Genocide

We went to Boat Noodle for lunch--we got four different things to share and it was only $5! That's including a beverage. YUM YUM!

We went to the prison museum yesterday. It used to be a high school, and then in 1975 the Khmer Rouge turnd it into a prison and torture place. Of the 20,000 people that went through it, only 7 survived. They had converted the classrooms into prison cells. The torture rooms had bed frames that people had been strapped to and tortured. Each room had a picture of how it was found with the dead person in it after it had been shut down. There were still blood stains on the floor. We walked in all the rooms. In another building the first floor has the classrooms slit up into cells about 2m X 8m large, separated by brick. The next floor was the same but made of wood. The top floor was closed to the public, but had been mass holding cells.
Outside there were 12 graves of the people that had been found dead there when the prison was abandoned (most people were taken to the killing fields to be executed). In one of the buildings (there were 4 in all), they had photos upon photos of the victims there. The Khmer Rouge had originally been photographing and labeling each person that went through. There are thousands upon thousands of people who did not have their picture taken later on.
It was almost too hard to look at all of their faces, especially little toddlers, and women with their infants on their laps. There were also brutal close-ups of the dead. It is hard to imagine that the city we are in today has this horrible past just 30 years ago, and that many of the people we pass on the streets lived to remember this. About 1/4 of the population was wiped out nation-wide.

After this sobering adventure, we went to Wat Phnom, a temple in the city. The temple, which was set on a small hill, wasn't very big, but it was quite beautiful and the land around it was amazing. There were monkeys roaming about, and some people fed them. Raina got really close to one much to Jordan's disliking and got a picture with it. We watched them most of the time that they were there.
At the top of the steps of the temple there was a blind man whose arms ended at his elbows. On one of them a bucket was held. We have been told not to give money or food because it only perpetuates this way of life and complicated reasons like that, but it was so hard to just walk past these people like this. Children will come up and beg, and we have to ignore them so that they will go away.
There were more people selling birds here, this time a group of boys. A group of boys like any in the US, but they had to sell birds at a $1 a piece to get money.

Today we are going to the NGO Little Sprouts, for toddlers and young kids, most of whom are HIV/AIDS positive, for a few hours.

Later!
Raina and Jordan