Three "Farang"on a Moto

A word of warning: THis blog entry starts off funny, but below I talk alot about my experience seeing the Killing Fields of Cambodia. It is not funny, and it will probably not brighten your day. I post it because I believe it important to be aware of these happenings in history, but I also believe it important that you know it may disturb when you read it.

Thursday night Katherine, Kate, and myself provided some entertainment for the local population of Phnom Penh. The three of us rode around town on one motorbike. Wow did we get laughed at! Even I, not speaking a word of Cambodian, knew exactly what was said when a guy pointed and I heard "blah blah... farang... moto!" Farang is the word for white person in Thai too, that one I know. But it was great fun. After so long in Asia, I find it quite funny when people point and laugh at me, because truth be told, it is funny. And it's that much funnier when you do something that people just aren't expecting. Like three big western girls riding around on a little tiny motorbike. It was my first night in Phnom Penh and we went to get massages, which I definitely needed after pulling a muscle in my back up in Siem Reap. We went to a Chinese Health Center, where Kate and I decided to get acupressure massages. As this is the type of massage that I went to school for in US, I am always interested to get it over in Asia. And wow is it different. Here the attitude seems mostly to be, quit-your-whining-pain-is-good-for-you! Indeed, and I have the bruises to prove it. In the end, I did actually feel better, and she managed to find the spot that was causing so much pain in my trapezius, but wow... how painful.

But I like Phnom Penh. It is very much like Hanoi in a lot of ways, but smaller. The leftover French colonial influence is very strong. There are lots of french style sidewalk cafe's, fresh bread being sold everywhere, and a lot of french expats. But of course, that is only a sliver of the city and a very small, well polished picture of life in PP. Underneath the surface, there is more...

Yesterday I visited the S21 prison and the "Killing Fields." For those of you that don't remember, Cambodia was the sight of a heinous genocidal regime in the late 1970's and the early 1980's. Hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have perished at the hands of the Pol Pot - Khmer Rouge regime that took power in 1975. S21 was a secret prison where people were interogated, tortured, and eventually killed. The ultimate perversion, S21 was a grade school until it was converted to a prison in 1975. It is a quiet place, but a walk through the halls chills you to your bones. The Khmer Rouge photographed and documented the biographies of most of the people who passed through the prison. These pictures are now on display, and stare hauntingly back at you, as you walk through the rooms of the prison. After two rooms, I really just wanted to leave, but something in me felt like I should see the whole thing.

From there, I went to the killing fields. Something I alluded to in the entry below this was the local population profiting off of places like this. What I was speaking to specifically, in this case, was something my friend Katherine had mentioned, about how as you walk out of the museum, the moto-taxi drivers will shout, "Killing Fields! You want to go to Killing Fields!" It seems a bit irreverent, and difficult to get your head around sometimes as a westerner. But, at least while I was there, they were slightly more subdued. I found a driver to take me the 11km out of PP to see the sight of the Killing Fields, and after agreeing on a price, asked him his name, where he was from, and did he have a family? (Though this is something i normally try to do when I meet people, I was not expecting the answer I recieved) He told me he is 37, and single. His parents were killed by the Pol Pot regime. What do you say to that? Nothing really, you're too stunned. And as far as I'm concerned, if he can make a decent living off the foreigners who come to this museum everyday, you won't hear me complain.

The Killing Fields are just as gut wrenching as the musuem, and I guess a bit more so. In Cambodia, the pavement pretty much ends at the edge of the city center. Then you are on dusty dirt roads for about 9 km. You arrive at the field, among many farms and villages, and it just looks like a normal place, until you see the stupa. The Memorial Stupa that stands in the middle of the Killing Fields is a large Buddhist Shrine, filled inside, about 20 feet high, with the skulls and bones of those exhumed from the mass graves, dug up just behind. Since the 80's almost 9000 bodies have been exhumed, with about 8000 more estimated to be buried in the surrounding area. For me, it was so hard to wrap my head around how a place of such natural beauty could be the site of such incredible brutality and cruelty. It's the kind of place that makes you reconsider human nature.

I didn't sleep well last night. For some reason, it was only then that the true gravity of what I saw yesterday sunk in. Very few people have been brought to justice over the genocide here. What that means, is that people who perpetrated these crimes, and people who were affected are still living side by side today in Cambodia. And as Katherine pointed out last night, the scope of the tragedy is so wide, that you are hard pressed to find anyone here who does not have immediate family that perished during that time. And it reminds you how much, as a visitor to this country (and to any country really), you see a polished version of people and their lives here. But you can't help but wonder how something like that becomes a part of the fabric of a society. How people live with it, and how they deal with it. Having grown up in the safe world that I did, I just can't imagine.

I posted this on the blog, rather than in an email. I don't want to ram it down peoples throats, but if you're interested, I want you to be able to read about this experience. I was very strongly affected by what I saw, and as I said before, I'd be worried for a person who wasn't. You can't spend all of your time thinking about things like this, nor should you. I truly believe that as human beings, lucky enough to walk on this earth, we have a responsibility to be happy, and spread that happiness to those around us. But, I also believe that we have a responsibility to be aware of these heinous things that have happened in the past and be aware of this side of human nature, if only so that we can find some way to keep them from happening again.

And as Forest Gump said... "And thats all I have to say about that."