Saturday with Phillip and Martin

Today, the 15th of June, 2019, our Poly group went through an experience unlike any other we have ever experienced and will ever experience. The mass graves just outside of Phnom Penh, known as the Killing Fields, or Choeung Ek enlightened us to a world of extreme suffering and brutal loss of innocent lives. The guide on the tour started where all prisoners came and stayed. The entrance, now completely adorned with decorations and the beautiful language of Khmer, was much more than a gate into a physical location. It was a gate into a new perception not only of past horrors, but future hope. The peace offered by the trees and gentle breeze belied the history that the audio guide described. If you divert your attention from the forested environment and look at the ground of the Killing Fields, you may find bloodstains and bone fragments. Through objects such as the Killing Tree, where babies were ripped from their mothers arms and smashed against, and the Jade Tree, also known as the Magic Tree, which was used to amplify revolutionary sounds to cover up the screaming of souls leaving bodies, we were confronted with not only statistics and basic facts concerning the brutal regime that was the Khmer Rouge, but painfully personal stories that showed the true effect of the Cambodian genocide on its people. At the center of the Choeung Ek Killing Fields there is a memorial stupa with hundreds of innocent peoples’ skulls and bones. The stupa’s interior is simply shocking. The interior is filled from top to bottom with skulls of the innocent, showing that no child, adult, or elder was safe from the reach of the Khmer Rouge. The brutality of these personal killings by tools previously used in daily life highlighted the raw emotion connected to these deaths. We were personally struck by how the skulls were painstakingly examined and marked according to how their respective victims were brutally bludgeoned or stabbed to death. Every one of those skulls was a personal story, and a life.

On the brighter side, our group was lucky enough to experience the “flip side,” so to speak, of Cambodia today with our trip with Arn Chorn Pond, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide and the founder of Cambodian Living Arts. Since we and the musicians formed too big of a group to fit onto the bus of CLA, everyone ended up boarding the tour bus instead. That means we can proudly say that the bus we have traveled on in Phnom Penh was a Magic Music Bus, in a sense. Our tour group was joined by the musicians of Cambodian Living Arts and cameramen that were documenting this effort, and we drove to a rural school where we witnessed traditional music being played for children and got to interact with children. This was quite a special experience for all of us, and the tour guides as well, as they had never personally done a tour with Arn traveling on a bus to perform for children before. Many in our group have had “wholesome”, in the words of Martin, experiences with the children, giving hugs and receiving smiles in turn. Kate also killed it on the vocals both on the bus and in front of the whole crowd at the performance, so she deserves special commendation for putting herself out there in a new situation. When we as a tour group were able to discuss the experience with Cambodian Living Arts later in the day, we found common ground in how the experience was over all enjoyable but was certainly different than we envisioned, with less interaction with the locals than expected. Some members of the group found that the experience could have benefited if we as a group were put on more equal standing with those in the audience, as we were given a separate area with nicer seating than the students of the school, making us feel a bit uncomfortable for not feeling deserving of an elevated position. Others felt that the affection received from children  was “unearned” and that the musicians deserved more credit for their hard work. 

Overall, while being one of the most tiring days, we felt that today was definitely one of the most memorable trip and we look forward for more to come.