Posts Tagged: Asia

If you live on the west coast of the United States, India is about as far away as you can get. It really doesn’t matter whether you fly east or west, the distance and travel time will be about the same. Before 2012, I had never been to Asia, but that year I made trips across the Pacific to Cambodia and Timor-Leste. But when I traveled to India with my girlfriend, Lauren, and her family in December, it would be the furthest from home I’d ever been.

During the spring quarter of my second year of law school, I participated in the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic. I did some work on the government response to the Occupy Movement, armed conflict in India, and disappearances in Turkey. But most of my time was spent working on a report about the effectiveness of agencies tasked with monitoring working conditions in Cambodian garment factories. Compared to other garment-producing nations, Cambodia actually has relatively good protections for worker rights.

Timor-Leste is a tiny half-island nation at the southeastern tip of Indonesia, about 400 miles northwest of Darwin, Australia. In 1975, Timor-Leste declared independence from Portugal in 1975. Within eight days, Indonesia, which controls the western half of the island, invaded. Thus began a brutal quarter-century occupation and constant violent resistance that resulted in the deaths of at least 100,000 people before Timor-Leste was finally granted autonomy from Indonesia in 1999.