Khmer Rouge Soldiers, Too Much Fruit, and Confused Looking Children

This man was a Khmer Rouge soldier
.

This man marched into Phnom Penh on April 17th, 1975 and told people to evacuate to the countryside, precipitating one of the worst periods of systematic human rights abuses in recent history.

This man is a Buddhist monk.

Difficult to reconcile? We sure as hell thought so. How did we come to spend time with this singularly unique monk?

We (myself and BJ, my roommate) had decided to forego the warm sandy shores of Sihanoukville for the long weekend (being the Queen’s birthday and all of course). Instead, we traveled 5 hours North-East into a province called Kratie (pronounced Krah-cheh) with a co-worker of ours named Khamboly (Boly) Dy and another co-worker named Paree. This is the province that Boly grew up in, and he decided to go visit for the first time in over 2 years, in no small part due to the fact that he was about to move to the States to get a Masters degree.



Kratie has an interesting relationship to the Khmer Rouge, as it was both the first province overtaken by the KR forces, and then the first to fall. Thus, there are many former KR soldiers living in the area, and many of those who helped to overthrow them.



The drive out took us along National Road 4 (NR4) one of (X) number of national highways that sort of criss-cross the country. Considering that this is Cambodia, the road was in remarkable shape. That is, it was paved, wide enough for close to two cars to drive past each other, and had no land mines. Using your horn and steering are essentially the only two skills that you need to have in order to drive in Cambodia. Strategic use of the horn is a must, and there are a number of different and subtle techniques and sounds that you must be proficient in. For instance, if you are driving along a completely open road with no other cars on it, you will toot your horn every 15 seconds or so, to let anything (farmer, child, cow, pig, dog) know that you are coming. If there are other cars on the road, sometimes you will give several short blasts as they approach, apparently to let them know both visually and aurally that you are in fact, oncoming. Dealing with the thousands of motos is a challenge well suited to horn usage, as any time a moto is encountered (which is pretty much at all times) you are (it seems) required to honk at them until you have passed them by, just to make sure they know not to go veering into your lane.

Once you’re out on the open (ahem) road, the scenery unfolds to either side of you like an enormous shag carpet unrolling: sunken rice paddies with murky water and brilliant green shoots of new rice predominate the landscape, only occasionally broken up by a slender, palmy fronded tree standing alone among the fields. Slate gray, rib rippled cows meander about, nibbling here and fertilizing there. Along the road are dozens of wood and thatch shacks, effectively just covered platforms built a few feet off of the ground, intended to provide a little shelter for the workers and sometimes sell any of the many varieties of fruit available throughout Cambodia. Pulling the car over is like a siren song for long-sleeve clad women and children, heads covered in red and white checked scarves, to approach you with baskets full of bread, sticky-rice stuffed into bamboo, and fried spiders the size of your face. If you’re feeling bold (but not spider-eating bold) you can try some durian, the pungent fruit that is banned from public transport in most SEAsian countries due to its ummm…intoxicating scent (quite delicious though)
.

Another interesting feature of the landscape is the dichotomy between the shacks and huts that people call home, and the stupas and pagodas that reside right next to those shacks. The homes, for the most part, are neat wood structures, often 20-30 feet off the ground. They are supported at the base by concrete pylons and usually contain a small concrete patio on which may rest anything from a pack of dogs to enormous clay pots full of rainwater for cooking and cleaning.

The holy buildings, by contrast, are vast white, blue and gold structures, 4 stories high or more, with ornately accented edges and beautifully tiled roofs. The roof tiles are especially of note, as they are usually a pattern of blue, gold, green and red, and tend to be arranged in expanding concentric rectangles. All around the pagodas are individual stupas, large, painted concrete tombs into which the cremated ashes of loved ones are placed. Seeing these ornamental touches next to such humble homes gave me a moment of pause, trying to reconcile the vastly different priorities assigned in my own culture to the appearance of the home vs. that of where we bury our loved ones
.

A final architectural feature of note were the entrances to many of the rice paddies. I wasn’t sure exactly the divisions, but every few kilometers, there would be a narrow, dirt path inbetween the paddies that seemed to demarcate some sort of property line. Notable about them were the structures that guarded the mouth of those roads. Enormous arches, stretched over the road, and where each reached the ground, a long low wall would extend out to the highway. These walls were shaped as dragons, with intricately carved scales, typically ending in a fierce lion or dragons head, seemingly daring anyone to try and cross their path and venture down the dirt road. Clearly we stayed away.

Part of the purpose of our travels was to deliver Boly's textbook to various high schools all around Cambodia. Since 2003, the government of Cambodia has excised from all official school books any mention of the Khmer Rouge period. Boly's book is the first such book that will deal with the Khmer Rouge period and has been written in a scholarly manner that is easily accessible to school-children. At present, the government has given the okay to hand out the books to the teachers to peruse, but has not yet approved the book for the kids. Apparently, the government wants the book cut from its already lean 70 pages to a more politically correct 10-15 pages. There are some other changes that they want as well, and DC-Cam is currently in negotiations to finally get this book out to the schools as broadly as possible. Either way, we stopped a number of times to deliver the books, and it was a moment of pride for Boly to hand over his work to be taught to future generations of Cambodian leaders.


We arrived in Kratie and Boly drove us to his home to surprise his family. Being the masters of planning that we are, he had decided not to tell them that he was coming. Completely unexpectedly, noone was home. No matter, Boly quickly directed us to his uncle’s house, right across the street. There we sat and….sat some more. It seems that on the weekends, at least in Kratie, a popular activity is to gather at a relative’s house, sit on the floor, and not talk. It sounds boring, but it was really very pleasant. Boly has a number of cousins and other uncles who came by to say hello as well, and much of our time was passed trying to convince Lyda (seen below) that we were not the terrifying white apparitions that we appeared to be.

One of the reasons that Kratie is mentioned at all in the guidebooks (albeit for about a page) is because of the rare, Irawaddy dolphins. This is typically where in the post I put up a picture of me doing something stupid with the thing that I am describing. However, in a blow to anti-discrimination activists everywhere the guy sitting at the entrance to the parking lot (I won’t dignify his position otherwise) told us that we each (white guys) had to pay 5 dollars just to get to the edge of the river to try and seek out these mystical, bizarre dolphins, and then a boat ride out to really see them would be another 7 dollars apiece. It was free for the Cambodians. Loudly protesting in both Khmer and English, we roared off into the sunset (well it was noon but whatever).

We decided to go to the 100 columns pagoda, so called because, as you can probably imagine, it has somewhere around 100 columns
.
What is interesting about these columns is that they are mostly made of concrete, where formerly they had been made of wood. We heard a number of conflicting stories relating to the fate of the columns, but largely, the point was that during the Khmer Rouge regime the temple was overtaken and the columns were stolen to be part of a bridge that was later blown up. Since the columns had been there for over 100 years, this was kind of a bummer
.

At a nearby pagoda, we met the monk. With Boly acting as interpreter, he told us his story, it is incredibly complicated and I won’t try to retell it all here as it requires a somewhat intimate knowledge of Cambodian history in the last 25 years, and even though I’ve spent the last month and a half studying nothing but, I still have only a very little idea how everything actually worked. Suffice it to say that this man is a survivor, a leader and a holy man. His story is remarkable not necessarily for the events but for the fact that it is not unlike the stories of many others in this country. Each conversation that I have with people who were alive during the Khmer Rouge regime fascinates and terrifies me, yet I can’t stop asking questions and trying to figure out just what went on here. It is a question one could spend a lifetime answering.

The next morning we loaded up for Phnom Penh, and arrived back just in time to have to justify to everyone why we hadn’t gone to see these ridiculous looking dolphins.



(I am having serious formatting and picture orientation issues these days with blogger. Please bear with me while I curse and scream and pray to Buddha to fix these ridiculous technical issues)

Next: Seriously, some pictures of my office.