We Shared the Peeled Orange: The Letters of Dr. Louis Braile

After Pol Pot's reign of genocide in Cambodia and the invasion of the Vietnamese in the 1970s, many Cambodians fled to Thailand with little more than the clothes on their backs. Moved by their plight (and encouraged by his daughter, a nurse), Braile left his home and Washington state practice to work as a missionary doctor in Cambodian refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border from 1983-1991. Braile's letters home to his wife, collected here, provide day-to-day snapshots of his life, showing what it meant to be a Western doctor confronting the atrocities of human conflict as well as rejoicing in the courage and hope of the Cambodian people. The detailed, daily records are not uniformly fascinating-changes in diet and problems with transportation being less interesting than, say, undergoing dental surgery ""in the land of mai pen rai never mind""-but Braile has a writer's eye for description, whether he's relating the terrible injuries of a land mine victim or the surprise of a lizard popping out of the toaster.