Friday we just bummed around the hotel and a few block radius. Our hotel has a pretty kick ass location. We're right across from the Tonle Sap river; on the block to the left of our hotel are a bunch of seedy bars and clubs; to the right, fantastic restaurants, a glorious internet cafe, and more classy bars; a block back is a fruit market where we can get 8 mangos for $2 or less, a bunch of bananas for $1 or less, a kilo of oranges for under $1; and we're within walking distance of the Palace, an antiquities museum and the school we're teaching at. Gotta love it. Only downside, it's a tourist area, so it's full of people (many of them children) begging and hawking, making each walk down the street a bit wrenching. If I were more financially on top of my game I would buy some bags of crackers or keep change in my pocket for the kids... but I'm not and need to concentrate on leaving Asia with some change of my own.
On Saturday (3/28) we visited the Antiquities Museum in the morning/afternoon and went to teach english in the evening. The Museum is housed in a building built by the French when Cambodia was part of French Indochina. It is filled with items recovered from Angkor Wat and other historical sites around the country. They are classified into three main periods: Pre-Angkorean (all Hindu), Angkor Period (mix of Hindu and Buddhist), and Post-Angkorean (all Buddhist). I'm having a hard time classifying the form of Buddhism practiced in Cambodia. The monks dress like Thailand's monks, but some aspects of it remind me much more of Vietnamese Buddhism - such as the prominence of extra deities, like "the Buddhist Triad". This probably is just a facet of adapting Buddhism to the long-standing tradition of Hinduism (with the Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva triad), but I still find it interesting that some countries, like Vietnam and Cambodia, require more adaptation than others, like Thailand.
While we were at the museum, Emily made up a hydration drinking game. She had to drink water every time the plaque said "unknown" for some part of the description. The favorite instance was a tray of some sort, that was of "unknown" origin, period, and function. No one is even really sure why it's in the museum. :P
My favorite items (because they had the most information given about them) were the "installation stelae." These are essentially tombstone shaped slabs of rock that bear an inscription telling about when some large gift was given to a temple or dedicated to a god. They start with the date (down to the hour) in Sanskrit and then had lengthy descriptions of land, slaves, food, etc. donated in Khmer. One of these had a large base on it, and according to the plaque, the inscription said something like "In the year such-and-such, when so-and-so had lost all of his teeth, he installed this shrine and dedicated the following gifts to some god." And, So-and-so had originally sealed his teeth into the base of the stele, but the plugs had been subsequently lost and the teeth gone missing. I just thought that was so interesting. He sealed his teeth in the stele! Wow! I just can't imagine wanting to do that.
That evening, we had our first day of teaching. While in Cambodia we are teaching two different groups of English students - an older, more advanced group on Saturday and Sunday evenings, and a younger, beginner level group on weekdays over the lunch hour. Since it was Saturday, we started this teaching stint with the older students (16-20 years old). We teach them at an art school where they normally learn dance and music. I spent most of the night working with a boy named Visah who learns dance and drums. He's very smiley and nervous about his English. He doesn't have as good of a vocabulary as he wishes. There were a few times when we were chatting that I could tell he understood my question but couldn't think of the words to answer, and unlike when that would happen to me in Spanish class, I don't speak Khmer and thus can't do anything to help him out. Overall, though the class seems to go really well, and the group of us english students can see our Cambodian kids improving even in two class periods. And our class tripled in size from the five we started with on Saturday to the 15 we had on Sunday. Pretty sweet.
Today, Sunday, was far less fun and games, with our main activity of the day being a visit to Tuol Sleng Prison. During the time the Khmer Rouge was in power (from 1975-1979) there were 20,000 inmates at Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as the KR called it, and only some 7-12 people left the prison alive. The images of what people did to each other were heart-wrenching. I'm infinitely glad for the fairly extensive reading I had done on the KR before we actually went to the prison; it wasn't quite as shocking as it would otherwise have been.
One thing that I hadn't really thought about before was the more spiritual ramifications of mass murder and genocide. One of the exhibits was a photo exhibit where the photographer had used varying light and reflections to give the mug shots of prisoners another look. He wrote a bit about the goals and meaning of his photos, which was posted in the exhibit. One thing he wrote that stuck with me was that according to Cambodian religious belief, if a person is not properly cared for after death (has a funeral service and is cremated, if Buddhist, or buried) their soul is not able to pass on to be reborn, but is instead stuck as a ghost. This has to be the most frightening thing for someone who bases their beliefs and worldview on the idea of being reborn over and over again. Getting stuck. Rather than being reborn and working out your merit and heading towards eventual nirvana, you're stuck, as though you never fully died. Imagine the grief of loved ones who know their loved ones are stuck. I didn't really comprehend that horror until today, because my world has been formed by the idea that when we die, we go to a better place and that's it. You don't necessarily need a specific type of funeral; that's often more important for those left behind. But not for these people. And I have no idea of how to fix it; and nor do the Cambodians it seems.
We're here at a rather precipitous moment. After 30 years, the international tribunal for high-level KR officials has finally begun in Phnom Penh, and they are currently opening the trial for Duch, the man who ran Tuol Sleng and the other S-21 facilities. I'm crossing my fingers for a conviction before we leave. I only wish Pol Pot were still alive to stand trial. And I hope that we, humanity, learn from our past.
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