Cambodia is going to be fine

The longer I stay in Cambodia, the more I understand about what it is to live here, especially in the energy. I believe whole-heartedly in ghosts, because energy is powerful. Walls, rocks, places, hold energies and history, and I think that at some times there is such a flash of energy that it remains -- perhaps why violent deaths sometimes result in ghost sightings and stories.

There is an energy in Cambodia, and I didn't really even understand that until a friend and I were talking about it. She was in Thailand for a week and said now she thinks it's important to get out of the country at least once every few months because the energy here is heavy.

She's right -- there is a heavy energy here. Going to Sihanoukville or the islands, while relaxing, doesn't cut it, because it's still Cambodia and it still carries the weight of the genocide.

At the immigration office we're working on a separated family case, and between the sisters who have grown up in America and the sister left in Cambodia (born some years before the Khmer Rouge), the difference in their faces and eyes are incredibly striking. The one in Cambodia has years and  years of care and worry and hard work etched into her face, very little education and far too much hurt for her time. Those in America have wide, lively eyes and smooth foreheads.

Sometimes it gets frustrating -- actually, a lot. Corruption has been built into this country's government from the beginning and it is so entrenched now that it's hard to see even the start of the path out. Poverty and corruption are institutions and it affects all daily life. With the recent political stalemates, it highlights the problem even more.

One of my friends said it best -- more often than not, instead of being the "Kingdom of Wonder", Cambodia is the "Kingdom of Wondering What The Hell is Going On."

And yet.

Today I went to go see the circus. If you believe the internet, there is no circus school in Phnom Penh, only in Battambang, but there is a circus, a program of the Royal University of Fine Arts. Circus apparently dates back to the Angkorian times as there are bas-reliefs in Angkor Wat showing people tightrope walking and juggling.

The maybe ten performers were aged somewhere between ten or twelve to maybe late teens or early twenties, all but two male, and they were good. They attacked their work with focus and determination, with all the panache, showboating, and theatricality required for circus. They were choreographed, decently rehearsed, and actually very impressive.

When I left, I had this thought: Cambodia is going to be fine. It's going to be fine because there is a whole younger generation of people who are passionate about what they do and willing to take the time to invest themselves in it.

My brain afterwards was trying to be a cynic about it, saying that the system is so skewed that all that optimism and passion could get squashed -- a very specific google search that finally admits the existence of the school is full of how it might get shut soon and how the artists are not sure if they can actually make a living doing this.

But I can never shake that feeling, whether with these young performers or other dancers and artists I've met. They are not sure, but they are passionate and willing -- so it seems at least -- to take the risk. When they talk afterwards their words are unsure, but when they are performing their eyes are on fire.

It is not now, and change is a very, very slow, ardous, and ugly process. My mind can think of a thousand ways for things to go wrong and very few for them to go right. The passion of youth to be stamped out by the status quo and the old entrenched institutions and all that.

But whatever my mind thinks, my heart sees these young artists and believes unshakeably that in their hands, Cambodia is going to be fine.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

10 months into my stay here and with a new strategy in place to connect more with the country I'm currently living in, I decided it was time to go to the genocide museum, Tuol Sleng, the site of the infamous S21 prison. 

I'm not sure what took me so long. In many ways, I was reluctant to go because I had heard so many stories, knew what kind of atrocities and misery took place there. What happens when you enter that energy? I wasn't sure I wanted to find out. 

S21 used to be a high school. It was converted into a prison, one of the worst during the Khmer Rouge regime, and tens of thousands were detained, tortured, executed. These days, the buildings stand largely unchanged from the time. It is not so much of a museum as it is a testimony. The grass has grown back, the trees are blooming, but the barbed wire still rims the outside. There are few explanations - though guides can be used for an extra six dollars -- but for a few detailing the history of the place. For the rest, the buildings stand as their own witness for their bloody history. 

The signs of what happened there are small, but no less damning. The arch where prisoners were yanked up by their hands behind their back until they lost consciousness is still there, as are the pots that used to be filled with filthy water, used to make the prisoners regain consciousness in order to continue questioning. In the classrooms converted to cells, the bed frames remain, as well as the bar and cuffs for the feet. Or the cement block and the chains used to keep them there. 

In the Building C, the former classrooms are divided into tiny cells by brick or wood. The air is close there, but the cells are empty now. There is no smell, no remains, nothing but a few bloodstains on the floor. 

I had no way to connect to the sheer horror of what happened. The faces of the prisoners, in the pictures taken as they were checked in, are of all ages, men and women, children and older. They are just looking, uncomprehending, numbers on their chests. One was smiling defiantely. But they are only pictures. The blood on the floor, the bed frames -- only the grainy, black and white pictures of prostrate bodies where they were found are proof there were people here, suffering and dying. But the ego cannot think of it, can't even conceive of it. 

Something that I particularly noticed was the pictures of the citizens cheering the Khmer Rouge, thinking the civil war was over and peace was on the way.  

I was numb, wandering through the mostly empty halls and rooms, just the few remnants of pain scattered across swept floors. Even the room with the skulls, crushed bones, the pictures of fields filled with skeletons, it hardly seems real, these grainy photos of suffering.

I wanted to feel something, get a sense of the energy. But all I saw was suffering too great to be touched, to be shared at this instant in time, except to understand that what happened is beyond words. What happened there are memories now, but still there, like the building itself, right in the middle of the city. Quietly a part of life, inconceiveably ugly in its history and unnoticed by the outside world, but here.

The only real thing for me was a quick conversation with a curious and friendly the young Cambodian woman studying history, who wanted to know where I was from, how long I was in Cambodia, and if I was married (I'm 22, honey, not gonna happen any time soon), and the crew of motodop drivers trying to read the tattoo on my leg and asking, as people do when they figure it out, if I like to dance. It was like the color against a black and white world. 

That and the grass in the courtyard, brilliantly green and unkept.