famine." The next day, at high tea with the royal family at their palace in northeastern Thailand, she handed Queen Sirikit a check for $100,000 to help pay for medical supplies.

For all the red-carpet treatment, the President's wife spent the bulk of her visit touring a series of relief centers devoted to the three different kinds of refugees created by Indochina's overlapping, unending wars: Cambodians, Laotians and the primarily Vietnamese "boat people." Her first stop was Sakaew, a center housing Cambodians 40 miles from the border. Rosalynn spent two hours at the camp, where more than 35,000 refugees were packed in makeshift lean-tos made of cloth, woven fiber and plastic sheeting spread out over 33 acres of clay like soil. During a briefing in a tent, she was told that nearly 1,000 of the refugees were seriously ill and that upwards of 400 people had died there since the camp had been opened just two weeks before.

Walking through the area, reported TIME Correspondent Christopher Ogden, "Mrs. Carter stopped first in a patched blue-and-white plastic tent full of small children, who were lined up sitting on straw mats in three neat rows. They were 'unaccompanied minors,' the official euphemism for orphans, and they were eerily silent, showing neither tears nor smiles. The First Lady bent over and whispered to a girl of about six, but the child stared back uncomprehendingly. When she left the tent, waving, only one child responded with the traditional Indochinese Wai greeting, which involves holding the hands together in a praying position under the chin.