'It was precisely the renunciation of self that was my project.'

After Angkor Wat, we rode to Phnom Penh, Cambodia's shining capital...well, the capital anyway. The most difficult part of the trip came next, because we had to be serious for about 24 hours. We visited the killing fields, the monument to the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in the 70's. Sent here from the prisons in Phnom Penh (which we later visited), or any number of other cities where they had been tortured, this was their final stop. It was truly sobering for me to sit there wondering how people are able to sink so low. As you walk around this hallowed ground, you can still see bone and cloth fragments from the victims of this genocide that surface because of the rain, almost as if nature itself is still slowly reminding us about the atrocities that went on there. The central monument is a tower containing human skulls of those who were murdered here. Several times as I was there I just couldn't keep going, and would force myself to sit down and just stop thinking about death.

As if all of this wasn't terrible enough, the worst part for me occurred as we exited the museum. We boarded our tuk tuk, and as usual were approached by several children asking for money. I had worked my face into a sort of blind numbness by this point because there had been so much of this at Angkor Wat. I still really don’t know how to react to begging children, or begging people…I realistically don’t have enough money to give even a little to everyone I see who asks, but how can I turn my back on someone in need when I’m justifying buying a trip to Thailand? ('freedom is all too often self-deception among people'). Then it happened. The children showed that they really did just want/need help by asking for simply water. And I, still in my blind stupor, coldly said no. One of the people with us (left anonymous, sort of) wasn't so blind, and gave them his water. Seeing this shook me out of my numbness, but too late. As the tuk tuk pulled away I looked back at the kids, rejoicing over their clean water. That’s when it all sort of came together in a self-incriminating rush—the killing fields, the prisons, the begging children. All of this can happen when we decide to not see what’s happening right in front of us. I am a human being, and am therefore capable of sinking just as low as others if I allow it to happen. Or I can decide that I AM a human being, and am capable of showing sympathy. Most of the time my choices end up somewhere in the middle of the extremes of human capacity. 

That was hard to write, and surely hard to read. Here's something I think we can all enjoy:

You can't really tell, but that's a cockroach in my hand, soon to go in my mouth. It was actually not terrible. The larva I ate before that was much worse.

All quotations from Franz Kafka's 'A Report to an Academy'