The last few days we spent in Phnom Penh, the capitol city of Cambodia.Our time in Phnom Penh was a mix of relaxing downtime and troubling experiences. On Monday, Christina and I visited the Choeng Ek Genocidal Center, otherwise known as the Killing Fields memorial site.Approximately 17,000 people were executed and buried at this site during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between mid-1975 and December 1978. As a point of reference for Americans, many historians attribute the Khmer Rouge's rise to power in part to the United States' carpet bombing and aggression in eastern Cambodia prior to 1975. In an effort to stop the flow of Viet-Cong arms and supplies through Cambodia and to prevent another communist domino from falling in Southeast Asia, the United States and South Vietnamese heavily bombed and even invaded the eastern borderlands of Cambodia. This effort failed to defeat Cambodia's communists and their Vietnamese allies.Fighting soon engulfed the entire country, ending only when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on April 17 1975, two weeks before the fall of Saigon. Once Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge successfully overthrew the US backed Cambodian government, they immediately began to pursue their vision to transform Cambodia into a communist, agrarian, classless society. Hailing the peasant farmer as the model and center piece for their new country, they forcefully evacuated the capitol city - where close to 1 million people resided - and relocated these people to rural state-rule farming and work compounds. Sadly, the regime also systematically killed hundreds of thousands of the country's intellectuals, well- educated and even professionals trained as doctors, nurses, engineers, lawyers and teachers, as well as the middle-age and elderly more generally.

As we walked the now grass and wild flower covered grounds of the Killing Fields, both Christina and I literally felt ill seeing the physical evidence of such tragedy.The excavated mass graves, the unexcavated grave mounds and the shreds of clothing and human bones lying half buried throughout the grounds captured just how recent these atrocities took place. The Memorial Charnel at the center of the field displays over 8000 skulls uncovered in the excavations - an absolutely chilling sight to behold. After sitting quietly under a tree for a time, we headed to the Tuol Sleng Museum, the location of the Khmer Rouge's Prison-21.Prison-21 was the KR's main interrogation, torture and detention center in Phnom Penh. During the KR's rule this former high school became the death site of nearly 12,500 people. Walking through the detention cells, viewing room after room of victim photos and reading the stories of both the victims and those forced to work at the prison was simply horrifying. We took some photos of these places but have decided that it does not feel quite right to post them on our blog.Somehow, showing the photos in this forum feels disrespectful of the victims, their families, and the degree of the atrocities that took place.

Somberly reflecting on the two sites we were heartened by the respectful manner in which they were run and attended. However, we also couldn't help but feel somewhat ashamed of our severely limited prior knowledge of these crimes. If you are interested in learning more about the Khmer Rouge and the U.S. involvement in Cambodia in the early 1970's, I recommend that you rent The Killing Fields movie - which is actually more about the buildup to war and violence rather than about the killing fields themselves - making it a hard, but bearable, viewing.We both feel fortunate to have had this very emotional and uncomfortable experience for it revealed the unedited horrors behind the word genocide. Furthermore, our time in Cambodia has motivated us to travel to Vietnam before leaving south-east Asia to learn more about that country and the US/Vietnam War.

On a lighter note, yesterday we ate lunch at a truly wonderful café named Friends where current and former street children are taught about the restaurant business. The food was excellent and the umbrella Mith Samlanh Center and Friends International organizations seemed top notch - providing a host of vocational training and social services to homeless Cambodian children while helping to send them back to school.Elsewhere in Phnom Penh, we felt aware of the aftermath of the war with few elderly and middle-aged people in the streets, many homeless children, and much poverty.We know that we will carry images from this time in Cambodia with us in the months and years to come.Hopefully, these images and experiences will inform on our life choices and raise our level of awareness and concern for the violence continuing to darken our world.

-Todd