Thursday 15th December: History & Culture

A great day today! The team was back on song and only had the concreting left to do and some final finishing touches on the fence and that was not going to occupy 16 people.  Sundara suggested that we might like to visit the Battambang Killing Fields; there were some old temples on the way as well which he said were worth visiting.  So we decided that we would split the group in half and one group would start on the concreting whilst the other half would visit the Killing Fields and then we would swap around in the afternoon. There were also some girls who wanted to work in the school in the afternoon so we sorted out the groups and we were away.  2 tuktuks were booked for 8.30am and the first group set of with Sundara.  We stopped on the way at the atelier where the women from the refuge work at weaving and sewing.  Some of the girls had a go at the looms although the women made sure there was no thread in the shuttles before they had a go!  Wise move.  We all bought scarves as they were so pretty and very cheap and also because we knew who had made them so that made them more special.

Then onwards through the villages to the Killing Fields Monument.  It was very interesting driving through the villages in the tuktuk and having time to look in more detail at the houses and the people.  It was also great being able to ask Sundara questions and find out more about the way of life; how the houses mainly have electricity (although the wiring looks decidedly dodgy!) but no running water.  Mostly they don’t have wells and will use the river for washing and cooking, some of them have large drums that they collect the rainwater to use for cooking and washing.  Drinking water is all bought bottled. Most are subsistence farmers who grow enough to live on or they form part of a cooperative and will pool resources, maybe farming different crops and then exchanging or trading.  The big concrete house that look so grand next to the simple wooden ones are apparently relatively cheap to build but those people tend to be asset rich but have little cashflow and are dependent on their harvest each year to pay off debts.

We saw one village close to the river where the main activity was salting fish which is a staple Cambodian food, in an other area we saw strange circular grid contraptions which they use for drying the rice paper used for making spring rolls.  I hadn’t realised until yesterday  when the tuktuk driver stopped  to refuel that the stalls on the side of the road that have racks of pop bottles filled with murky looking liquid are actually selling petrol for bikes and scooters!  Sundara also told us that the shrines that are at almost every house – ornate red and gold  creations – they were originally there to bring good luck and protect the household from evil spirits.  He believes that they remain more out of superstition than religion but they are a part of the culture.

We stopped again at a temple, this one was much newer but there was a huge statue next to it and a much older ruined temple behind it. Unfortunately we had to pay to go in and so everyone decided to give it a miss.  I feel bad that we didn’t when Sundara told us that it was the temple where his wife had been imprisoned during the Pol Pot years.  She had succeeded in escaping but he says he never knew how.  Apparently many of the temples were appropriated by Pol Pot and used as prisons.  Sundara’s family were also forced to leave their home and had to endure quite a different life to what they were used to, some of them, like Sundara survived the horrors but other family members were killed.  He ended up in a refugee camp on the Thai border and eventually emigrated to Australia which is where he has lived until recently.  He is currently on a two year sabbatical working for the Australia Volunteer Organisation and is the supervisor for this area. He is a fascinating man to talk to and clearly has an amazing story to tell although he would modestly say it is not dissimilar to many other Cambodian survivors. He was very emotional at the Killing Fields and has many frustrations about the way that the Cambodian people view the Pol Pot era and how little they seem to care about remembering the past and keeping the memory of the atrocities alive for the next generation.  He says that they are a very forgiving people but the harsh reality is that this could be just a way of being able to cope with the horrors. Look at how the Germans tried to erase the Nazi era from their history books through shame and a feeling of extreme guilt of their own generation.  However, the ruling party at the moment in Cambodia is the Cambodia People’s Party which is made up of the “left overs” (Sundara’s words) of the Khmer Rouge.  When you consider that the majority of the intellectual elite of the country, the doctors, teachers, lawyers, were annihilated by Pol Pot then the country folk, the farmers and other agricultural workers, the unskilled workers are those that are left.

The Killing Field memorial itself is very moving.  It tells the story of 1975 – 1979 through a series of bas relief sculptures around the monument.  As in Pnomh Penh, there is a tower with skulls and other bones visible through glass.  The bas relief are graphic and tell the story as it was leaving little to the imagination.  What saddens Sundara, though, is the neglect of a monument erected to remember the horrors of that time.  The lip-service paid to the rehabilitation of a country whose intellectual base and essentially its future growth were destroyed and the money piled into a legal battle to bring the perpetrators to account that amounts to a media circus that benefits nobody. This Killing Field really brought home the reality of the horrors and helped us all to understand a little more clearly the history of this beautiful country.  I could go on but it is late and I am weary.  Hopefully I will remember everything I learned today….

The afternoon saw us working to complete another section of concreting – not a very professional job but given the tools at our disposal and our limited knowledge and experience of laying concrete we think we have done a decent job!  This evening we went to the circus which was fantastic.  It wasn’t a circus as such but a dance and drama performance put on by a local but very skilful Performing Arts school, Phare Ponleu Selpak which means “the brightness of arts”.  The school started at one of the refugee camps on the Thai Border in the late 1970s and at the time simply offered drawing classes to children as a way of providing them with some distraction from their miserable lives.

It proved to be very successful and developed beyond just drawing classes; when the refugee camps were disbanded and the inhabitants were re-located to Battambang the school moved too.  It continues to provide an education for children from the local community and furnish them with skills and an opportunity to move on and improve their quality of life.   The school uses arts to answer children’s psycho social needs and helps them to develop an understanding of their own national culture. It was only a short walk from the Street Family Centre.  The performance was called “Rouge” and was devised along with a French performing arts group to portray the story of the Pol Pot years.  The performers were incredibly skilful and the whole piece was very moving.  Having visited the Killing Fields today we could follow the story more easily through the movement of the dancers.  These will be images that remain for a long time.