the killing fields

Hello I’m back again but from Phnom Penh, we arrived early yesterday morning and found a little hotel from which I’m writing this blog. In that 1st day we just spent it relaxing from our early morning and caught up on a few Z’s! Phnom Penh is the capital of the country Cambodia its quite a bit hotter than Bangkok and there’s much more poverty and beggars on the streets. It does take a while for it to go in but after over ten beggars came up to asking for money and even more tuk tuk (this is the transport of Cambodia and Asia really, it’s a normal motorbike with a little cart attached to the rear of it.) drivers you do get used to the surroundings. After a good nights sleep (apart from the early wake up from a call for prayer at 5am) we got the hotel driver to drive us around town. The first stop was to the killing fields called Choeung ek genocidal centre, which is a memorial for all those who died twenty odd years ago. I’ll try to explain it to you but I don’t get it that much; In the1970’s the president of Cambodia tried to brainwash the country and turn it into a communist state and of course the were many to disagree so he took them to a remote part of the country and basically mass murdered everyone. We had gone to where it had all been done and it was extremely disturbing there is a 17 floor tower which had shelves of skulls they had dug up from the mass graves (as pictured) they were tortured in ways you couldn’t believe. We had walked round where the graves had been and they had got at least 300 people in a grave (also pictured) they had only found and dug up 20 thousand people which sounds a lot but in total over 3 million people were killed in a space of 3 years(!!) walking a round you could see clothes of the victims which had been rose to the surface naturally because they weren’t put in coffins, we walked past a tree where the children had been beaten to death and another tree where they hung a microphone with music loud enough to drown out the moaning, just thinking about it is making me sick!!

Moving on to a slightly more pleasant matter (we not really) we moved to the prisons and integration rooms which used to be a high school but it got transformed and all the classrooms are now cells ( but of course there don’t still use it) which is called S.21. I didn’t look around as much as I needed too to tell you about it but what I do know is that all the ground floor cells where used as torture chambers and there would be a bed for which someone would be chained to. They had pictures of the dead body on the wall of each cell and there where disturbing. For the interrogation, if you didn’t want to speak they would rope you up and hang you upside down until you lost conciseness and then they dunked you into a bucket of stinky water were you would instantly regain conciseness then the integration would continue. Um… I’m sorry to say that’s all I know about the prison but I’m sure you’ll find out more from my parents.



from joe