A Life Changing Experience

I traveled to Phnom Penh, the capitol city of the Kingdom of Cambodia, to adopt a child. One morning I made my way through the colonial-styled lobby of the Hotel Le Royal, located just off Monivong Street in the historical center of the city, and out onto the pale gray driveway curving up to the entrance of the hotel. The sticky summer air stunk of gasoline fumes and food carts that lined the street just outside the gates of the hotel. The washed out sky was saturated with the melodious rumblings of a romantic and dangerous Asian city. A thought crossed my mind that somehow I had been transported into a Hollywood movie. Off in the distant I heard the lapping of the Sap River where tiny wooden houses are perched on stilts and rusty Chinese container ships are moored with thick-corded ropes. The river’s muddy water meanders to the Mekong River and fans out across the old battlefields of the Mekong Delta of Vietnam before sweeping out into the South China Sea.

An old black car with caramel colored upholstery pulled up alongside me. Behind the wheel sat a slender man with a small nose and shiny black hair. He introduced himself in perfect English as Hae Kim and then let out a deep-throated laugh, which caused me to wonder about my safety. Nevertheless, I slipped into the back seat, sunk into the soft leather, and began a journey to the high school that Pol Pot turned into death.

Except for a couple of warning horn blasts, my driver made no other sounds during the trip.Once he smacked the car horn at a bright green scooter that darted by burdened with two, chicken-wire bound pigs hanging over the back wheel. He let out another blast at a weaving truck, with five splendid, saffron-robed monks sitting cross-legged on top of a large pile of coconuts, which caused a motorcycle to veer towards us. The cycle’s nearly invisible driver’s face and skinny limbs poked out from an immense bunch of dark green bananas.

Block after block of houses made from unpainted wood passed by the car windows. Outside many of the houses huddled people, their knees up near their chins and their bottoms hovering just above the ground, around open fires with steaming black cooking pots. On the side of one house, between two pale-barked trees, a man sat on a green and white-striped hammock trimming his hair with scissors in one hand and a mirror in the other. Shiny black hair littered the ground underneath his dangling feet.

As we drove past Charles De Gaulle Street, a reminder that Cambodia once belonged to the French Indochina Empire, three naked and squirming boys hopped about a mud puddle. A clothed girl, with a menacing switch in one hand, poured bowls of water over their heads while they scrubbed their skinny bodies with open hands. A woman, wearing a long gold skirt and black blouse, strolled by them with a tall stack of glowing silks perched on top of her head.

We arrived at our destination, the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. Outside the museum’s entrance stood a one-legged man beside an ice cream cart underneath a large red and yellow umbrella. Behind him a yellow-cheeked gibbon, chewing at a purple-flesh fruit, was tied to a bolt sticking from a double wall of corrugated steel.

I got out of the car at the place where the Cambodian people believe the bones can find no peace. The serenity of large palm trees in the courtyard of the school misled me into a false sense that this was just another tourist attraction. I soon realized my ignorance when I browsed a small visitor’s center that sold the belongings of people murdered by Pol Pot’s revolution.

The plain gray, three-story buildings, which were once high school classrooms, are wrapped in barbwire. In the first classroom I was shocked by the metal frame of a bed and on the wall above the blood stained floor a photograph of a woman’s rotting body found on that bed after the Khmer Rouge fled the city from the approaching Vietnamese army. Crude doorways had been broken through the cinderblock walls of the classrooms to connect them. In another classroom I found a disturbing painting of fifty to sixty people shackled, lined up head to feet along the mustard and white tiled floors, and left to lay in one another’s filth. It’s impossible to wrap my mind around the documented facts that several thousand men were imprisoned and exterminated in this place with their wives and children. The evidence, their bones, is buried nine miles from the city in the infamous killing fields of Choeung Ek.

First the interrogators questioned the prisoners and if they weren’t agreeable to the charges leveled against them they were tortured. Brutalized by ways that seem only plausible in books and movies. Water boarding that inflicted the horror of drowning over and over. Fingernails ripped out by pliers and then the bleeding wounds rubbed in salt. The victim’s screams echoing throughout the classrooms. Others were hung from wrists bound behind their backs until their arms and shoulders separated. Many were immersed in a large wooden box brimming with water that was connected to a live electrical wire. Then, as if it was some sort of sick joke, they were murdered by blunt-force trauma, sharp-force trauma, or gunshot wounds.

The sky had clouded up and the smell of rain filled the air when I tumbled back into the car. I sobbed all the way back to the Hotel Le Royal. Once there, I wandered into the Elephant Bar and after two burning shots of whiskey inspected the well fed, smiling faces around me and wondered what I had done to myself.

This post is an entry in Robert Hrusek's 'What I Learned From a Mountaintop Experience' click hereI traveled to Phnom Penh, the capitol city of the Kingdom of Cambodia, to adopt a child. One morning I made my way through the colonial-styled lobby of the Hotel Le Royal, located just off Monivong Street in the historical center of the city, and out onto the pale gray driveway curving up to the entrance of the hotel. The sticky summer air stunk of gasoline fumes and food carts that lined the street just outside the gates of the hotel. The washed out sky was saturated with the melodious rumblings of a romantic and dangerous Asian city. A thought crossed my mind that somehow I had been transported into a Hollywood movie. Off in the distant I heard the lapping of the Sap River where tiny wooden houses are perched on stilts and rusty Chinese container ships are moored with thick-corded ropes. The river’s muddy water meanders to the Mekong River and fans out across the old battlefields of the Mekong Delta of Vietnam before sweeping out into the South China Sea.

An old black car with caramel colored upholstery pulled up alongside me. Behind the wheel sat a slender man with a small nose and shiny black hair. He introduced himself in perfect English as Hae Kim and then let out a deep-throated laugh, which caused me to wonder about my safety. Nevertheless, I slipped into the back seat, sunk into the soft leather, and began a journey to the high school that Pol Pot turned into death.

Except for a couple of warning horn blasts, my driver made no other sounds during the trip. Once he smacked the car horn at a bright green scooter that darted by burdened with two, chicken-wire bound pigs hanging over the back wheel. He let out another blast at a weaving truck, with five splendid, saffron-robed monks sitting cross-legged on top of a large pile of coconuts, which caused a motorcycle to veer towards us. The cycle’s nearly invisible driver’s face and skinny limbs poked out from an immense bunch of dark green bananas.

Block after block of houses made from unpainted wood passed by the car windows. Outside many of the houses huddled people, their knees up near their chins and their bottoms hovering just above the ground, around open fires with steaming black cooking pots. On the side of one house, between two pale-barked trees, a man sat on a green and white-striped hammock trimming his hair with scissors in one hand and a mirror in the other. Shiny black hair littered the ground underneath his dangling feet.

As we drove past Charles De Gaulle Street, a reminder that Cambodia once belonged to the French Indochina Empire, three naked and squirming boys hopped about a mud puddle. A clothed girl, with a menacing switch in one hand, poured bowls of water over their heads while they scrubbed their skinny bodies with open hands. A woman, wearing a long gold skirt and black blouse, strolled by them with a tall stack of glowing silks perched on top of her head.

We arrived at our destination, the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. Outside the museum’s entrance stood a one-legged man beside an ice cream cart underneath a large red and yellow umbrella. Behind him a yellow-cheeked gibbon, chewing at a purple-flesh fruit, was tied to a bolt sticking from a double wall of corrugated steel.

I got out of the car at the place where the Cambodian people believe the bones can find no peace. The serenity of large palm trees in the courtyard of the school misled me into a false sense that this was just another tourist attraction. I soon realized my ignorance when I browsed a small visitor’s center that sold the belongings of people murdered by Pol Pot’s revolution.

The plain gray, three-story buildings, which were once high school classrooms, are wrapped in barbwire. In the first classroom I was shocked by the metal frame of a bed and on the wall above the blood stained floor a photograph of a woman’s rotting body found on that bed after the Khmer Rouge fled the city from the approaching Vietnamese army. Crude doorways had been broken through the cinderblock walls of the classrooms to connect them. In another classroom I found a disturbing painting of fifty to sixty people shackled, lined up head to feet along the mustard and white tiled floors, and left to lay in one another’s filth. It’s impossible to wrap my mind around the documented facts that several thousand men were imprisoned and exterminated in this place with their wives and children. The evidence, their bones, is buried nine miles from the city in the infamous killing fields of Choeung Ek.

First the interrogators questioned the prisoners and if they weren’t agreeable to the charges leveled against them they were tortured. Brutalized by ways that seem only plausible in books and movies. Water boarding that inflicted the horror of drowning over and over. Fingernails ripped out by pliers and then the bleeding wounds rubbed in salt. The victim’s screams echoing throughout the classrooms. Others were hung from wrists bound behind their backs until their arms and shoulders separated. Many were immersed in a large wooden box brimming with water that was connected to a live electrical wire. Then, as if it was some sort of sick joke, they were murdered by blunt-force trauma, sharp-force trauma, or gunshot wounds.

The sky had clouded up and the smell of rain filled the air when I tumbled back into the car. I sobbed all the way back to the Hotel Le Royal. Once there, I wandered into the Elephant Bar and after two burning shots of whiskey inspected the well fed, smiling faces around me and wondered what I had done to myself.

This post is an entry in Robert Hrusek's 'What I Learned From a Mountaintop Experience' click here