The journal we digitized and edited is housed in the Congregational Archive of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, located in Bertrand Hall on the Saint Mary’s College campus. Although researchers can access this journal, the narratives are not widely accessible to the general public. By sharing the history of the Cambodian refugee crisis, the Sisters’ work in Cambodia, and this documentary evidence of the experiences of those who lived under the Khmer Rouge, we hope that  readers of this edition will reveal the severity of this conflict and its aftermath.
We chose not to include the full names of the eight individuals who contributed entries to this journal in order to preserve the privacy and safety of these individuals. Despite this, we still wanted to stress the individuality of each of these voices, so we opted to refer to each author by their initials. We believe that keeping these refugees safe and preserving their privacy is a priority -- one that requires the removal of this information from the images and transcriptions. While we recognize that removing the names from our digitized images of the journal fundamentally alters the capacity of those images to serve as archival surrogates, this was a decision that seemed unavoidable as we sought to balance the privacy of the individuals who contributed to this journal with our goal of providing the public with as much access to this artifact as possible.

As a class, we decided that including both a diplomatic and an edited transcription of each entry.  While the unedited, diplomatic transcriptions present faithful reproductions of the text written by the authors, the edited transcriptions aim to correct grammatical and orthographic errors in the original to provide a more accessible reading text, while still maintaining the voice and cadence of the original journal entries. We thus silently corrected minor errors of grammar, punctuation, and spelling, and, at times, we also added words or phrases to clarify the meaning of the original text.  We hope that by including both edited and diplomatic transcriptions will allow these entries to be as accessible as possible for general audiences, while also providing an accurate reproduction of the original entries for future researchers.

And finally, we carefully chose additional digitized images of associated archival material that could enhance our edition and provide additional historical context. We sought to select those documents and images that we felt most deeply represented the work of the Sisters and which  best portrayed the struggle to maintain human goodness amidst the cruelty of this period.