End of Days

Telen Walsh - Tomb Raider!

What is the antidote to heartsickness?   

Kids.

At least for me it is.  After the heart-wrenching visit to S-21 and the killing fields we all needed something to help lift the weight from our mood.  On our way to Seim Reap we got that help.  We stopped at a spot where the local people sell fruit, vegetables and tarantulas.  A bit of an unusual combination.  You hoped you did not get a combination you did not expect i.e. fruit and tarantula or vegetable and tarantula.  You could get tarantula live or stir fried with oil and garlic.

There was a throng of children there to sell you the goodies.  They immediately swarmed us as we got off the bus and they tried to make a close personal connection so we would buy the fruit from them specifically.   They played the “cute” card right away.  Or maybe they just were cute.  Sort of like girl guides selling cookies. 

So I bought a lot of fruit.

Once they had sold you the fruit, vegetables or tarantulas they needed to help support their families they became regular kids again.  I engaged a few of them in conversation and they got excited to tell me about school, friends, how old they were and who was their best friend etc. etc.  As they talked they started talking over each other and getting louder and louder, giggling and shrieking.  Just like kids anywhere.  They were learning English in school and seemed eager to practice with us.

The second dose of kids came at a village off the beaten track that we stopped at.  It was a poor village and we had all bought small things like hair elastics, combs, toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap and such like for the children.  We were not prepared for the volume of kids.  I swear they were just materializing out of the ether!  I think there may have been as many as 40!  That meant we ran out of doodads before we ran out of kids.  Unfortunately some kids were disappointed.

Then we brought out the soccer ball Tony and Yannig had purchased for the village.  Immediately a game broke out – girls against the boys- with the tourists mixed in with both teams.  It actually became just a melee.  The rules, if anyone knew any, just disappeared and the excitement level meter buried the needle.  Things peaked when a stray kick hit Mick directly in the family jewels and he dropped like a stone.  Everyone, except Mick, was in tears with laughter.  Mick was just in tears.

The Tourists and the kids

 After the game we all visited with the kids.   Such beautiful children!  One shy little one just hung out with me and kept looking at me with huge beautiful eyes.  We had a group picture and since she was little I picked her up so she could be seen.  After that she was my best buddy.

Me and my little sweetie.  Who is the little fat man with the white beard dressed in red with the loud laugh?

Some of the village ladies got caught up in the excitement and started posing with some of the guys in our group.  These ladies looked like they were grandmothers but it turned out they were mothers.  Their tough life had taken its toll.  When I looked at these gorgeous little girls I thought that they were probably going to end up like that.  We live such a privileged life in Canada.  I don’t think we really appreciate just how good we have it.

The visits with the children was the antidote that I needed.  It did not make me forget the horrors of the Killing Fields but it did help take the emotional edge off.  It also made me wonder what I could do to help make these kids’ lives better.  I am still in a quandary about that.

We didn’t really do much for the village except give them about an hour of fun that they might not have had.  The little gifts we gave did not amount to much and would not make much of a difference to their lives, unfortunately.  My thoughts keep returning to my little sweetheart and wondering what her life holds in store.  Is there anything I can do?  I don’t know.

Christmas morning was spent at Angkor Wat watching the sunrise.  We had a group of rampant agnostics watching the sunrise on a pagan holiday that was pre-empted by the Christians and hi-jacked by the corporations over a Hindu temple that was converted to a Buddhist shrine.  How many people can say they did that?  Well, other than our group, lots!   The area around Angkor Wat was crowded at 5 am on Christmas morning, so the experience was not unique to us.

Christmas Morning at Angkor Wat

In spite of the large crowd, the early hour and the lack of coffee the experience was unexpectedly spiritual.  It was a beautiful morning and Angkor Wat is astounding. 

We all went out for a Christmas dinner at a local restaurant that Tony, Alec and Chloe had discovered and booked.  The whole group was there and we all had a surrogate family Christmas.  Amazingly they had turkey.  At least they said it was turkey and it tasted like turkey.  So, I guess it was turkey! 

I don’t want to look too deeply into it…

Christmas dinner with the surrogate family

We are now back in Bangkok and everyone is on to their next destination.  It feels like the lights just came on and the roaches are scattering.  We had a great group for the trip.  There were 12 out of 15 people who went the whole way and we had some additions and subtractions along the route.  We were together for 29 days and we got to know each other pretty well.   It is sad that everyone is leaving. I feel that I can call all these people friends.  

I am really going to miss them.  

  

 

Killing Fields

I need to talk about the Killing Fields.

In the previous entries in this blog I have been somewhat flippant and silly about a lot of things. You cannot do that with the Killing Fields.  Up to this point in my life I did not believe there was such a thing as pure evil.  The events in Cambodia in the 70’s are rapidly changing my mind.

We visited S-21 - one of the prisons where Pol Pot imprisoned, tortured and killed over three hundred eighty-five thousand people.  Of all the people that were imprisoned in S-21 only seven survived.  S-21 was only one of one hundred sixty-eight prisons that the Khmer Rouge kept in Phnom Penh.  The torture that the prisoners faced was unspeakable and meant to wring from them confessions of crimes they did not commit or had no knowledge of.  Some of those crimes consisted of: not answering questions quick enough, grieving for relatives killed by the Khmer Rouge, crying out under torture, or not working hard enough. 

Not only were the prisoners tortured and killed, so were their families.  Every family in Cambodia has lost at least one or more family members.

Like the cultural revolution in China all the intellectuals and educated people were taken to the country to work in the fields for sixteen hours a day and fed one bowl of rice porridge a day.  Pol Pot set a quota of 5 tonnes of rice per hectare of land – which is impossible.  One hectare of land can, under the best conditions, yield 1 tonne of rice per year.  If you did not meet that quota you were not working hard enough – a crime punishable by torture and execution.

In 1975 when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge came to power he evacuated Phnom Penh – a city of three million people - by claiming that the Americans were going to bomb the city.  He told everyone to leave their doors unlocked and not take any of their possession with them as it was only going to be for a few days.  He then marched the people to the countryside and put them to work in the rice fields – a job that none of them had any experience with.  Thousands of people died in the march from starvation and exhaustion and many more died in the fields for the same reason. 

Altogether over two million people died in the four years that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge held power in a country of eight million people. 

We visited the Killing Fields on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.  There is a pagoda there with seventeen levels.  It is filled to overflowing with skulls found in the mass graves.  No one knows who these people were or why they were executed.  Execution was accomplished by beheading.  They were often beheaded by using a palm tree stem – which is a stick that has naturally sharp edges.  It often took fifteen minutes or more to finish the job.   Failing that, rather than waste a bullet, the prisoners were simply buried alive.  Bullets were too expensive.

The Skull Pagoda - housing  over 8,000 skulls

Human bones resurfacing

No one really knows how many bodies there are in the one Killing Field.  As you walk through the area you can see where more and more bones are coming to the surface as the soil erodes or the ground shifts.  So much agony and fear must permeate that ground.

What hit me the hardest was seeing where the babies were killed by bashing their heads against a tree.

At that point I believed that pure evil does exist.

Pol Pot did not act alone.  He had help from Mao Tse Tung and Ho Chi Minh.  He also had deputies that assisted him in his crimes – people that actually did the dirty work.  Pol Pot did not, as far as we know, actually kill anyone himself – he delegated it.  But they did as he told them.  He even had most of his accomplices killed as he got more and more paranoid.

How is this possible?  How could someone kill children by bashing their heads against a tree because they were told to?  How could one man have so much power that everyone was so afraid of him that they committed such unspeakable crimes.  Why did they not just say “No”.  He was just a single individual.  Why would someone be so afraid that they would torture and kill their own relatives? 

We were all deeply affected by the jail and killing fields.  I find myself returning again and again to this in my mind.  I find it incomprehensible.  This affected me to the core of my being and I am only seeing the aftermath thirty years after it was over.  How must it have affected the people involved in the actual events – both the Cambodian people and the Khmer Rouge? 

We were privileged to meet a survivor of S-21.  His name was Bou Meng and he survived because he is an artist who was able to paint a flattering picture of the Monster.  There are only 2 survivors left – the other five have since passed away.  He was such a cute little man with a huge sunny smile.  He must be incredibly strong.

Bou Meng - 1 of  7 survivors of S-21

Pol Pot died in the early 1990’s of natural causes.  Such a shame – he will never be called to answer for his crimes.  Some of his deputies are still around and five of them are to be tried by international court.  One already has been and has been sentenced to life in prison.  Four more await trial.   Their sentences cannot be enough.  Nothing we can do can ever come close to justice.

And there are not enough tears.

Telen writes:

The visit to S-21 prison and the nearby “Killing Fields” was very emotionally straining to me too.  Pol Pot was an admirer of Mao Tse Tung and he wanted to change Cambodian society into a communist country similar to China.  The man was obviously very paranoid.  He wanted absolute control.  The Cambodian tragedy lasted for 4 years as compared to the Chinese Cultural Revolution that took place over 25+ years.

It seems that everyone here has lost a loved one to the genocide, i.e. a wife, children, a father etc.

I can look around here, people are struggling to live here BUT they seem relatively happy.  There is a statue of a bronze rifle twisted into a knot in the centre of Siem Reap.  It symbolizes the Cambodian people’s desire for NO MORE war and violence in the world.  May be this is why people here all seem to have a warm smile when I greet them.  At least now, they are living in peace.

The children here are beautiful.  According to Wikipedia, 50% of the population is 20 years old or younger.  The genocide has eliminated not only culture and the intellectuals, it has killed off 25% of the population.  People’s lives here are slowly improving.  Now, only 1 in 20 children will die before age 5.  10 years ago, the statistic was 1 in 8 children. 

How could anyone hurt such a child?

Our tour bus stopped in a farming village yesterday on route to Siem Reap from Phnom Penh.  We donated a soccer ball, some decorative hair bands for the girls, several bottles of bubbles, soap, shampoo and combs.  A soccer match amongst the children and several members of our tour group quickly broke out.  Rand did a “hole in one” kick when the ball ended up hitting the English fellow in our group right in his crotch.  Well, he dropped like a stone onto the group.  Everyone just laughed and laughed.  We really had a great time in spite of the language barrier.  Cambodia has suffered a lot but the spirit of the people triumphs—as reflected in their gentle smiling faces.

Sigh Gone

Saigon aka Ho Chi Minh City from the Sheraton

Saigon aka Ho Chi Minh City has all the frenetic activity and anarchy of Hanoi without the charm.  In fact it seems more chaotic than Hanoi and the drivers are more death defying.  We are getting used to the way you navigate Asian cities and so we are more confident crossing the road.  There is still the bowels-turn-to-water feeling as you step off the curb and we are getting better at suppressing the blood-curdling scream thingy that sometimes happens involuntarily but I would say that “more confident” is a better description than “confident”.

I think the problem we are having with Ho Chi Minh City is not the chaos or the traffic but the western influence.  Since we have been travelling through most of Thailand, Laos and Vietnam there has been little western influence and things are done in their own way but in Ho Chi Minh things changed.  Granted there are the usual plethora of tiny shops and markets but now there are big names up on big buildings like Prada, Adidas, KFC and Gucci.  Strangely I think we are having culture shock…

Telen in traditional Vietnamese "pyjama"

We went out in the evening for dinner and on our way back we were somewhat nonplussed at how the city had changed.  Everyone comes out in the evening and in a city of eight million that is a LOT of people.  It was almost impossible to walk down the street due to the density of the crowds.  And the Christmas decorations!   Every store has Christmas decorations, lights and… snowflakes?  All the young ladies are dressed in their finest and doing their best poses in front of the Christmas trees and lights to get their friends to take photos.  It still feels odd to be seeing Christmas decorations and paraphernalia in 30 degree heat in a primarily Buddhist country. 

I don’t think Buddha would be pleased.

What is wrong with this picture? (other than the unhappy elf)

We went to see the Cu Chi tunnels and we were lucky enough to get a guide that was a Vietnam War veteran.  He had worked as a translator for the South and later became an officer in the South Vietnamese army.  This gave him a unique perspective on the Cu Chi tunnels and on the war in general.  His sentiment was that everyone in the war was a victim including the North Vietnamese Army, the Viet Cong, the South Vietnamese Army and the American soldiers.  He said that no one wanted to be fighting but that they were forced into it.  Which lead me to this.  If every soldier refused to fight would there be no wars?

The Cu Chi tunnels were amazing.  An “unbiased” film about how the gentle hard-working peasants were forced to defend themselves from the crazy devil American soldiers quickly indoctrinated us.  They had stories of how the clever simple farm girls devised ingenious ways to kill bloodthirsty American soldiers and how some of them were awarded the American-killer medals for bravery.  The propaganda was a little over the top and our guide asked us how we enjoyed the impartial film all the while with a sly smile on his face.  In reality, if you strip away the propaganda-loaded language, you can see how the Viet Cong were trying to protect themselves and their homes.  There are still craters around the tunnels where bombs from the B-52’s blew holes in the landscape and killed countless innocent people.  On the other hand the Americans had no idea who was Viet Cong and who was on their side.  All Vietnamese look alike and they did not wear name tags.  Both sides were equally barbaric.  It makes me despair for the future of humanity.  Are we truly civilized or are we just viscous animals held in barely in check?

Speaking of the tunnels…

There are about 200 km of tunnels and three levels: 3 meters, 6 meters and 8 meters deep.  These tunnels were where the Viet Cong would hide from the American and South Vietnamese forces.  They could only stay down there for about six to seven hours before they ran out of air.  The tunnels were so small that it is hard to believe that people could even fit in them much less conduct warfare from inside.  I tried to fit into one but it was like trying to force a marshmallow into a wine bottle – you might eventually succeed but the marshmallow would never be the same or be removed.  There was a large crowd watching and, although I could not understand what they were saying, I think a great deal of fun was had at my expense.

How likely is it that I am going to fit?

They also showed us some of the booby traps the Viet Cong had devised to fight the Americans.  They were diabolical and gruesomely effective.  The Americans, on the other hand, were satisfied with dropping bombs on villages.  We are extraordinarily clever at coming up with ways to cause tremendous suffering.

The whole experience was sobering.  So many deaths, so much suffering and such unbelievable cruelty all in the name of a political ideology.  Surely humans can do better. 

It breaks my heart.

We toodled around the Mekong Delta to see how the fourteen million people who live there get by.  It was quite interesting to see how they farm rice, vegetables, and fruit and how they get fish and mollusks from the river.  We visited the floating market and had lunch at a local farm.  It was a much more relaxing and considerably less emotionally taxing than the previous day at the Cu Chi tunnels.

How not to paddle the traditional Vietnamese Mekong boat

Soon we leave Vietnam for Cambodia.  Vietnam takes you through a gamut of emotions – delight, frustration, awe, astonishment, sadness and anger.  The people are delightful, the traffic is frustrating, the scenery is awe-inspiring, the ingenuity is astonishing, but the aftermath of the war is sobering and the fact that so many people were killed makes me angry. 

One amazing country!