January 7, 2008
Phnom Penh: Rags and Riches
Our guest house is across from the luxuriant gardens of the National Museum and the Royal Palace with its opulent Silver Pagoda. We walk a few streets farther and there is so much poverty, dirt, stench and din of traffic that we soon trace our way back to the hotel strip with feelings of helplessness, guilt at our own relative wealth and depression. The scars left by the Khmer Rouge Regime, civil war and famine are still very evident, something I admit I wasn't emotionally prepared for.
Today, January 7, is a national holiday, "Victory over Genocide", and coincides with our visit to the Tuol Sleng Museum. The museum building was previously a school that was taken over by Pol Pot's security forces. It was then turned into the largest prison and torture center in the country, known as S-21. The building now serves as testimony to the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, showing the cells, torture instruments and photographs. That humans are capable of committing such barbarism cannot be grasped - the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, ...
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Many things I don't understand. Why is it necessary to post a sign forbidding visitors to laugh in the former torture chambers with pictures of scenes that one can hardly bear to look at? Is it aimed at youths accustomed to seeing war atrocities in films on tv and don't know that this was reality? I can only guess.
A visit to the Tuol Sleng Museum isn't necessary to be reminded of the country's not so distant history: extreme poverty, countless orphanages, the many homeless whose means of livelihood has been destroyed, people who have been crippled by land mines, beggars.
We visit the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda along with throngs of Cambodians on a Sunday family outing, all eager to admire the elegant golden roofed buildings and the Silver Pagoda housing a golden lifesize Buddha, weighing 90 kilograms and encrusted with 9,584 diamonds. It is a strange world.
Since it is a holiday, the popular temple Wat Phnom is especially crowded with visitors who bring offerings of joss sticks, fruit and money, either asking for good fortune or as thanks for having their wishes granted.
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