This is Phnom Penh

I sit back and flip through pictures from three days of travel in Cambodia. It’s hard to believe that it was just three-- I am quickly reminded of suffering, poverty, war, desperation, and equally, hope, comfort, and happiness. These are the toils of humanity. The ups and down. And this is what we put each other through, day in and out.
How bizarre it is to be human.


Day 1:

The room is on stilts, hovering among twenty others over the river, a dirty brown. When the men take their prostitutes you can feel their movements from down the boardwalk. The unit rocks back and forth, threatening immanent collapse down into the water below.

It smells-- everywhere. People are too poor, or uneducated to worry about proper plumbing. Garbage litters the ground that children play, piss, and shower in. There are beggars-- all over.

Day one is reserved for the sites, and it begins early with a somber walk through S-21. Tuol Sleng is the infamous former-high school-turned-prison. It is a museum of a three year genocide. It is a memory of atrocities; a reminder of our darkest side.
In between the rows of prison cells and barbed wire walls I see blotches of dark red taint the tiles. I think of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. How could they have done this?
There is a picture of Comrade Duch, chief torturer of S-21, where his eyes are scratched out and writing is scribbled across his face. I thought of the pain he caused others, especially whoever defaced him. And then I thought of the people’s faith. How could the Buddha expect us to offer compassion to a man such as himself?


We followed the prison with a walk through the nearby Killing Fields in the city’s outskirts. Hollowed out pieces of land dotted the field. These were the graves of prisoners who had been forced to dig their own beds.
Around the premises, on the other side of the fence, kids pressed their faces into the grills, hands outstretched past a barricade commemorating their own, begging. They had mastered the art. Cunning little bastards: they would grab your attention first by asking you to take pictures of them, or by asking your name, and then they would turn on their puppy eyes and stretch out their hands. I hesitated for a moment not wanting to be outplayed by 6 year olds. And then they begged for my water. And I thought, these bastards have every right to win.




The tuk-tuk ride back home seemed longer than usual. The seats were stiff and sticky. It was hot. The sun had heated the land and offered it no shelter. The grass was dying, not because it was the dry-season, but because everything else was dying. The Buddha taught us this a long time ago. He also taught us that life is suffering.

And yet, he also taught us that there is a way out. Back in the city, people walk the streets.

This is Phnom Penh.