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'
