Genocide Museum

Today we went to the Genocide Museum. For those of you who don't know much of the history of Cambodia, in 1975 the country fell to the Khmer Rouge , which was initially a small guerilla force, but grew into a large army in just a few weeks. Under the Khmer Rouge the people of Cambodia were forced to labor camps. The objective of the Khmer Rouge was to introduce a pure Maoist agrarian society-which is basically a fancy way of saying they wanted everyone to be farmers. So they executed all military and public service personnel, the educated, intellectuals, those believed to be loyal to the old government, professional workers, and religious leaders. Altogether deaths related to the Khmer Rouge actions, disease, starvation and other hardships are estimated at over 1.7 million people.
Given this history, you can imagine what this museum might be like. We will try to get some pictures posted. It was a very hard museum to get through. Apart from wanting to vomit at the things I was seeing, I just felt such a heavyness of emotions. There are rooms you go through that just have pictures after pictures of all the people killed (they took pictures, sort of like a mug shot, of each person before they killed them). And then other rooms would show all the different things they would use to torture the people, there were rooms with glass cases full of skulls. And there is a whole building of tiny cells that they would keep the people in.
Before I came on this trip I read books about the history of all the horible things that happened in the short span of four years under the Khmer Rouge. Reading it was aweful, but to be here in Cambodia and see the reality of it was absolutely horrible, words truly cannot describe it.
Life for these people in the last 30 years has been an enormous struggle to overcome multitudes of obstacles. Only in the last 10-15 years has any sense of normalcy been restored.
So you can imagine how this also plays into our challenge of teaching the girls here. How do you rebuild a country that has had everyone with an education or professional career killed. After the Khmer Rouge fled, everyone went into survival mode. And still 30 years later most Cambodians are just surviving, living on less than a dollar a day. This counrty is in great need of prayer.