I spent about 3 days in Phenom Phen and I really liked it. It was much more modern and clean then I had expected. I think it is actually the nicest big city I have been too in SE Asia.

I visited a Pagoda that was very impressive. I tried to go volunteer to play with orphans for the day, but when we got there we discovered that they were away on an overnight feild trip to the beach! I was disappointed but happy for them. I went with 3 others and we chipped in and bought 36 oranges, a giant can of formula and 5 kilos of rice. They were very happy with our donation.

A majority of my time in Phenom Phen was spent learning about the genocide that took place in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.

The Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of a man named Pol Pot, killed an estimated 800K to 3M of Cambodians which was close to a quartre of the population at the time. He wanted to start an agrarian society and killed most of the educated people.

All of the people were forced to work in the fields and were not fed well. Reading and writing were forbidden. Families were torn apart. Children were recruited by the KR and turned into brutal killing machines. In many cases, they killed their own family members.

The history and how he came to power, is extremely confusing so I won't try to explain it. But I will say that the U.S. started off supporting the Khmer Rouge when the KR invaded Vietnam. Thailand also supported the KR for a time.

I visited the S-21 prison that had formally been a school. This is where prisoners were taken to be tortured. Much like the Nazis, they took pictures of everyone in the prison. It is very moving to see these photos because you can see so much of what the person was feeling in their eyes- disbelief, fear, defiance, sorrow, dejection and strangely calm. There were 20K prisoners and only 7 survivors.

I also visited the Killing Fields which is where mass exterminations took place. There were 86 uncovered mass graves and 43 that still need to be exhumed. When you walked around you could see bones and tattered clothing in the ground. There was a monument to the dead that had hundreds of skulls in it. Most people were killed by blows to the head.

It is hard to believe that something like this happened so recently and still happens today. The aftermath of the genocide is still very apparent in Cambodia. It set them back many years. There were no trials for war crimes. Most of the perpetators just went right back into society.