The Giver

She went where she was needed, helping refugees who had lost everything.

By Matt Dillon

From Reader's Digest

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Yvette

Like most pieces of bad news, this one came from out of the blue. A friend called one April morning and woke me up. "Matt," she said, "I thought you should know -- Yvette died." I was shaken. Yvette Pierpaoli was a woman who changed my life, a courageous person whose work took her to troubled, often dangerous places.

A year earlier, in 1998, I was writing a script for a film called City of Ghosts, about a young man in search of his fugitive father in Cambodia in the early '90s. It was the first movie I was going to direct, and I felt strongly that it could only be made in Cambodia, a place that had fascinated me since my first trip in 1993. However, the country was unstable. There was no infrastructure for filmmaking, and I had so many questions that needed to be answered if my film was to ring true.

I soon attended a New York benefit for Refugees International (RI), an aid organization that has a strong presence in Southeast Asia working with refugees, street children, war widows and land-mine victims. There I met Yvette, RI's European representative, a Frenchwoman of Italian descent. She, too, shared my fascination with Cambodia. She had lived there for 10 years during the Vietnam War and had returned many times over the next decades. She spoke Khmer and said she would be happy to advise me on the subtleties of Cambodian culture.

As our friendship grew, I discovered that Yvette, a small woman with big, smiling eyes, was a legend among the worldwide community of volunteers who work with refugees. Then in her late 50s but possessing the strength and enthusiasm of a much younger person, Yvette was often one of the first Westerners to show up when a refugee crisis developed. She would live with families in their homes, gathering intelligence about their needs, arranging relief supplies. It was dangerous work, and sometimes she had to do it undercover. She would arrive with treats for delighted children, offer comfort to the bereaved, and dispense hope.

As I wrote my script, Yvette answered questions I had about Cambodian customs. She told me that a Cambodian's word was everything. "Matt, when you're there making your film," she said, "you must be careful about negative emotional outbursts. 'Face' is an important part of the culture. To show anger in an explosive way would be a loss of face for both of you." I'm a pretty passionate person, and would need to learn to keep my emotions in check, to work with patience and a positive attitude.