Day 19 - RV La Marguerite - 25th September 2014

RV La Marguerite - Day 19 - 25th September 2014 - Thursday

Today we visit The Killing Fields and S21, which stands for Security Office 21, just one of who knows how many official sites for killing people. S21 was once a high school, an innocuous looking place, rather like Chingola High School, about fiftrn minutes drive from The Killing Fields. We have heard various estimates, but in a population of five to six million people, up to two million were executed in the most gruesome, barbaric conditions.

The young man who is our tour guide has excellent English, and recounts the 'sad story' as he calls it, with compassion and quite factually. He advises us that we don't have to go in, we can sit outside under the shade of mango trees, but I think this is a part of history which cannot and should not be ignored.

You can read of this horrendous time in our recent history, but I will share a few images.

The place has a silence about it, the reverence one reserves for a place of worship. Yet not all visitors are respectful, and I have to stop myself from smacking people who talk and laugh out loud, wear revealing clothes, or smoke.

We were advised to wear enclosed shoes 'because of the bones'. Wherever we walk along footpaths, there are shards of bones and teeth, constantly being unearthed by weather and people the remains of thousands and thousands of people, buried in mass graves. We are walking over the bones of someone's father, daughter, mother.

A mangy dog, under a tree gnawing on a bone. A human bone.

The Killing Tree, where they crucified babies and little children, pinning them to its trunk, and then beating and clubbing them to death. Little children, OMG. It is covered in brightly coloured circles of string, offerings of respect from visitors.

Rags of clothing, clustered at the foot of a tree, floated to the surface during heavy rains. A frilled yellow dress to fit a three year old behind a glass enclosure, blood stained.

Because they were killing so many, so quickly, and bullets were expensive, each victim knelt at a hole exploded in the ground, and was smashed upon the head with a hoe or a heavy bamboo, then toppled into that grace. If the guards refused to kill, they themselves were killed, and so they killed. Could you continue to do this even if your life was threatened, I ask myself? Surely death would be preferable to bludgeoning to death your nation, your family and friends - fathers killed sons, uncles killed mothers, children killed parents - nobody was safe. Nobody trusted anybody else, not mother and child, nor husband and wife, and betrayal was rife. All intellectuals were killed, all doctors, musicians, mathematicians, all libraries were demolished, homes destroyed, people were tortured from 1974 - 1978 ???

The Gallows, a huge wooden construction where unspeakable acts of cruelty were perpetrated.

Room after room with a gruesome black and white photos of just some of the victims,wearing numbers stitched to their clothing, or their skin. Yes, stitched to their skin. The numbers are duplicated, so it's impossible to verify the numbers who died. Photos too of the dead in rigor mortis, eyes open, floor bloodied, bodies smashed and striped with torture.

The torture rooms and beds, the windows sealed to filter out the noise of the torturous screams, and the floor still stained with blood. This was a high school once, and the classrooms have had a wall built down the centre to make two rooms, in here fifty people lived, writhing in a mass like eels in a basin, fighting for air and space. They followed instructions to the letter, there was one small tin for toileting, and if you had diarrhoea and missed the tin, you were forced to eat it to clean up the mess.

A monument to the dead, grey stone, we buy flowers and incense for a dollar, and head inside. The overweight cannot enter, it is a narrow winding walk around glass cases fifty feet high, each one filled with skulls, each with a hole where they were clubbed, neatly arranged in rows, like cabbages in the market place. Rocks and racks of shin bones and thigh bones, varying from white to dark brown, a a ghostly and ghastly display of the evil man perpetrates against man.

Buddhist monks clad in orange, posing for photos, I ask if I may too? I reach and place my hand gently on his back, a la Paul Keating with the Queen, and the young monk reels back, saying 'You must not touch me!' I apologise. I learn later it is bad karma. So sorry, mate. He smiles for the photo, and beckons a young boy to come and take a picture of us, this Buddhist monk kid has the latest I pad and is clearly skilled. I have to laugh.

I am relived to leave this place, and so glad I went. It reminds of of when I was 17 years old and visited Dachau, there is a huge black and white photo that still haunts me, of a mother leading a small boy who looks excited by the prospect of an outing, he is wearing a jacket way too big for him. But the eyes of the mother told me she knew where she was going.

Lunch on board ship, a brief rest and writing, and off to see the Royal Palace and The Silver Pagoda, then to Central Markets.

WORK ON THIS

I have been trying with minimal success to contact Colleen Kennedy, as Lyn Doolan tells me she is now living and working in Phnom Penh, in an orphanage by day, and an Italian restaurant by night. Colleen and I met about twenty years ago at Landmark Education in Sydney, where many of my extraordinary friends and friendships hail from. In 1997, she was a coach for me when I was leading the Self Expression and Leadership Program, at the same time that Lyn coached for me. She also did her Results Coaching Systems coach training about the same time I did, and I remember her merry eyes, great laugh, a deep compassion and can do attitude. I am sure she is causing good stuff here. Finally we connect, via FB and messenger, and despite the fact she has a friend arriving this morning from Australia to do some work here, we arrange to meet. Her friend declines, exhausted, but with the help of Frederick, the ships manager, and his phone, at 6.30 pm Colleen is tripping up,the gangplank with me, wearing a purple dress, a purple head dress, carrying a purple handbag, and wearing high heels. She looks gorgeous. The heels she explains, are very special, the first time she has worn them in Phnom Penguin, she had them made here, and just for 'such a special occasion as this!' We hug and laugh and exclaim, I remember her love of fun, and our relationship is instantly reinstated, all these years later. How amazing is that? I ask her, is this work you are doing another one of Landmark's projects? No, she says, laughing loudly, and asks, isn't all of life a Landmark project after you've done the work? Well, yes!

We cannot talk as the Cambodian dancing has already begun, we are late, the traffic in the tuk tuk was bad she says, so we make a discreet entrance, and sit a way back for where Gerald is guarding four select seats in the front row. The dancing is exquisite, beautiful tiny adolescents with eyes like does and clad in fabrics of gold and with rouged lips and slender, flexing hands are mesmerising. During a break we take our reserved seats in the front row, and clap loudly and applaud the many wonderful,things we see, a fish dance, a flirtatious courtship involving fishing baskets and coquettish eyes, and a randy young fisherman intent on getting the girl, a des duly fast dance performed over four long solid poles, with feet leaping agilely between them as they crash loudly together a feat of timing and daring, easy to break an ankle or leg in this dance, and I decide not to take up this particular exercise. And then we are invited to join the dancers on stage, in a bumbled, clumsy, unruly attempt at imitating their graceful and elegant movements, but Colleen and I are up in an instant, shortly joined by the group, all the while insisting no no no, yet loving every moment. I know I give these women permission to be a bit bold, they like it and I like it. I don't have to be leading the Landmark Self Expression and Leadership Program, or a program for World Youth, or even Results Coaching - to make a difference.

The loose plan had been to go to the Italian restaurant Colleen works in, but acting on instinct, seeing how glammed up she has got for this visit, I ask her if she would like to have dinner on board with us, despite already having informed reception we would be going ashore. Her eyes light up, there is a flimsy resistance, and she says yes. In an instant, Frederick organises it for me, I say I am happy to pay for her meal and drinks but he shakes his head no, I think he fancies Colleen.

Dinner is spectacular, we sit at a booth for four, she is shining, and remembering my time in Lombok, I know how she must be loving this western, sophisticated night out with old friends. We dine on duck a mind blowing duck entree, then a prawn consommé, ???? and tropical fruit, washed down with copious quantities of Italian wine. After dinner, we show her our decadent Indochina Suite, and some of the facilities.

But it's the talk at dinner that I love most, about what she is doing, the challenges she is facing, the overwhelming confront of the size of the project she has taken on, her ill health - she nearly died a few months ago of Dengue fever, her three 'carers' forgot about her, and she was alone, with a dangerously high fever, no food, and more importantly no water, for several days ..... She speaks of a 'lack of nurturing' in the culture, and the number of NGO's who are corrupt and lining their own pockets, she listens generously to an abbreviated version of our sad end with World Youth International, she talks with great emotion about the children she is here to serve, tears in her eyes, and the myriad of problems they face, the lack of support she has from government and the corruption and bribery which abounds. We are riveted.