Nation of Orphans

This is a beautiful place.

I bit warm for an Oregonian, but not too much so.


The rice fields are really taking off, people are still planting... and it is so very green.


The skies fill with thunderheads every afternoon, lightning dances across the sky...


There is history here... written in stone... and written in the absence of the elderly.

I have been dropped into Southeast Asia, immersed in a new environment, surrounded by a different culture, and it has been beautiful and fascinating and horrid.

It has been a profound experience for me. It is something I shall never forget.

Much of it has been quite fun. I have joined the foreigners in dining and enjoying the exotic, though I am embarrassed by my fellow world travelers who ignore the hurtful truth and have taken advantage of poverty.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Let me show you some of my day today.


Look closely at the above photograph. There are three buildings here I wish to discuss. One on the left edge, one in the center, and the third to the far right, just to the other side of the buses.


This is the building from the left. It is a fairly new temple set on the foundations of a temple built nearly a thousand years ago. Within are murals and an altar surrounded with smooth clean stone.


I was offered an incense for the buddha enthroned within. I did not wish to offend my hosts. So... I knelt and I prayed:

"Heavenly Father... Creator of all things... I kneel within this man made temple, built to honor an illusion, and I see it is no more than a thing... plaster and stone and gold... And I know that you see clearly through this mirage of confusion people have constructed here... I know You are the maker of all things, and I know Your heart aches for these people. I pray, Lord... bless these people, help them Lord and lift them from their misery, help them to draw near to You. I praise You O Lord God. Bless my sons, bless my home, bless my nation, bless this nation, help all of us Lord, from those who have never heard of you to those who have but do not listen. Accept my offering of praise, Lord. Thank you for all You have done for me... I am Yours Lord. Bid me and I will obey..."

This building was a high school at the same time I was in high school. I graduated in 1974. In 1975 the Kmer Rouge rolled into this place, and this became a prison. Not the sort of prison where people served time and were sent away after their punishment. In this prison men and women were chained to the floor, and in a week or so, after dying of thirst, their bodies were dragged into the courtyard and thrown into the well.

This distresses me. While I was adventuring, hitchiking along the West Coast, hiking through Yosemite, blithely enjoying the senseless, carefree life of a teen in a land where I was free to do as I please... people lay here, their tongues thickening... dying. I do not know enough about the truth of the history of this time when I was off being irresponsible. That will change. I will learn of this and remember.

These are stulpas. They are common throughout Southeast Asia. Many families have several on their lands. Within them are urns holding the ashes of their loved ones. It is their form of a graveyard.

There is a special stulpa here. One with glass walls to show the world what happened here.


This stulpa stands as a monument, the details described for suddenly sobered tourists.

Somnang, my dtuk dtuk driver asked if I wanted to have my picture taken here. I was tempted to tell him no. This isn't something to get a photo of so one has a souvenir of the exotic to show the folks back home. But...

But... in memory of those who suffered here, I can do the small distasteful act of placing myself in a photo, a recognition that I live, that I enjoyed life while this had happened. I took my hat off. I did not smile. I sat for the photo.


After the Kmer Rouge had been routed, after the the horror, people came here, emptied the well of those bones, and placed them gently behind these panes of glass.


It disgusts me.

It makes my heart ache to think of the suffering...

Somnang took me to the Cambodia War Museum.



Above this flag of the Kmer Rouge are a few uniforms of who opposed them. If you look closely you will see the holes in the fabric, the blood stains.


And this... this is so horrid I can barely tap these words into this keyboard. These rifles, made by mighty nations, represent great evil. Do you see the bayonets?

Snake venom was spread on those blades. Infants were tossed into the air and speared with them. There is a tree nearby famous for the thousands of babies who were smashed against its trunk.

Oh... It aches just to write these words. But avoiding such words, ignoring such evil truths, is wrong. In this beautiful land... I see why 50% of those in this country are younger than 21.

It is easy to look the other way.

I was told I was the first westerner to have come here in days. Many others here are enjoying the food and women and spectacles, but don't come down the narrow road to witness what evil can do.


I was shown many things here. All sorts of weapons. Guns that could hit targets 27 kilometers away.

The man who started this museum served in this war, served the Kmer Rouge. He was shackled and led with others to that prison above, and an officer asked if any of them could drive a tank. He said he could. They told him he would drive that tank, the one in the next photo, until, as he was told, they won the war. He survived by joining those who killed his friends and neighbors.


He had stopped the tank to relieve himself, and his friend moved the tank on a bit further to get a better view of the terrain. An anti tank mine destroyed that tank. Killed his friend. That is his friend's thigh bone on the tank. Finger bones are to the right.


There was a sample mine field there. Even over the short grass the trip wire was nearly impossible to see.


There was a good representation of types of land mines.... Bouncing Bettys, anti-personnel, claymores, anti-tank.


The war still claims victims. My guide, Kohn, helped his family when he was a little boy by dragging bits of metal home to be sold as scrap. He was told they could not be hurt because his father had a special tattoo across his back, a dedication to the gods who would protect him and his family.

One day one of those pieces of mechanical evil killed his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, took his arm.

There wasn't much in the way of medicine to help him. Someone cut the stump clean. He still carries shrapnel around his heart, bits of metal which ache in cold weather.

His father's family came, and since there was no one else to claim the land, they sent Kohn to the monks. After a while the monks sent him to a Christian school which taught him English.

He says no one will hire him because tourists don't want to see cripples. He says no girl will go out with him. He says the only things he has left are a determination to tell the world the truth of his history, mostly to his community, people too young to know it first hand, and his faith in the Christian God who despises the evil men do.

This is a horrid post. It describes things which turn my stomach.

I recall the young girl yesterday... probably not yet 12, who was angry because I would not step into the role of one more abuser in her life.

This is a beautiful land. This is a place where people smile and hope the farangs from far away will leave some of their wealth. This is a place where most are too young to know fully the horrors that happened here, and those fortunate few who survived avoid speaking of it.

I don't think this experience will seem to change much of who I am, what I do when I return to my home in the Willamette Valley. But I think, it will be something that will help me to be just a little more fervent in worshiping my God, a little more focused on my students, the children I am charged to instruct, a little more grateful for all the blessings which have flowed over me all my life.

I won't forget this nation of orphans.