Immersion trip in Cambodia

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Hello everyone-

We met up with the Erasmus class on 5/30 in Hong Kong and spent one last night there together before we flew to Siem Reap, Cambodia to start our human trafficking/sustainable development immersion trip. We've been really busy so it's been hard to keep this thing updated, but here goes.

Our guide, Borath is a really cool guy. He grew up during the Khmer Rouge and lived through the genocide that ravaged his country. During his college years, he was sponsored by an American family in where else - Amherst, MA - to live with them and graduate from UMass (or Zoomass as he refers to it). He's an extremely intelligent person. However, rather than going on to join the workforce and chase dollar signs, he decided to work for nonprofits and help rebuild the country he calls home. This is a country that was almost completely leveled due to the Vietnam/US war and the Khmer Rouge occupation. 1/4 of the population died due to starvation, mass murder, bombing, lack of healthcare, and more factors. He has been a huge inspiration to me, along with some of the other things I have been exposed to on this trip.

We stayed at a really cool place in Siem Reap, the Lotus Lodge. It was kind of a small place where you got a family-style feeling when staying there. We got to know all of the staff, which was cool. In Siem Reap the first day we visited Angkor Wat, which is an ancient Hindu temple complex from the 11th century. It was beautiful, especially when it started pouring rain when we reached the top level of the main temple.

We visited a bunch of NGOs in Siem Reap, with the Sangkheum Children's Center probably standing out the most in my mind. Children can stay here if they have no home and they are offered education and food. It was great to see these children enjoying themselves so much because these are all kids who would have no shelter at night without programs like this.

After 4 nights in Siem Reap we went up north to the Battambang Province (Borath's home province). We stayed here for two nights and visited more nonprofits along with a microfinance institution. One thing that really stuck out in my head here was when I took a picture of a chart in the microfinance center. The chart had various loan prices and their respective interest rates all mapped out for viewing. I realized that the camera I was taking the picture with costed the same amount as some of the loans that these people were obtaining to start businesses and rise out of poverty. This is a good indicator of the social injustices that exist in our world today.

We left Battambang for Phnom Penh, the nation's capital, on June 6. Phnom Penh is a really cool city, filled with Buddhist temples and plenty of places for backpackers/tourists to eat and drink at really cheap prices. We visited more NGOs here, but I think the thing that impacted me the most here was visiting the Genocide Museum at Tuol Sleng. Tuol Sleng was a high school that the tyrant Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge turned into an interrogation/mass murder center. One of the wierdest things about this place was that they photographed the faces of every person they murdered, and they were all on display at the museum. Along with men and women, even babies were murdered here in some of the most brutal ways possible. The idea behind this was that if they killed the children as well, there would be no chance of anybody wanting to take revenge. This is the regime that killed 1/4 of the Cambodian population - in only 3 years of rule. It makes me really appreciate the life I was born into. I know what it's like to lose one person that is close to you. I couldn't imagine losing this many people close to me, with so many of them being completely innocent as well - doctors, teachers, students. Hospitals, schools, and every modern form of infrastructure was destroyed. If you weren't killed, you were removed from all of the people close to you in order to make it impossible to unify against these oppresive rulers. We also visited the Killing Fields, which were the mass graves where many of the murdered were buried.

Tonight is our last night that we are all together, and I think we're going to try to catch the South Africa/Mexico world cup opener. Mariana and I leave on Sunday for Bangkok, Thailand to start the vacation portion of our trip.

Unfortunately I can't add any pictures on the computer here, so I'll try to whenever I get a chance.

- Jackson

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