The team didn’t visit any orphanages today. Today was about remembering history to better understand where Cambodia is now. Cambodia has a tremendously upbeat and optimistic culture but not 40 years ago, Cambodia was home to the vicious dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
After a quick breakfast, the team piled into the vans and headed out to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum at the former site of Security Prison 21 (S21). The site was originally known as Chao Ponhea Yat High School located in the center of Phenom Penh. The Khmer Rouge converted the school to an interrogation and detention center in August 1975. Between 1975 and 1979, the prison housed between 17,000 and 20,000 prisoners but the exact number is unknown. Life in the prison was inhumanly brutal and over it’s 5-year existence, only seven survivors ever escaped.
The site has been kept much the way it was when discovered by the liberating Vietnamese army in 1979. Everything from the beds prisoners were strapped to for torture to the gymnasium turned gallows have been faithfully preserved. The team followed a tour guide through buildings A, B, and C with building D still under renovation. At the end of the tour, the team had the honor to meet the last 2 living survivors of Security Prison 21. Seeing the wretched conditions and sickening interrogation tools was hard for much of the team.
After S21, the team loaded back into the vans and headed to the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek. Seeing S21 was hard to stomach but the Killing Fields hit like a ton of bricks. Choeung Ek was the end of the road for an unknown number of victims because officials have simply stopped counting the bodies. Even today you can see bones and clothing strewn across the property as rain continues to uncover the graves.
The team followed a guided audio tour across the surprisingly small property. The tour covered everything from the truck drop off to the former sites of administrative buildings to the uncovered grave sites to the killing tree. The tour concludes with a Buddhist stupa near the center of the site. In Buddhist religion, a soul cannot rest if the head is separated from the body and Cambodia is a predominantly Buddhist country. The stupa is filled with over 5,000 human skulls whose body was never recovered.
The Killing Fields were hard to handle for many on the trip. The sheer scale of cruelty is hard to comprehend and the sight of bones and cloth uncovered by recent rain is overwhelming.
Security Prison 21 and Cheung Ek hit everyone hard but seeing where Cambodia has come from is important to understand where it’s going. The Khmer Rouge was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of roughly 1/4 of the Cambodian population. The genocide ended in 1979 but an overwhelming majority of people alive today were directly affected but that reign of terror.
Seeing the horror but also seeing the hope and optimism at the orphanages and across the country paints the picture of where we are. This is not a defeated people. This is not a charity case. With those images and memories fresh in our minds, the team gets back to work tomorrow and leaves early in the morning for the next orphanage.
Bunkbeds 4 Cambodia 