Work With Cambodian Refugees
After his second divorce in 1976, Pond felt a desire to start over and decided in 1979 to move to Thailand, where his mother, Josephine Stanton, wife of Edwin F. Stanton, the first United States Ambassador to Thailand after World War II, was living at the time. Pond wanted to establish an "indigenous Peace Corps" in Thailand and met with members of the Thai Royal Family. But the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia after the end of the Pol Pot regime caught his attention, and he went immediately to volunteer at Sa Kaeo Refugee Camp on the Thai-Cambodian border. "It was a suffering I had not known," Pond later recalled, "and I felt compelled to be a part of it. I had just never seen such a broken people as the Cambodian people. There was so much devastation, so much incredible sadness that I was crying and very shaken."
In June 1980 the Thai Government decided to forcibly repatriate thousands of refugees. Pond and the Preah Maha Ghosananda organized a protest against the forced repatriation of refugees from Sa Kaeo and Pond was imprisoned "in a shack filled with human excrement" for several days. When Queen Sirikit heard about how Pond had been mistreated by Thai soldiers, she ordered his release and made amends by offering him three wishes. Pond selected three Cambodian orphans, including the musician Arn Chorn-Pond, to take back to the US. After his release Peter asked the United Nations for permission to begin a foster care program in the US for Khmer orphans, but was refused because it was felt that it was more appropriate for the children to return to Cambodia.
In all, he adopted 16 Cambodian children, mostly orphans, including the musician Arn Chorn-Pond and Rhode Island's first Cambodian physician, Dr. Soneath Pond. He also worked with Thai street children in the Patpong section of Bangkok and provided food for detainees at the Suan Phlu Immigration Detention Center. In 1983 he was invited by Rosalynn Carter to join the White House's National Cambodian Crisis Committee, created in 1980 as a clearing house for donations and relief efforts. That same year Pond and the Maha Ghosananda visited Pope John Paul II to discuss ways of achieving peace in Cambodia. In April 1984, he was asked to testify before the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs on the refugee situation in Thailand, along with Kitty Dukakis.
In 1989 Pond and the Maha Ghosananda founded the Inter-Religious Mission for Peace in Cambodia, a Bangkok-based project designed to bring monks and refugees together from all the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, including those run by the Khmer Rouge, to teach peace and nonviolence through Buddhism. As a result of his work, Pond received an honorary doctorate from Providence College in 1992.
Devoutly religious, Pond was at different times in his life a Lutheran, a Congregationalist, a Unitarian-Universalist, and a Roman Catholic.
Read more about this topic: Peter L. Pond
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