Holiday in Cambodia

For the enrichment week between China and India, our group went to Cambodia. This meant that we would be having Christmas in a country none of us had ever visited, which was a little daunting considering the level of homesickness some of the students already exhibited.

We landed in Phenom Phen and the next day went to the killing fields. We felt like it would be impossible to visit Cambodia and not talk about the genocide, but we also wanted to give as much distance as possible with the visit and Christmas. When you walk into the site, there is a seven story building for all of the bones taken from mass graves. The bottom two levels are filled with skulls, which helped to give a visceral sense of the magnitude of the killing. Many of the skulls showed where a bullet had penetrated. Perhaps more disturbing was the clothing come up from shallow graves the victims were forced to dig themselves.

The entire process was very sobering, and my co-leader Jess did a great job of debriefing. It seems like the genocide falls into the gray area between current news and history classes, so many of the students hadn't even heard of it.

The next few days were spent at Angkor Wat and surrounding temples, which was a welcome relief. Like Machu Pichu, it was spectacular, but perhaps loved to death by tourists. It was hard to feel any spiritual connection surrounded by a thousand clicking cameras. We did visit one outlying temple in disrepair that the students nicknamed the Indian Jones temple. There were far fewer tourists and it felt much more like what the entire complex must have looked like a hundred years.