Day 6 (Thursday)

A taxing but very important day. The VT team accompanied the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization, an NGO that provides psychological counseling to KR survivor-victims (among others), to The Killing Fields. The Killing Fields are now-lush green spaces that also were mass graves for up to 20,000 KR victims. The KR soldiers used horrifying tactics to save bullets when torturing and murdering “subversives.”



It was the first visit to the fields for many of the survivors, all of whom had lost an unfathomable number of loved ones during the KR. After an emotional walk-through of the fields, we all participated in a Buddhist ceremony seeking peace in some form. I know this only through feeling: the chants were, of course, all indecipherable in language to me.

Then the buses took us to a nearby pagoda, where survivors shared their stories in Khmer, translated quietly for the internationals in attendance. I cannot repeat here what I heard—it was too terrible, and too wrenchingly personal. Today I remembered why I came here. It is essential to document the terror of 1975-1979 and what has followed since in a way that is accessible to everyone, rather than just internet-savvy Westerners, lest history repeat itself. Time is rapidly diminishing before these memories are lost forever.