The Killing Fields

Today we arrived in the Vietnamese town of Chau Doc via the Mekong River from Phnom Penh. We started out from Phnom Penh in a mini bus with a race car driver who couldn't get enough of the horn, then got on a great little boat that took us to the border, where we switched to an even better boat. An enjoyable ride which gave us an idea of the typical Vietnamese river life: rice fields and floating fish pens. The minute we crossed the border almost all the women had those great conical hats and we knew we were in Vietnam.

Arriving into Vietnam after the past few days in Cambodia feels wonderful. We really loved Cambodians though and we will miss their easy laughter and smiles. But the days we spent in Phnom Penh were gut wrenching at times because we spent a lot of time learning about the horrific past of the Khmer Rouge days. We visited the Toul Sleng Museum and the nearby killing fields. Toul Sleng was once a high school that the Khmer Rouge used as a prison where they performed unspeakable torture on their victims before taking them to fields to be murdered and thrown into mass graves. We also watched the movie "The Killing Fields" and now I'm reading First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung. I think I will be done with my education after reading the book because it is so sad to read and listen to these first-hand accounts of Pol Pot's regime of terror. Estimates of the number of Cambodians that died during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) range from 700,000 to 3 million people depending on if you count the number of people that starved to death or were killed by American carpet bombing of the border regions. No one really knows, but it equals roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of the population. Pol Pot wanted to create, overnight, a communist agrarian society where people worked the rice fields and no class system existed. In reality, they drove people living in urban areas out into the country and made them second-class citizens to the rural peasants, so they really just inverted the class system. They split up families and killed anyone suspected of having any sort of education. Almost thirty years later, Cambodia is still recovering and doesn't feel nearly as prosperous as neighbors Thailand and Vietnam.