Cambodian Snow

Cambodian snow. It’s everywhere you look. There is a layer on everything. To the untrained eye, it may just be an annoying fine layer of brown dirt. However, if you look closer, it is actually the most beautiful thing to see. Look closely at the landscape, at the people. They are smiling at you. Happy. Triumphant. One would never guess the atrocities that have occurred here over and over and over again. One would think the lady with no legs begging on the street would be bitter. Or the old man with nothing but the piece of fabric wrapped around his emaciated body, walking barefoot on the rocky dirt road would shoot you death stares. Just the opposite. They welcome us into their country with open arms and huge smiles. It’s amazing after all they have been through. I had heard of The Killing Fields. The movie. Not the actual situation. I thought Khmer Rouge was one man. Never knew the situation. At least until yesterday. Our day was on motorbikes. Our favorite way to see the places we are in. It is the only way to get a true feeling for each place as you are able to see inside the homes of the people. We stopped at a Wat (temple). Here Sakai told us the story of the Khmer Rouge. Crazy shit. If you wore glasses, you were killed, because they thought you were educated. Families were ripped apart never to see eachother again. Once again, situations very similar to the Holocaust that I have learned and learned and learned. Why again I ask, have I never heard of these? Because we did NOTHING to help. No one did. A group of people regime who was tired of the way things were, came into power and systematically carried out a genocide with no international help. For 3 years, 8 months, and 20 days, anywhere from 2.7-3.7 million people were killed for no reason. Men, women, children. All brutally tortured and killed. They were taken into fields….There is a monument here that is full of skulls and bones that were found. Real shit. Hard to look at. It became too emotional for me. I couldn’t listen anymore. I had to get out. I walked outside the gate and stood watching children play at school. You could have been in Lafayette, at Happy Valley Elementary school. Some chased eachother, some sat talking. But they were all happy. It was painful to look at them and know that at any given time, any of those children could be playing at their homes, or their friends homes, and a land mine could blow them up. TODAY. Not in the 70s. TODAY in 2017. What if that were Ari I thought. At the end of the Regime, land mines were placed by Thailand, Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge. No one knows where the others put them. Not that it matters. We are in a valley. And with each rainy season, the land shifts, and with that shifting, the land mines follow. So, at any time in any place…..Fucking Crazy! Hard to wrap your head around it. Currently, about 50% of Cambodia is 18 and under!!!!! Those who lived through them many civil wars that went on even after the Khmer Regime ended, carry those images with them. They could all have the why me attitude. But no. They have each time picked up, and rebuilt. Over and over again. They are probably the strongest people I have ever met. Again, many have nothing. 
Cambodia is the land of either you have nothing, or you have a lot. There isn’t a middle ground. If you have real walls and real windows and not tin, palm, or whatever you can find to make a wall, you are well off. They exist side by side, neither one prettier than the other. Really. The run down shacks are just as beautiful as the concrete homes right next to them. Many of the roads are dirt roads. And those are the good ones! Trash is everywhere. Yet, it is beyond beautiful.