Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap

January 18, 2015

Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap

[Originally posted Jan 18, 2014]

Vientiane, Laos. Chillax. I think that's the best word to describe the capital city of one of the five remaining communist countries in the world. Chillax. As in chill and relax. When we arrived a couple days back I imagined we had snuck up on southern California from maybe 70 years ago. A lot of laid back folks, good street food, and instead of the beach the Mighty Mekong River. A couple days there until a flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Cambodia uses the US dollar as currency, which really puts a damper on my ability to barter. It's easy to haggle over the price of a tuk-tuk when you're bartering between 40 or 50 or 60 Indian rupees. But when a guy tells me a ride is $2, I just have a hard time saying, "No, how about $1.75."

On April 17, 1975 Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, Cambodia. On that day, kids put down their toys and men left their shops and lined the streets, cheering their arrival. They assumed their civil war had come to an end. They were wrong. Three days later, 90% of the 400,000 inhabitants had all been forced from their homes into the countryside. For Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, April 17, 1975 was year zero. They day he would restart civilization and build an agrarian communism. His plan was to remove all education, religion, business and family and create a new people who basically did two things: grew rice and pledged their allegiance to the state. Anyone of mixed ancestry was killed, those who wore reading glasses were killed (they spent too much time away from the fields), if you had an education or knew a foreign language, also killed. (Which is strange cause Pol Pot was educated in France and spoke French). Over the next three years a quarter of Cambodia's then 8,000,000 population would die, either buried in one of the hundreds of mass graves throughout the country or starved to death (Pol Pot sold much of the grown rice to China in exchange for weapons to maintain military control).

Seventeen kilometers south of Phnom Penh is Choeung Ek, the mass grave associated with the Tuol Seng Prison in Phnom Penh. Tuol Seng, or S-21 as it was commonly called, was the Khmer Rouge's infamous torture chamber and prison. During Pol Pot's reign of horror, he became possessed by the idea that others were in league with the CIA or KGB. As soon as he suspected this behavior (in either a man who had been a farmer all his life or someone inside his inner circle) they were sent to S-21 and tortured. The only way to end the torture was to confess to wrongs they didn't commit. Then, around 6:30pm, a couple times a month, 50-70 people were loaded into trucks, told they were being taken to a "new home" and delivered to the killing fields. Under the loud drone of a diesel engine and blaring Khmer Rouge Party music, mass graves were filled and covered before morning. About 20,000 people were killed in Choeung Ek. As Katy and I walked through the site, a peaceful, but tragic, calm was present. These people's lives were ruined, but the torture was over. A sign on the trail read, Don't Step on Bones, next to some bones that had slowly made their way to the surface during the yearly rainstorms. Further down the trail a couple teeth were seen on the trail. It's impossible for me to look at other people in this country and have any idea what someone their life might be like. Every time I see a Cambodian, I think to myself, "Is that person forty?" Cause if they are older than forty they lived through something more horrible than I can even imagine. Then I wonder, were they on the being killed or the killing side? Were their family members innocently killed? Or did they ruthlessly kill others, possibly with pickaxes in order to save precious bullets, so they wouldn't be killed themselves?

Then, something a little more cheerful happened, we went to the airport and met . . . . . . my parents. Whoa. It was a realization that back home still exists and in three short months we will be there.

We spent the last three days with them at Angkor Wat in Siem Reap. Angkor Wat is the largest temple complex in the world (and since we are a temple loving people, and also Vishnu loving people, we thought it might be nice to pay a visit). My parents spent a lot of time arguing over the more industrious people - the Khmers who built Angkor Wat in 35 years or the Mormons who built the Salt Lake temple in 40 years. My father asked our guide a host of questions about the temple (all the temples happen to be Hindu temples, and since my father's recent visit to India, he has become a bit of a Hindu devotee) but most questions were answered by a sentence similar to, "We think they kept records that talked about stuff like this, but all the records were looted." Where did the heads of these statues go? Looted. Did something used to be here? Looted.

At church this morning, a lady in an orange and blue plaid shirt and peculiar green pants that kind of looked like pajama pants got up from her seat in front of us to give the final talk of sacrament meeting. It didn't look like she wasn't wearing shoes as she walked up the aisle and it appeared that many years of hard work had taken a toll on her. She began to speak (all translated through a headset by a missionary) and talk about her difficult life at home, poverty, a son who drinks too much, her conversion to the church three years ago and her resilience to push on. She started crying at the pulpit, and they weren't tears of fleeting emotion or spiritual sensitivity. She cried about how difficult her life had been. I can only imagine why she might have been there without a husband. I can't imagine what it might be like to live in real poverty. I got the feeling this lady has never taken a hot shower or laid down under clean sheets. She's probably never been on a vacation and will never sit down to dinner in a restaurant. In LDS circles, people often say things like, "oh, but in the next life all of this will be made right." How will a life of suffering and a life of prosperity and ease be "made right?"

Contrary to the difficulty of Cambodia, or maybe because of it, the first thing you notice when you fly into Cambodia (or Laos) is the friendliness of these people. I think friendliness of strangers increases in direct ratio to the distance we have travelled away from the United States. Cambodians (and Laotians) other enduring trait is a love of laughter. Our tuk tuk drivers, waiters, guides, church members, everyone we meet can't get through a couple sentences without a chuckle here or there. Although, if you get them speaking about how they feel about the Israelis, Chinese or Koreans they will definitely speak their mind.

Today we all flew from Siem Reap to Luang Prabang, Laos. Laos is enchanting. After Slovenia, it is #2 on my list of "places I knew nothing about the day I entered them but now absolutely love."