Cambodia

I had been waiting so long to go to Cambodia. I was interested to see a country where every person was affected by the horrors of the Cambodian holocaust under the rule of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. We flew into Siem Reap and were greeted with such great hospitality by the owner of the hotel. I felt much more at home in Cambodia then in Vietnam, because it has many similarities to Thailand. When talking about the event that took place less than 30 years ago, our tour guide mentioned that he had lost some of his family members and spent much of his younger years in a refugee camp. Everyone we talked to has lost members of their family.
We spent one day at Angkor Wat, which really is no time at all considering how much there is to see. I got sick the night before and I was so worried I wasn’t going to be able to make it out in the blazing heat of Cambodia. Fortunately, my professor was so nice and got me some antibiotics. Along with some meds for my fever, I was set to go..there was no way I was missing Angkor Wat!

What an amazing place. No wonder Cambodia is so proud of it. A huge area filled with massive, beautiful structures dating back to the 12th century. I won’t go into all the detail of where we went and what we saw, but I’ll mention some of my favorites. We visited Ta Prohm temple, which is over grown with huge trees growing from the roofs while their roots drape over the building and plunge into the ground. Here is where we recognized some shots from Tomb Raider where they did some of the filming. I’m still surprised they let them film there…it must have been a good amount of money. ( a famous shot from the movie is seen to the left)Last, but not least, we saw Angkor Wat itself. I don’t even know how to describe it! Huge towers silhouette the back, guarded by a mote and a large, very wide walkway leading to this place that housed many of monks in ancient times. One can learn so much, because so many of the details are still visible, like the drawings carved on the walls that tell stories. One of the interesting things about Angkor are the stairs, which are most hazardous to one’s health. They are very small and very steep. They let tourists still use many of them, but while we were there a girl fell and had to be rushed off to the hospital. Unfortunately, that is not an uncommon occurrence.

oh, also, a wild monkey crawled on my back and looked for bugs in my hair...
The next day we took a bus to Phenom Penh. We knew we were in for a difficult day, because we were scheduled to visit Tuol Slang Prison and the Killing Fields.

WARNING: the next part is somewhat graphic and may not be the most enjoyable to any young readers.

I hesitated on what to write about this day. I won’t give many details, if anyone is interested in that they only need to pick of a copy of “Survival in the Killing Fields,” but this is a large part of what I experienced on this trip, so I will share it.

First we went to Tuol Slang Prison which was a school that was taken over by the Khmer Rouge and used as a torture prison. It was sickly to see a familiar school building turned into a place of gruesome murder. Each room we walked into contained a metal bed and some items, like chains or torture devices, that were left behind. Every room also displayed a picture of the body found in the room by the Vietnamese when the Khmer Rouge left in a hurry. Many things I would have passed without a second glance if it hadn’t have been for our guide. We passed by some monkey bars and large pots of water. He mentioned that they were used for torture and killing. A huge series of rooms were dedicated to hundreds of mug shot photos, they included many, many young people, including women, and children. They were photos of Khmer Rouge convicted and killed of being traitors. The Khmer Rouge became so paranoid they started killing off their own people. They would torture suspected members of their group and demand names, so the victims just gave any name that came to mind. They in turn would follow the same fate. There was no mercy, not even for babies. The Khmer Rouge was crumbling from the inside. Out of all the thousands that came through Tuol Slang only a handful survived.

If that wasn’t enough for one day, we drove out to the killing fields. After reading Survival in the Killing Fields, I imagined they were huge, stretched out fields used as mass graves. I was surprised to see a forest. In front of the forest, there is a huge monument filled with skulls as a remembrance to those who died here. A worn out path leads around some trees to an opening of many, large low spots of earth. Each dip in the ground is a mass grave. Some are roped off, some have signs giving more details of who was buried here or how they were killed, but mostly the graves are unmarked and one could walk across them all. We all wandered off on our own, struggling to comprehend that this quiet place a few years ago was filled with such atrocious acts, and that we stood on the friends and family members of the people we met and loved in Cambodia. While I wandered, I found human teeth and bits of clothing coming up through the path from people walking on it. I wonder when the bones will stop surfacing… Before these events Cambodia had a population of 7 million, afterwards their country was cut by more than a third, leaving them with 4 million people.

This is probably the longest blog ever, but these events had a deep impact on all of us. It was such a short time ago and things like this continue to happen today. Currently in Thailand, refugees are fleeing from Burma. Many of us started to fear. All of the sudden, far away atrocities became real and I no longer felt free from harm. My mortality became so clear. It is hard to even believe that people are capable of such evil. We cannot escape the consequences of other peoples’ decisions, whether good or bad. And so we must come to grips with the fact that every nation; although separate, has many strings connecting it all other areas. One pull on our own string, pulls the rest of the world with us.
I digress. Alyse Johnson read me here blog on Cambodia and I thought she summed up our thoughts completely and beautifully. Rather than try to force it out in my own words I will quote her:

“I found that my thoughts were randomly plagued with scary images, and I became paranoid that something bad might happen. I felt like I was protecting myself by “not letting my guard down”—by facing the fact that bad things happen and they would probably happen to me. But what took me a while to realize was that paranoia and fear were the very elements that caused thing like the Cambodian Killing Fields, and the Jewish Holocaust, and the Rawandan Genocide. Bad things do happen, but I let the possibility of something bad happening cloud the reality of how good still far outweighs the bad. It’s important to learn about the evil of which humans are capable, but we learn it not to let fear overcome our thoughts and actions, but for our thoughts and actions to overcome our fears.”