The Killing Fields

Yesterday was my first official day in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I was woken at about 10 a.m. by the ridiculously loud, mechanical ringing of the phone. It turned out to be one of the other LanguageCorps participants who had arrived on Wednesday. He invited me to go out with him and another of the newly arrived girls to visit the Killing Fields. He had all of the arrangements made for transportation already, he said. Though I really did not want to get out of bed just yet, I realized that taking a trip with some of the other students was exactly what I needed in order to assuage my social anxiety about the start of the course on Monday. So I accepted.

The city is hazy with the heat and the dust kicked up by traffic. Though it is the “cool” season, it was already sticky outside. The first thing that struck me was the smell of the city. It is a bizarre mixture: one part incense, one part petrol, one part raw sewage, and one part garbage rotting in the heat. The streets are littered with bags of it, and the majority of locals navigating the roads wear blue hospital masks to avoid the exhaust fumes and dirt. Instantaneously, I loved all of it.

We took a Tuk Tuk, driven by one of the hotel’s regular employees named Smith, a Khmer man who is extremely friendly and has a great sense of humour despite his somewhat limited English. By the time we finished lunch at a local restaurant outside the gates of the Killing Fields, he was already joking with us about how much each of us would charge for a night of “Boom Boom” and how he would charge the most, because he was not “Cheap Cheap.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect at the Killing Fields. I’ll be honest, I was so focused on worrying about whether or not I would even make it this far, I didn’t do a lot of cultural research. We received our audio tour sets and wandered in the direction of the number 1 sign. The first thing you see is the tower monument with glass doors, displaying several stories of human skulls. Like something you would see at the Jeffersonian on an episode of Bones.

The first few audio numbers were clustered very close together around a series of wooden sign posts describing what the multitudes of Pol Pot’s victims would have experienced upon arrival at the execution camp. At first trucks carrying around 30 people came every few days. Then later, they came every day. Despite the sobering information being imparted upon us, I have to say at that point, it was all a little hum drum. The signs stood in place of the actual buildings which had been pulled down after the camp was abandoned by the needy villagers who were desperate for any resources they could find.

It is not until you reach the first pit that the reality of the situation starts to hit you. It’s not a particularly large pit, but the sign cautions you to be careful of bones and scraps of fabric protruding from the earth. Despite the excavation that occurred in 1980, each rainy season continues to bring fragments of the victims ever closer to the surface. Behind the small roped off section, you can see a long femur like bone. But then as you continue on, suddenly you see the multitude of grass covered pits stretching away on either side. There is a small lake at the back side of the field, with an uneven dirt path winding around, flanked by a fence with barbed-wire coiling across the top. A man, missing half of one leg is propped on stilt-like crutches on the opposite side of the fence stretching his hand through the wire. Four young children run along the fence after the tourists, murmuring “some money, some money.” A little further on, a man wades in the shallows of the lake, pulling fragments of bones from the weeds and placing them in the pouch he has made out of his t-shirt.

Rounding the other side of the lake, the path becomes more uneven, and with a jolt, you see the porous shaft of a bone peeking up through the dusty spot you were about to place your foot. A few feet further there is another. The signs now tell you that the men, women, and children that were brought to this camp as “enemies of the state” were not executed with rifles because bullets were expensive. Instead, they were hacked at with whatever farm implements were handy while the loud speakers blared patriotic music at night to cover the sounds of the victims dying.

This time as you return to the tower monument and it’s multitude of skulls, you fully appreciate what it means.

Welcome to Cambodia.