Tuol Sleng
Trip Start
May 18, 2005
1
16
25
Trip End
Jul 10, 2005
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
Today we took a tuk-tuk to Chhoeun Ek, commonly called the killing fields - though all of Cambodia was a killing field in the bad times. At Chhoeun Ek around 9,000 people have been exhumed from mass graves. At the entrance is a shrine with most of the exhumed skulls and some of the clothing. Past this there are about 30 pits, most about 12 feet in diameter. Pieces of cloth and bone stick up out of the pits and the pathways between them. People (mostly young western backpacker types) wander about quietly. I was overwhelmed. When we left, the lady who passes out incense at the shrine looked at me and I at her and I could not speak
A pretty rough city
. Lady, I will not forget your face in my prayers.Next was Tuol Sleng, a former high school turned into a place where people were tortured -and all taken to Chhoeun Ek to be killed. First there were torture rooms, each with an iron bed, shackles, and some torture instruments: torture rooms, shackles, cells, gibbets, instruments, barbed wire - photographs of the tortured and killed, before and after in some cases. There was a room with photographs of Khmer rouge guards and fighters with their biographies and the old story of, "I did it because I had to" most common. The banality of evil right there for us to see.
For me this like closes a circle ("like" because, hey man, this circle doesn't really close, does it). Twenty years ago the Dalai Lame reached out and took my hands in his, looked me in the eye and said, "Keep doing this work." So today I rededicated myself to the work. Many miles to go before I sleep.
