Facing Cambodia's Past

The next day, we arranged for a tuk tuk to take us to the Killing Fields and the Toul Sleng Museum. It is hard to separate Cambodia from the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and we wanted to learn more about the history of the country and what had made it what we saw today. The trip to the Killing Fields took us out of the city down a rural strip of fields and farms. When we arrived, we were greeted by the local kids begging for money, but now almost expertly, brushed them off and paid for our entrance into the exhibit.

In the middle of the Fields there is a huge tower built to commemorate those killed during the Khmer Rouge regime, inside which are housed the skulls of hundreds of victims unearthed when the mass graves were discovered. The Fields themselves are pocked with pits where mass graves were discovered and relieved of their contents, and little else. In the background, school children played in the school yard, while further off a baby cried inconsolably. It was a sobering experience.

As we went to leave, we were approached by a group of children who looked up at us and repeatedly implored us to take a picture, miming taking pictures with an imaginary camera. Steven bargained with them over the going rate for a picture and they all happily gathered around me, shouting "one, two, three, cheese!" as Steven's shutter clicked.

From the Fields we went for lunch at Friends Cafe run by a nonprofit that trains children living on the street with marketable skills and supports their well being an education. The food there was without a doubt, some of the best I've ever had, and the service was impeccable. Their attention to detail was such that when placing our silverware on the table our servers made sure that it was straightened and when a corner of napkin caught on the edge of a plate, one young man made sure to reach over to lay it flat on the table.

After our meal, we walked next door to the Friends Thrift store, where I seriously considered a $30 cookbook - straight from the menu - until realizing that it was too expensive and too heavy to be practical, and gained a little peace of mind by reading a sign on the door that warned against giving money to children on the street, suggesting instead for people to patronize local organizations such as theirs that assured that your contributions went to the well being of the children and not the pocket of unscrupulous adults that often collected whatever money the children received.

After lunch, we continued our tour through Cambodia's horrific past at S21, or the Toul Sleng Museum. S21 was a high school turned prison where political prisoners - or those thought to be political prisoners - were held and tortured, often their last stop before being murdered and thrown into a pit at the Killing Fields. The torture rooms looked as if they hadn't been touched since the last prisoner left and many were just bare rooms with a metal bed frame, some shackles and a car battery lying in the center, leaving the fate of its former occupants all too easily imagined. The rooms where the prisoners were housed were even worse: claustrophobic brick cells with only eye slats through metal doors offering evidence of the world outside. Other rooms housed exhibits with the tools of torture and boards displaying rows and rows of the black and white photos of prisoners taken the day they came to S21. The mood was grim and the museum only further showed the depths to which some people will go; evidence of a holocaust decades after the fall of Nazi Germany, that was wholly unknown to much of the outside world.