S-21

Cambodia is a place that can challenge you and your intentions pretty quickly. It carries the beauty of the dance, art, and ancient immaculately carved temples, and the calmness of a Buddhist nation and its people. It carries people's smiles, shining brightly against the hot, dusty backdrop of a city in the sun. It carries some of the biggest hearts worldwide, coupled with some of the poorest pockets in SouthEast Asia. And just a scrape under the skin reveals the heroic-like steadfastness of a people recovering from years of genocide, war, destruction, and everything bad that goes with it. With one glance, I would see some of the most amazing art these eyes have even been blessed to see. Then I would look down and find several begging amputees, who lost their limbs to some of the many land mines still present in the soils—land mines our governments planted and should have cleaned up long ago. Begging, because their state can't figure out how, or who, is responsible and how to care for them.

Before I had arrived, I had made a conscious decision to avoid going to the K'mer Rouge's torture prison in the heart of Phnom Pehn, as well as the Killing Fields-the actual site of millions massacred the year I was born. I didn't want to see it—nor could I validate the tourist-like economy that was blooming out of its infamous history. But, yet, I felt I owed it to someone or something to go. I ducked the Killing Fields—the more expensive option (why go to a massive cemetery for me to already know that killing is wrong and sad and depressing and …. I went to the prison-otherwise known as S21. That was enough.

It used to be a school. So hard for me to feel like I could see kids playing in the courtyard, while hearing the screams of thousands of tortured intellectuals. Spaces hold energy---THEM I felt for sure.