The Last Few Weeks Chilling in Phnom Penh

have been awesome!

We have finally settled into our neighborhood. People recognize us as we walk Sila to his school, which is around the corner, and when we head out to the market one street over. It's so nice to settle into a place and make it your home, to learn which streets are best, how much things should cost, where to find things, and how to get around. The last time Julie and I settled somewhere other than Florida we were in Knoxville, TN. Well, this is a bit different.

We have also settled into teaching, having finished our first week last Friday. Teaching English, and especially the conversation-centered English we are teaching, is completely different from the teaching we do back home in part because you can spend the better part of 10 minutes, as I did last week, trying to explain Halloween to people who don't have the vocabulary. Things like jack-o-lantern, trick-or-treat, and dressing up in costume for really no good reason at all are hard to understand out of context. There's also the fact that my students really regard this class--and learning English--as a major step towards a more positive, rewarding life. Cool!

Things otherwise are uneventful, which is great. I bike to school every morning and afternoon through the insane traffic (perhaps more on that in my next post); Julie has begun teaching a free yoga class; we both spend our evenings watching some TV--thank heavens for the internet--and reading.

We miss everyone very much and think of you often. We also think of cheeseburgers and other amenities of American life, but really, it's being around our friends that stings the most sometimes. We will certainly be happy to land on American soil and into the arms of friends when the time comes.

Toul Sleng or Security Prison 21 (S-21)

was a high school--an irony perhaps not lost on leaders of the Pol Pot regime, many of whom were once teachers--before the Khmer Rouge army seized Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. Under the Khmer Rouge, Toul Sleng was a prison of the walking dead--those who needed to confess their sins against the Angkar (or Organization) before being put to death in the Killing Fields just outside of town.  

The tales of brutality are well documented because the Angkar wanted to have "evidence" to justify their practices, so prisoners were photographed upon entry, and their testimonials, sometimes running hundreds of hand-written pages long, were kept on file. One prisoner, one of the few who made it out alive when the Vietnamese retook Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, was kept alive so he could document life in the prisons through his paintings.

On my recent trip to what is now formally known as the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, the details struck me the most. The holes chipped into the baseboards where the outer walls meet the floor. One author pointed out that they were punched out so that the blood and excrement could be more easily washed from the room. These little holes are omnipresent: in the cells, in the larger rooms, in the stairwells.

The chalkboards in some of the rooms remain a testament to the prison's former life as do the vast courtyards where children must have shrieked and scampered during recess. In the buildings, chains are still firmly stuck into the concrete flooring of the brick cells, the slapdash masonry of which attest to the quickness of their construction. A man can just stand akimbo, raise his hands into the air, and lie out flat in these cells. The wooden cells are a bit tighter, and it is only through pure chance that some have access to a barred window, or portion of one. Higher ranking officials who had fallen from grace were afforded larger rooms with metal beds, but the torture devices and apparatuses--and the shared fate of most of the inmates--are cold reminders that a larger cell must have been little comfort when the beatings, waterboarding, and finger-nail pulling finally ended late into the night.

As I stood in these cells, as I stared at the thousands of faces gazing back through time, as I peered out at the courtyards through the cross-section of razor wire that was meant to preclude suicide attempts, the greatest tragedy was that the story of Toul Sleng can never fully pass into the annals of history as long as it reminds us of the present. And that's perhaps the craziest thing to think of as you walk the halls and touch the chains: there are people today, right now as I write and as you read, who are suffering similar fates to the thousands-strong tortured souls of S-21.



  

The Settling in Process Continues

in ways we had not imagined.

Now that we have a space to call our own, we are tasked with finding chairs, bed linens, pots, pans, spoons, and all of the other miscellany that make a place a home.

To complicate matters, we are all succumbing to various illnesses of one sort or another. In between bouts and episodes of Elmo (all hail the omnipotent electric parental unit), we are exploring our hood. There are a host of shops, hair salons (I just got a crop for a buck-fifty), bakeries, super markets, cell-phone purveyors, moto-bike shops, and stalls.

We also have a wonderful open-air market one (or is it two?) street over. This is a hodgepodge of make-shift sunshades, under which (mostly) women crouch or perch while they await a passing glance at their goods. These range from an assortment of wonderful fruits, the names of which I can only guess (we call one spiney fruit), seafood, meats (passing stall after stall of these warming, fly-covered carcasses always evinces in me a certain je ne sais quoi), and vegetables. Hidden behind the women are little homes, the front rooms of which double as shops and restaurants.

 

The restaurants are themselves a cluster of small (1 ½-foot) stools clustered around a table that has a few condiments (usually of the holy-s#*! hot variety) on it and a spangling of used napkins under it. These places often sell only one type of dish for a particular mealtime, something we found out yesterday as our hostess pointed to a number of options and when we tried to order one of them (obviously not the correct one), she called over someone who could speak English. That nice lady informed us that they had meat soup today. Okay, I guess we’ll take a couple then, we said—only to find out later that our definitions of edible meat are quite different than theirs.

Our apartment itself is above this fracas as we are on the 3^rd or 4^th floor (depending on if you’re speaking to an American or a European), and we get a lovely breeze through the place once all of the windows are opened. The place is tiled throughout, clean, new, and we have such Western novelties as a two-burner range and a rather large mini-fridge, into which I recently deposited a few Kingdom beers.

We are in high spirits (or soon will be) as we sit here above the din and think of all of our friends back home. Tonight, as you head into your evening routines, enjoy a few things for us: identifiable food stuff, cotton sheets (top sheets, too, actually), a non-foam mattress, and the ineffable comfort that can only come from having the neon glow from the 2 or 3 (probably 4 or 5) CVS/ Walgreens signs in your neighborhood. Oh, how little I appreciated their warmth when they were so close upon me!