Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
We left Siem Reap at 8am this morning to go to Phnom Phen. A taxi picked us up and the trip took 5 hours. Fortunately the road was paved this time and a little bit smoother than yesterdays ride! The countryside was very green. I saw houses built on stilts so that when it floods it won't ruin the main living area. There was plenty of cows around but their cows here are not like back home. Cows are mostly white and I could see the bones sticking out. I was warned not to try the milk here since their pasteurization method isn't like back home but then again I haven't really seen much milk being sold. Plenty of bottled water, fruit juices and soda are sold but that is all. They use fish and vitamin enriched crackers to get their calcium from what I saw. Another thing I noticed about the countryside is that they have plenty of rice fields and their hay is stacked like in the picture of "Little Boy Blue". You know the nursery rhyme: Little boy blue come blow your horn, the sheep's in the meadow the cow's in the corn. And the picture of him sleeping against a hay stack that is piled high like a hill. The ride was pretty uneventful, dusty and long, took several small naps since the car was nicely air conditioned.
When we got to Phnom Phen the traffic was outrageous! The road was still dusty even though it was paved and there were plenty of motorcycles around. People would pile up on the motorcycles and I saw up to 5 people riding them! The house where we're staying at is near the Russian Market and is very typical of a home here. Rectangular in shape and it is built up so you have rooms on every story. Our room is small and has a bathroom with no sink! Another new experience for me was brushing my teeth without a sink I had to aim at the drainage hole and of course I was using a water bottle since it isn't safe for me to even use the water here for brushing my teeth.
We had lunch at the house, which was fried chicken, some kind of green vegetable with a spicy vinegar sauce and rice. After lunch they took us to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Talk about a sobering reality check! The museum showed how cruel Pol-Pot was to his own people. How he would torture them with various methods, the men, women and children. They had various paintings of the cruelty and inhumanity that the Cambodians suffered under that regime. Pictures of how people were tied up like a pig on stick, beaten and then killed were shown. Babies would be torn from their mothers and the hit against a tree viciously or thrown up in the air and shot like clay pots. Oh man it was heart breaking and I don't know if I could go back to the museum again. Once is enough for me! After that we drove out into the countryside to where the Killing Fields were, the place where they buried the people they tortured back at the high school building (which was converted into a museum). There were mass graves of just body parts or heads. A temple filled with skulls found on the grounds commemorated the horrific event on site.
Then we took a ride to visit Mrs. Bibliota (one of the older missionary ladies working here in Cambodia and she visited us when I was about 7 years old in San Jose) who was working out in the countryside near Phnom Phen. Talk about your stereotype mission field! Where Mrs. Bib was like a small community off the side of a main roadway but hidden in the jungle. They had houses made of palm and wood, chickens running loose, cows passing by and dirt roads. Mrs. Bib was teaching English class underneath one of the houses and we met some of her students. They practiced their English on us by asking questions about us, and they spoke it rather well though were a bit of hesitant and un-secure. But it was fascinating! The place where they hold their Sunday services was just a roof, four poles, one wall and a small fenced in area. It reminded me of a stall for an animal which is very different from any meeting hall in the states.
This trip has totally given me a new view on missions! The people who work out in the mission has got to have the biggest heart ever. They live with very little, have to learn a new language and culture and then it may take years before they even have one convert. Such patience! Another thing this trip has done is made me realized how spoiled I am. Here they don't have much and the conditions would be considered poor to us but to them it is enough. They still smile even though their past is horrific, their present situation doesn't afford them much and their future is uncertain. It really tells you what the heart of the people is like! Dinner was at a Khmer food place I found in the Lonely Planet guide: Cambodia. We ate traditional Khmer food and for six people the bill came to about $35. Very cheap! When we were walking around the GrandPalace to digest the food, I saw a stall that was selling fried insects. The spiders still look like spiders and the maggots were just crispy. Gave me the shudders!
- comments