We arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, with the impending task of visiting the genocide sites ahead of us. We’d all been reading or had begun to read accounts of the Khmer Rouge regime written by survivors, and this made the visit to the Killing Fields and S21 much more poignant. It wasn’t hard to imagine the thousands of innocent prisoners making the journey up the dirt track to the field, less than 40 years ago, especially as we made the same one in our tuk tuk. We all found the walk around the site extremely surreal – it’s quite hard to put into words, but it was nearly impossible to imagine that so many people were buried in the ditches that were marked off by pagodas. Scraps of clothing and bone, turned up through the soil by the recent rain, forced us to accept the reality of such unbelievable acts. The visit to Tuol Sleng, a school that had been turned into a prison for up to 400, mostly innocent, Khmer citizens, and has since been left exactly as it was found by the Vietnamese, was even more hard hitting. The rooms display wall to wall boards of photos of the prisoners’s faces upon their arrival; all young and all scared. We were able to meet one of 7 survivors of the prison, who (astonishingly) works there, sellings books. He escaped the Khmer Rouge when the truck carrying his family was attacked by Vietnamese soldiers, watching his wife get shot amidst the fighting and losing his baby son in the pandemonium and panic. Although he believes his son is alive, he has no way of finding him. We bought some books from his stall, and exchanged smiles, whilst we secretly wondered how he could smile at all, let alone work outside the building.

We have some photos from the visits, but it doesn’t really seem appropriate to put them up here. We might attach a few to the end of this post at a later date.

Love to all at home – feeling very lucky right now xx