Chasing Amy-Lou

Phnom Penh, Cambodia; 

As a collective, the volunteer guys and myself had decided to take an educated excursion to The Killing Fields and The S21 Prison in Phnom Penh.

If you’re not already aware, during the seventies Cambodia suffered drastically at the hands of Pol Pot and his army of Khmer Rouge. The warped version of Marxist communism that Pol Pot wanted to implement in the country, on the surface and in theory, might’ve looked and read like an ideological masterpiece. It was far from this. And what occurred in Cambodia during the four year Khmer Rouge ruling, from 1975 to 1979, was far worse than the actions of Hitler and the Nazis, was far more brutal, and was possibly the worst case of genocide a country has ever seen. It was barbaric, violent, mindless and completely and utterly wrong (for more detailed information please refer to books and websites such as; “First They Killed My Father”, http://www.historyplace.com and http://www.history.com/topics/pol-pot where you’ll be able to receive a far more accurate account than I’ll ever be able to give).

Phnom Penh and the rest of Cambodia was decimated during the civil war at the start of the 1970s and subsequently during the Khmer Rouge regime: millions of people were horrifically murdered and the country became a sad and scary place. Those who were killed under Pol Pot’s reign were mostly intelligent, educated and well-off city dwellers who’d done nothing but try to better themselves and create a more comfortable life for their families. S21 (Tuol Sleng) was a former high school in Phnom Penh that was turned into a prison and was used by the regime to house and torture political prisoners before sending them to the Killing Fields (of which there were hundreds situated all around the country) where they’d be barbarically put to their deaths.

We flagged down a tuk-tuk driver who agreed to ferry us all to both sites for a nominal fee of $4 each. And by 10:30am we’d reached our first sobering destination – The Choeung Ek Killing Field site – the most famous of all sites in Cambodia where mass graves containing 8,895 bodies were discovered after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

Without trying to explain too much, mainly because I find it hard to put into words, the Killing Fields was unbelievable. And not in a good way; unbelievable in the worst sense of the word. What we saw and learned on our two hour audio tour of the site was truly awful; it was disgusting, painful, sombre and hard to digest; and the facts, information and artefacts presented to us, I found very difficult to accept were real. It was devastating.

S21 wasn’t any easier either. The former prison which has now been turned into a museum was a site of harrowing juxtaposition, the beautiful trees, plants and greenery making the greying, characterless, eerie buildings look even more frightening. The audio tour at S21 took a lot longer than the one at Choeung Ek, mainly because of the detailed information being read to us and the gruesome photos we were bearing witness to. It was shattering.

My heart had been in my mouth all day. Tears filled the brims of my eyes and huge lumps formed in my throat as I listened to the sad account of events; the suffering, and the pain that filled my ears through the headphones reduced me to an angry, teary, mess. If your knowledge of South East Asian history is minimal, I urge you, every one of you, to please educate yourselves on such atrocities. History is so important in understanding why we do the things we do today and why people behave the way they behave. And events like these should never be forgotten.

As a group of strangers in South East Asia, on an excursion together for the first time, myself and my fellow volunteer friends knew the day was going to be intense and pretty hard on the emotions and on the soul. But in a strange way, experiencing something like that, before we were due to embark on an intense week of volunteering, not only gave us the opportunity to broaden our knowledge of Cambodian history, to make ourselves aware of what the country and its people had been through, it brought us that little bit closer to one another too.