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Travel and World Culture   
Image: Cambodia
  Photo: Wolfgang Richter-Kirsch
Image: Cambodia
  Photo: David Licence

Cambodia: Remnants Of The Khmer Rouge (cont.)

Not personally, I almost said. But the tone of his voice made me hesitate.

"Pol Pot killed my father," he said.

He paused. Following a raspy breath in the hot, dusty air, I waited for him to continue.

“I was only two, and so I have no memory,” he said. “My father had an education, and Pol Pot killed all the people with an education. We never saw his body. We don’t know where his grave is. My mother had to take care of us, of all my brothers and sisters. They are years no one in my family will speak about. Years that no one that remembers.”

The bus diver honked for us to return to the van, my body wailed in protest. Beebee told me about the bus driver. We learned he made the excruciating journey either to or from the border every single day. He rarely saw his wife, and often made as little as one hundred and fifty US dollars a month. "He used to be child soldier for Khmer Rouge," Beebee said. "Tank driver. He was not happy then, but he is happy now. He is happy because he is free."

After we made our way back to our seats, the van's interior was dark, and Beebee’s face was shadowed, his expression hard to discern. He leaned into me, like a child I gathered closer, keen to receive his deepest secrets. Outside, the fireflies punctuated the darkness

The van stumbled over a particularly rough series of holes, and involuntarily, we crashed into each other. The solemn mood was lost in our tangle, but Beebee wasn't done. “Whenever I take people to Pol Pot’s grave, you know what I do?” he said, bright-faced, as if he had remembered some outlandish joke.

“I piss on it!” he exclaimed, and laughed uproariously.

Later there were spots of light, flashlights, sway-dancing over the fields. Beebee motioned toward the lights and explained that they were farmers, searching for frogs in the night-puddles, just another thing to sell. He told us about snake soup laced with marijuana available at a restaurant in a certain town; he could take me there in his tuk-tuk if we liked. Being a vegetarian, I had an easy out. Apparently they also specialized in barbequed rats.

When we arrived in Siem Reap, Beebee offered to show me around town. Along the slum-lined river of mud, among the vast five-star hotels, men and women slashed by puckered scars and missing limbs beg in the street. The juxtaposition is especially poignant here. The affluent fly here en route to Angkor Wat, they spend freely, but the locales never see the money.

Beebee took me to the outlying land mine museum, which was just a disheveled series of huts around a courtyard featuring piles of disarmed mines. Cambodia remains littered with Pol Pot’s “perfect soldiers”, although a disproportionate amount of mines were planted by American soldiers during the Vietnam war.

Forty times per week, someone is gravely wounded or killed by one of the four to six million lingering mines.

After the mine museum we stopped at an overpriced restaurant with open walls. As soon as I stepped inside two girls ran towards us. The older one had a monkey kept on a length of chain, and the younger caught a praying mantis and brandished it with pride.

"For free," she said, and the praying mantis flew away.

 

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