A Stark Contrast

Today was a very interesting day for me. I felt like the morning and afternoon were in stark contrast to one another. One was very somber and emotionally draining. The other was revitalizing. Each carried with it its own sense of importance and its own spiritual connection.

In the morning we went to S-21/Tuol Sleng and to Cheoung Ek Killing Field. S-21 was a place where they tortured and killed a number of people. They used any means necessary to get the prisoners to confess to the crimes that they had committed (or in actuality had not committed at all truly).

One of the prisoners of S-21 and her baby.

A prisoner found dead in the hall of one of the buildings.

Many of S-21 had been left just the way that it was when they found it in 1979. The beds that the prisoners were chained to were in the same place where the prisoner had died on them. The ghosts in that place were very heavy. Visiting here did not get to me as much as visiting Cheoung Ek. After we had looked around the buildings of S-21 we loaded the bus and made the trek to Cheoung Ek. This was another site of mass execution and torture. Torture was not performed here as much as execution was.

Teeth found as the ground is washed away during the rainy season.

Skulls from the mass graves.

Between 1975 and 1979 17,000 Cambodians were brutally executed and put in mass graves. Approximately 8,900 bodies have been exhumed from the mass graves. Many are still closed as a memorial to those that suffered the tragedies that occurred there. The largest mass grave held 450 bodies. There were also mass graves that had headless bodies found in them, as well as one for women and children that were found completely naked. The thing that upset me most here was the Killing Tree.

The Killing Tree

The Killing Tree is where they took babies and killed them. For the sake of anyone reading this blog I will not describe what they did to them. It was traumatic enough to see the painting that someone did as a rendition of what would have happened there. That is when I broke down. The thought of someone ripping my child from my hands and taking them to that tree to be brutally murdered made me unbelievably upset. Children don’t know what their ideology is yet, so how can they even know what’s going on. They couldn’t have known. It just makes me unbelievably sad. Pol Pot committed mass genocide against his own people and still no one knows what the reasoning is behind what he did. It took a lot to process Cheoung Ek and I feel as though I’ll still be processing it when I get home. I just pray for the survivors and for the souls of those that were brutally murdered there.

After the Kililng Fields, we traveled back into the city of Phnom Penh. We were a little rushed due to our late start so we opted to eat snacks on the bus so we could spend more time at the byTavi workshop and at the Daughters workshop. The byTavi project is truly a prevention project. It takes girls and woman that are in a position of extreme poverty and it teaches them how to make purses, totes, and other like items to give them an income. CGI believes that most families in extreme poverty are just one crisis away from trafficking one of their daughters. In order not to create an artificial crisis in the family by taking the daughter out of the income structure of the family, CGI supplements the family during the time that they are in training by giving the family $50 a month. This helps the families survive during the time when their daughters are not at home.

Sina and I in the Daughters workshop.

A baby whose mother works for byTavi.

We saw the workshop where they worked and we spent a lot of time buying bags to take home to our families. After we were done there were walked just two shops down to see the Daughters workshop. The girls were so excited to see us!! We each were greeted with huge hugs and smiles and “I missed you”. The smiles on their faces made me so much more emotionally recharged. I needed that after the morning that we had. I can’t stop smiling when I’m around them. They are all playing and being silly. I showed the girls pictures of Lola and they couldn’t believe that I had a baby. They all thought she was very beautiful. Chanty was being silly and picked me up. She pretended that she was rocking me like a baby.

Being around the girls brings a new energy into my life that I can’t describe properly in a blog post. They are so positive and carefree, something that many of us in the United States lack. I know I could take note of the way they live their lives and it would help me a lot. I need to slow down. Nothing here is on time and if it’s late no one worries about it. I’m always in a rush and it gets me nowhere but stressed out. I want my daughter to be around girls like them. Girls that don’t worry so much about what they look like, but what’s in their hearts. I can’t even begin to describe the amount of joy that I get when I’m around them. I couldn’t stop smiling yesterday; they made me smile so much that my face was hurting. I haven’t been that happy in a very, very long time (except when I’m with Lola. Nothing makes me happier than she does). I love all the girls that we are working with and all of the people on our team. Speaking of the team, I spent a great deal of breakfast opening up to them about what has been going on at home. I truly enjoy getting a new outlook on what I should do and what would be best for myself and for Lola. I’m glad this trip is making me look at things, instead of avoiding them, which is what I’m very good at doing.

We also got the chance to walk down the alley where some of the girls in the Daughters project have come from. It was an alley where homes were built on stilts out of small boards, planks, pieces of aluminum. Anything the people could find is what they would use.

One of the houses in the alley.

There was feces covering the streets. There was dirt and flies everywhere. The children were walking in it in their bare feet. The smell was horrible. I can't even describe the stench that came to our nostrils. We then met a man whose wife is an alcoholic and their baby has fetal alcohol syndrome. He was very angry because he had brought money home to feed the children and his wife had spent it on alcohol.

One of the children that live in the alley.

More of the children that live in the alley.

We then got some time to shower and get ready for dinner. We went to a very, very nice Italian restaurant. I probably had the best lasagna that I’ve ever eaten in my life. As we walked some of the group to a small pub where they were going to watch a band play and meet someone that is a business partner of Chris’, we saw young children sleeping on mats on the sidewalk. They were totally asleep and people were just walking by them. It made me so unbelievably sad to see them lying there. They had no choice in the circumstances into which they were born. They didn’t make that decision. They are innocent and yet they live in such horrible conditions. My heart aches for them and I just pray that they can come to find a better life.