This is a tough one...Cambodia

We have arrived in Cambodia.   Cambodia is the country where the Khmer Rouge was in power, most tragically during the mid-70s for a little more than 3 years.  During that time, more than 2 million Cambodians died.  Many died of starvation because they were not allowed to eat the rice they grew, because they did not own it, and it was sent overseas.  Over 17 000 of them were tortured and executed at a detention centre called "S-21", in the middle of Phenom Penh, the capital.  It is now called the "Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum" and Nathan and I visited there.   Before the Khmer Rouge took it over, S-21 was a high school.  It looks like many other schools in the area, except for the razor wire across the corrugated iron fences.  It is strange, after going to Tuol Sleng, to look at all of the other schools around and remember the atrocities that happened in one of them.    S-21 was a horrible place.  At its height, 100 people were killed per day.  Bludgeoned to death, or whacked on the head and throats cut.  There are rooms where the people were tortured, where you can see the iron bars that their ankles were shackled to.  They were tortured until they admitted to whatever crimes they were accused of, whether they were guilty or not.  Their bodies were dumped in the Killing Fields, where thousands and thousands of skulls have been recovered.  Do you know that the people here in Cambodia believe that if a body is buried without a proper funeral then the souls of their loved ones become ghosts and can never find peace?    I won't go on too much about what it was like.  My soul feels bruised.  There are rows and rows of pictures of the people who were inmates there.  The Khmer Rouge documented.  Children with sad, empty eyes (how could these toddlers be enemies of the state?); teens, some eyes defiant, some just dead; adults who look at the camera with hate.  There are a few pictures of stark terror.  And you know that this is not a face that was put on for a movie or because the photographer said "look scared".  This was a look because the person was utterly, unconsolably terrified.  And they had reason to be.   I walked through the rows and rows of pictures with tears in my eyes.  But I knew that I could not cry, because if I started, I would not be able to stop.  Plus, I think it might have started a chain reaction with everyone else there, who, quite frankly, seemed to just be hanging on to the grief simmering below the surface.  How could this have happened, AGAIN?  I owe it to these victims to look at these pictures so that someone will continue to remember.  But I did not want to look.  I did not want to see our continued inhumanity.    And this happened recently.  When I was 6 years old there were 6-year-olds dying in S-21.  Every Cambodian alive today has a direct relationship to those years, those tragic, horrible years when anyone who was literate, who could speak another language, who had any higher position in government, who was a medical person, who WORE GLASSES...anyone who might be educated at all was hunted down and put to death.  They were a threat to the new regime.    Yet these people smile at us.  They get on with their lives.    However, the wounds are still only superficially healed.   We were talking to someone here who works with the Peace Corps.  She says that they were interviewing people for new local jobs and wanted to see how well people could write English.  One of the questions was "tell us something about your family".  They did not talk about their spouses or their children.  They innumerated how many of their family had died during the regime.  Fourty years ago.    We are so lucky.  Most of us have never gone hungry.  We have never been hunted because we are educated.  We have never been accused of something that we did not do.  We have never cried because we fear that our family member is being tortured.  It is quite possible that in this country, anyone my age or older has experienced all of those things.  And you know that this kind of trauma will be handed down for generations to come.   And yet these people can still smile at us in the street.  They are getting on with their lives. They are living.    We are so lucky.  So, so lucky.   This is not a very "up" Christmas email, I know.  I debated waiting to send it.  But when, exactly, is a good time to hear about this kind of thing?  The more we travel, the more I come to realize that we as westerners take so many things for granted.  Not just things like hot showers and flush toilets.    We can get together with friends and family for a meal.  Some people have no friends or family because they are dead.  Some people can't get together for a meal because they have no food.  Some people are not allowed to gather because their government forbids it.   So when you are getting together with your friends and family for a meal, look at them and look at the food and be thankful that you live where you live, were born wherever you were born.  I am so thankful.    "For there, but for the grace of god..."   May this season bring you nothing but joy. ACDB For those of you who get these messages directly from me, you should check the blog site, as Nathan has posted some pictures.  http://ad-zen.blogspot.com