Sobering....that is all I can say about the day today. Today we witness the greatest dehumanizing and evil acts I have ever personally witnessed. You cannot walk away from the Killing Fields and S21 Prison with out being deeply affected by the suffering humans can impose on one another and ask yourself how can it not happen again?

S21 - an old school was transformed into a torture prison for people the Khmer Rouge expected of being enemies of the country. Most of them were just educated people or had previously had an position in the government. Here they were brought to endure mind blowing torture techniques to extract confessions out of them - most of which were made up by those torturing. If they didn't die eventually they would be hauled off in trucks 2-3 times a month to a Killing Field 15K outside the capital. Blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs, they were knelt beside a mass grave and killed. Chemicals poured immediately on them to ease the smell of dead bodies or kill those who were buried alive. The area is marked with a tall monument filled with skulls and bones of those they exhumed. As you walk around the area you not only feel the evil, you see it - the clothes of those killed are still being pushed up to the top of the soil - random bones still being brought to the surface. A tree next to a mass grave for babies and women was the monument of babies heads being smalled against the tree before thrown in with the others. Over one third of the countries population died under the Khmer Rouge regime - it makes you stop and realize the magnitude of this war. Over 340 of these prisons existed and thousands of killing fields like the one we visited dot the country.

Like the Nazi's in world war 2 the Khmer Rouge took detailed notes and pictures of all their prisoners. You walk through the school rooms where prisoners lay waiting to have fingernails ripped out, hands tied behind their backs and lifted up and down until they passed out, and beat over and over again. You can feel the fear they must have felt as you look at the chain used to lock them to their cell. The pictures of victims cover the entire first floor of one of the buildings - gaze at the faces of thousands of people who entered this prison only to be killed - a life unknown aside from a picture.

I have to ask myself questions like what is the responsibility I have so that situations like this cannot happen again? I'm reading a book right now called, "The Girl in the Picture" about a girl from Vietnam affected by the war (you'll know the famous picture if you look it up). She shares, at least at this point in the book, the effect America pulling out of the war had on the people of the south - many more people suffered. I question getting involved in somebody elses war but I saw the quote I keep at the bottom of my e-mails written on a wall today, "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". In no way am saying America is the answer - but I am saying don't people have an obilgation? As a Christian who wants to speak up and defend the rights of the poor and the destitute - do I not owe something to getting myself involved? Knowing what is going on in the world? Learning and advocating help? What does one person do? Pol Pot was 1 person - and he destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands - 1 person can make a difference. We want the good difference.