The Nightmares

Two years after coming to the United States, Ms. Ngo herself began to have problems. Night after night, she was awakened by nightmares — scenes of horror that returned whenever she closed her eyes. She would awake in terror, not knowing whether she was in Cambodia or the United States. She suffered in silence for over a year, without realizing what was happening. Finally, she confided in her supervisor at work, who referred her to therapy. There, she was diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although at first she didn't feel they were helping her — "They didn't even know about Cambodia at all," she recalls — Ms. Ngo continued to visit her therapists for over a year. The chance to tell her story, and have someone listen, kept her coming back. Even more therapeutic, she feels, were her contacts with friends she'd made on her job, a doctor and a nurse practitioner whose support and companionship proved crucial in her lowest moments. They listened, but more importantly, they made her get out of the house, go to the park, take the bus, go to the beach, or go hiking with them in the mountains.

After a while, Ms. Ngo felt herself capable of taking camping trips on her own. On one these jaunts, Ms. Ngo spent a particularly painful time alone in a cabin in the woods. "I was so depressed, I couldn't do anything," she remembers. "But I'd been trained as a fashion designer, remember. And there was this baby quilt I was making for my sister's grandchild, and it needed to be finished, so I sewed and sewed, and it felt good. I asked my friends if there was anything magical about sewing quilts, and they told me the American Pioneer women did it to help themselves through depression. And then I thought, maybe I can try that with the Cambodian women?." It was the beginning of Ly-Sieng Ngo's most ambitious project yet — a quilting circle. "The next week, I got permission from my manager to bring the women in to sew. The first week, I brought six women, and they were fighting to tell their stories. When they'd come to the clinic, they never shared one word. I thought my experience quite bad, but their stories were way more than what I could even imagine!"

Within a year, the group had grown to 46 women. Ms. Ngo was the only facilitator. But the results soon proved to be dramatic — the women were using health facilities much less often, and some no longer required anti-depression medication. The women were sharing stories, food, friendship; they were healing each other's psychological wounds, and re-awakening each other's interest in life. Ly-Sieng could feel herself healing as well.