Now I’m not squeamish. Nope. Not at all. Seriously. I’m not…for the most part anyway. I’ve been to local markets all over the place, and I’ve seen pig heads, cow heads, animal legs, chickens being killed along a river…you know, the usual. I’ve meandered through stalls of skinned frogs and dead bugs. A quick walk through any Chinatown brings you face to face with hanging ducks, snakes, and other weirdly gross things that people like to eat. None of those things bother me. I recognize that in America, we have become separated from our food so much that we sometimes fail to associate meat with its origins. I understand why some people have a problem seeing all of this, but I don’t find it shocking in the least. Smelly, yes. Shocking and unexpected, no.
I will tell you what I didn’t expect to see though, but first you have to read about my day. On our second day in Phnom Penh, Diane and I took the full tour, including a trip to the Royal Palace, the Russian Market, and then to the gruesome Tuol Sleng Prison and the Killing Fields at Cheong Ek. The first half of our day was, by far, the most pleasant. The second half was horrifying and eye-opening as we wandered through the former school turned prison where thousands of Cambodians were tortured by their own government and then to the farm where even more people were slaughtered and left for dead.
I’ve been to Auschwitz, and I was only able to take it for a finite period of time. The thing that made me sick was the room full of human hair left from the victims after their bodies were burned (and having to exit the camp via the gas chamber pretty much sold me on never going to another concentration camp again). Even today, when I go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, I have to walk away from the photo of that room full of hair.
So what freaked me out and instantly made me sick and full of pain at the Killing Fields? It wasn’t the tower of human bones. It wasn’t knowing that I was walking on a mass grave still filled with thousands of corpses. It wasn’t seeing the speaker system that they set up in the trees to drown out the cries and moans of the people who were beaten and tossed into the pits, left to die underneath the weight of other lifeless bodies. It was a tree. The children’s tree, so-named because it was the tree that the Khmer Rouge used to crush the skulls of babies before throwing them into the pits. And that’s when I couldn’t take it anymore (and was somewhat relieved to have a little macabre laugh at the sign reminding people that grenades should be left at the door before entering the museum (because where else would people be carrying grenades as if it is a normal accessory?)). With that said, I have no regrets about going. As hard as it was to see it, genocide is something that people should see and should know about. It just isn’t right, so there is a reason that these places are left as memorials to the horror that once took place there.
When we finished our solemn tour of the Killing Fields of Cheong Ek, we loaded back into our tuk-tuk, doing what we could to avoid the throngs of children begging us to buy them a coke and headed back toward town. We traveled down the road for several miles, passing motorbikes loaded with families, farm trucks loaded with equipment (and usually housing a couple workers on top), and even a motorbike with an attached grill (that was in use as it was in motion). After awhile, a pickup truck approached us from the rear (and this was not the unusual part seeing as we were tapping out at 25 mph). As they passed us, the six passengers in the cab (you read that right) stared at us as though we were aliens. We smiled and waved, and then we saw something that instantly made our jaws drop wide open. What could possibly have been so shocking and unexpected after the day we’d had? Well, I’ll tell you. The back of their truck was loaded with the bodies of at least fifteen dead pigs, piled on top of each other and practically bursting out of the ropes that tied them down. Diane made a funny and described the scene as being literally hog-tied. And THAT was what I never saw coming.
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