The purpose of volunteering is also to understand the culture and the history of the Country where the volunteers go.
The history of Cambodia is very sad and intense and we have the duty to know it as much as volunteers can during our workcamps. The host organizations should also work as a bridge between their Country and the volunteers.
That’s why one day Srey Neant and Hok, two young guys from Ruseydom community – where CYA Learning Center was built – bring us to one of the killing fields close to the village. In this area, during the Pol Pot regime, there were some killing fields, even though they were smaller than the most famous ones in the north of Phnom Penh.
Fifteen minutes walking from CYA there is a sort of sanctuary, paid and built by the villagers: inside it, there are the bones of the Khmer people who lived in this area, killed by the regime during the gory years between 1975 and 1979 to remember and give dignity to all of these dead people. During the regime, at least 1,7 million of people died for executions, famine or lack of medical treatments: the 20% of the population, one person every five.
A man we met there told us they found, after the war, an incredible quantity of human bones in the small lake close to this sanctuary. After they built it, they moved them inside it. To save the bullets, the Khmer Rouge often kill them using sticks and stones, and that’s why many skulls are broken.
To discover more about this sad story, we also visited the S-21 prison, inside the Tuol Sleng high school in Phnom Penh downtown, where at least 17000 people, suspected to be against the regime, were imprisoned, tortured and finally killed. Only 7 people survived, because they were able to do something useful for the regime. Chum Mey is one of these people: he survived because of his high competence in machine repairing.
Credits:Federico Guarino; Anna Dobrzykowska
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