Difficult day
Trip Start
Jun 15, 2007
1
90
163
Trip End
Ongoing
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Lan had been recommended to us by a couple we met in Malaysia and so we had booked him to take us on our trip today (Tuesday). He was really nice and gave us a lift to a hostel for free because he was grateful we had booked him. When we got to the hostel we had dinner and watched the film "The Killing Fields" so we would know more for our visit. It was a tough film to watch but the visit would be even worse.
So today Lan picked us up and took us first of all to the Killing Fields where we walked around the area where the prisoners were taken to, kept overnight and killed before being thrown into mass graves, in the time of the Khmer Rouge. That was awful as there are still clothes, skulls and bones from the people who were killed here. A lot of them have been put into a cabinet and labelled with ages and sex of the victims. There were some children in there which we found very difficult to comprehend. The mass graves are split into men and then women and children. It is so sad to think of what happened here and how awful it must have been. And to think this was only 30 years ago. There is also a memorial here where you can go to pay your respects and lay flowers. It was a very sombre mood.
After the Killing Fields, we went to S21 which is the prison they used to keep the victims in once they had been captured. Here the prisoners were interrogated for information they did not have and then tortured in horrendous ways until they gave the information that was wanted. By this I mean they said what the Khmer Rouge told them they wanted them to say. Then they were taken back to their cells and beaten some more before being blindfolded and taken by truck to be killed at the Killing Fields. The scariest thing about all of this was that some of the Khmer Rouge soldiers were females and some were children and yet they were torturing their own people. But when we looked around the prison more it became evident that these were not necessarily evil people but people who did as they were told because they were scared for their own safety. And then most of them were killed anyway. We saw a film in the prison about one of the survivors and one of the guards, and also heard first hand stories from several of the victims' relatives. That was really interesting but very sad. Of the 20,000 prisoners of S21, only 7 of them survived. How awful is that? And the 3 heads of the Khmer Rouge have never been brought to justice for what they did. Brother number 1 died a few years ago and the other 2 brothers are in prison right now but they have never been tried for their crimes and their defence when arrested was that they had no idea what was going on underneath them as they were not at the prison themselves. It made us so angry to learn all of this today, but what made it worse was that Lan was telling us a lot of stuff that wasn't in the prison, and he was telling us first hand. He lost 6 members of his family, including his father, during the Khmer Rouge regime. Hearing him talk about it was heartbreaking as he is only a few years older than us. Life for people in Cambodia is so hard we can't begin to explain. We gave Lan a good tip for his service today and he was so grateful as it is his only form of income and he never knows how much he will earn each day, if anything. But that money is a pittance to us. We earn more per hour at home than they do in a day. It is crazy. We both wish there was more that we could do, as Cambodia is so beautiful and yet so poor. It is really very sad.
Last stop today was the Russian market, which was aimed at cheering us up after a hard day. We had lots of fun here, bartering with the stall holders!
When we got back to the hostel Lan came in for a beer with us and before we knew it, it was time for dinner! We had a really nice meal down the road from the hostel and then got caught in a thunderstorm! Nice! Oh yeah I forgot to say, it's rainy season right now so it rains a lot at night time!!
