"while getting lashes or electrification, you must not cry at all"

Last Sunday, my friend Mary was in town before leaving to start her internship in Kep, Cambodia. There were some tourist sites in PP that I had yet to see...well, most of them actually given that I work all day. One of these was the Tuol Sleng, Genocide Museum. I had been afraid to go alone.

Tuol Sleng, known under the Khmer Rouge regime as S-21 (Security Office 21), was used as a prison and institute of interrogation (read: torture), prison and execution of individuals termed anti-KR during the years in which the KR were in power: 1975-1979. Of the 12,000 children, prisoners and other general workers who passed through its doors, only 7 left S-21 alive.

In 1980, it was reopened and is now operated by the Royal Government of Cambodia to comemmorate the history of those horrific 5 years. It is a testament to the absolute fury which can be wrought by human hands. I felt a feeling of strangulation and

I was going through my harddrive tonight, since it's a quiet Friday evening and there's a raging storm outside. I found something I wrote. It was in response to a talk I went to back in March. I was lucky enought to be invited to, given by Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson, current President of Liberia and first female state leader in the continent of Africa. Liberia is currently recovering from similar horrors wrought by human hands. Following the development of my interest in Cambodia as a kid, I became very much interested in the little known, but very much sinster events occuring in Liberia in 2000. All from a Rolling Stone article I read. While I listened to President Sirleaf-Johnson give her speech, I wrote this,

*

as humans, we are gardeners of our bounties and architects of our own madness
it is the balance of these 2 mechanisms of human development that we can truly ameliorate the cosmos of concerns we face in the 21st century

by bounties I do not mean a vegetable garden
for it is possible to flourish pests of uncontrollable growth as well
by madness, I do not mean to insinuate psychosis,
for it is insanity that mankind has brought to life the grandeurs of imagination

it is thus best to recognize the power we wield
harness it to the best of our powers
be wary of our own boundaries
cross those boundaries
and to lookout for the ones who stand most vulnerable.

*


Reading that tonight, I guess it brought back memories of last Sunday. Especially when the man without a face, a man, scarred by either land mines or perhaps even horrors wrought during Pol Pot's regime and begs outside Tuol Sleng everday, came to Mary and I asking for money. For whatever reason, the destruction done to this man's face: his missing eye, his reddened and deeply scarred flesh, had an even greater effect on me that seeing a man wheel an older man lacking all 4 limbs on Sisowath Quay. With all the office work I do, expat social life I have, its easier to lose sight of why they heck I wanted to get myself here in the first place.

Is such destruction and carnage a part of our genome that we will never be able to shed? Similar horrors are occuring in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Sudan at the moment. Eruptions in Burma loom near. We just kinda let them happen while trying to tackle avian flu