Part of our visit was an opportunity to go to Battambang, a city about 100 miles from Poipet. What a privilege that visit was. Chomno was going back to places where he had experiences great pain, and this was only he third time he had been back since the days of the Khmer Rouge. The lake to which he brought us (See Photo Album) was the place he was taken captive from his village by the Khmer Rouge. Here Chomno was put to hard labour, digging a lake with around 100,000 men to irrigate the land around so that there could be two rice crops a year instead of just one. It was simply amazing to go out on a boat on what is now a very beautiful lake, with many lotus flowers growing on the surface, and to realize that this vast expanse of water is man made. But it was made at such cost. Around ten thousand men died for this lake. Chomno as there for three years, until he eventually managed to escape back to his home. At that time he was a Buddhist, but of course the Khmer Rouge outlawed all religion.
Ater the lake, the hill. As we parked at the bottom of the hill we were to clime, groups of kids gathered to fan us as we climbed up. We were going to the caves where the Khmer Rouge took so many people to put them to death. The kids knew the story so well, and could tell the story so well, and in English. It was a horrible thought that many of the best intellectuals of the area, and anyone else feared by the Khmer Rouge, were literally thrown to heir death into these caves. A pile of skulls is there in the Buddhist shrine- a grim reminder of horrible cruelty which could be forgotten so easily. It is too painful to imagine.
The day after, we found oursleves in a pretty far-out village. Getting there required crossing a river which had flooded, and getting on a rice truck, pulled by a rice tractor. We ,et the church there, about which I'll say more later. But it was pointed out to us that many of the fields were still mined: the bamboos were the point you did not venture beyond. Then we heard someone say: 'This was a Khmer Rouge village'. The amazing grace of forgiveness and reconciliation is that this is a place where CHO is very much at work. If I'd been treated the way Chomno was by the Khmer Rouge, I wonder would I have the grace to go there....
Pete has written a poem about all this which he read at prayers this morning. I will ask him to post it later today.
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