Equipped with the sensitivity known from his earlier reportages, in Roosters Crow, Dogs Cry, Wojciech Tochman addresses people with mental illnesses in Cambodia who are imprisoned in kennels, chained up, and locked in cells—often by their own families, who are desperate and at a loss for what to do. Doctors from the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization, in turn, face a great challenge in helping these people because there are only fifty psychiatrists in a country of sixteen million people. Roosters Crow, Dogs Cry approaches both the doctors and their patients with empathy, and also highlights the country's other social problems, such as slave labor or the lack of sensitivity in society. A thematic continuation of Polish journalist Tochman's self-described dark triptych about societies affected by genocides, Roosters Crow, Dogs Cry presents a portrait of a Cambodia in which the memory of the Khmer Rouge terror is still alive, where the nation is suffering from a trauma referred to as baksbat, or "broken courage syndrome."
Author
Reporter, non-fiction writer. He has twice been shortlisted for the NIKE Literary Prize and has won the Polish Book Publishers Association Award. He began his career as a reporter at the youth weekly Na przełaj before leaving school, and soon after he joined the first reporting team at "Gazeta Wyborcza". His reports from this period were published in a book, Stairs Don’t Burn (2000, 2006). Before he got his masters degree at Warsaw University he went to Bosnia with a convoy organised by humanitarian aid worker Janina Ochojska. He then went back to the Balkans repeatedly for many years, and the book Like Eating A Stone is the result of those journeys. His next book was Dear Daughter (2005), the moving account of his efforts to find out what had happened to his missing friend, a reporter called Beata Pawlak, who turned out to have been killed in a terrorist attack on the island of Bali. For several years Tochman was involved in activities aimed at finding missing people. From 1996 to 2002, he ran a programme called "Anyone Who Saw, Anyone Who Knows" on the Telewizja Polska TV channel. In 1999 he founded the ITAKA Centre for the Search for Missing People.
