Soo Sdey from Cambodia! It’s been a while, I know, so thought it was time to check in again – mum you must be pulling your hair out. Am writing you this from Phonm Penh, having left my heart in Vietnam. What an amazing place Vietnam is, and I learned so much about the culture there and their unique way of life. Oh and silk. I am going to be well into excess baggage charges at this rate!
But Cambodia is an entirely different story and today’s blog is one of heartbreak. I have been here a day and feel like I’ve been traumatised beyond belief.
I start the day yesterday as usual, negotiating a price for a tuc tuc to take me around the city, not really having an expectation for the day.
I visit the Genocide museum which was once a school; if you try hard you can picture children laughing, playing in the courtyard. Only when you scan around the courtyard to the buildings that surround, which during the genocide were turned into torture chambers and a prison for thousands of innocent Cambodians, you are left feel the pain and suffering.
It almost screams out from the walls inside, the torture tools are left as they were, the tiny cells with rows of shackles are still intact and the walls are filled with photographs of the dead, tortured, raped and starved. I actually had to take a moment, get myself outside into the open air, because my stomach turned and I felt I would be sick; with tears welling up I literally doubled over and retched in the courtyard.
I sat for a moment, long enough for a kid to sit beside the crazy westerner lady with her head in her hands and tears streaking down her face, and so the patter begins again, ‘lady, what you name?’, ‘how old are you?’, ‘you have family?’.
Now instead of seeing him as a pest after my spending money, I see before me a kid, with no ancestors to speak off, wiped out by the Khmer Rough. No Grandparents, parents who have endured a lifetime of pain, witnessed people grotesquely toss aside without any feeling of humanity and torture. So it's at this moment I could have given him the clothes of my back, no amount of money will help, but it's all I can offer. I give him what he's come over for, the dollars he begs for.
Ok, so no sooner have I done so, when I've 10 or so kids around, probably because my new little friend, Tom, has told the other kids you see the crazy crying lady on the bench, by the blossom tree, she gives you dollars for free!
What a day. I have decided that for tomorrow I won’t go explore another town or go off trekking. I am going to do a day of volunteer work at a local orphanage so I can help in any way that I can.
Sorry for the depressing post, I just wanted to share this experience with you all.
