Day One!

Seeing as the rest of the team appears to be suffering from jet lag, I took it upon myself to write about our first day into Cambodia =D

**warning: a post that is probably too long below**

So before I even get to how my first day went, I'd just like to mention that for Candace, Sherry, Yen and myself, our flight from San Francisco to Phnom Penh went very smoothly with the only hiccup being the one part that we didn't think could go wrong, waiting to be picked up from the airport.  Due to a slight miss-communication about airlines/arrival times, our little group of four ended up waiting a little longer than we expected after going through customs without any problems.  Just thought that that was amusing and wanted to let everyone (especially those who prayed for us to have a painless trip!) know that we got to Phnom Penh without any problems.

Anyways, for those of you who don't know, I really don't like the heat.  In fact, it was actually one of my personal prayer requests (that I would be able to get used to/stand the heat in Cambodia) that I had for our Cambodia Team Prayer Night.  When the airplane landed in Phnom Penh and we were walking out on to the walkway, I could feel a sudden increase in temperature and humidity and was instantly worried thinking that if the insulated walkway was this bad (though still tolerable), how bad would it be once we got out of the airport?

Luckily, however, when we actually got out of the airport and waited to be picked up, I found out the insulation on the walkway was pretty much non-existent and it felt pretty much the same as it did outside as it did inside the walkway.  So overall the day was, in my opinion, actually quite tolerable though still definitely uncomfortable.  Another helping factor was the fact that both our van and our hotel rooms have air conditioning (which is the only reason why I am writing this post as I would not be enjoy having my laptop fan spewing hot air into an already hot hotel room), this will hopefully allow us to get used to the heat and humidity a bit more before next week when we move out of our nice air conditioned room into the outlying provinces...

I realize that so far I haven't actually talked about anything that we did in Cambodia so I'll get to that.  The first thing that we did after getting picked up and dropping our stuff off at our hotel was to go to a buffet for lunch with Nathan.  There we got our first taste of Cambodian food (as I'm not going to count the order of fries that Yen ordered at the airport Burger King in order to get the wifi password to contact Victor and Nathan) which included a dish that had several winged ants in it.  I personally believe that they were cooked in as part of the meal but I think that I'm the only one so I'll leave it at that.  What we did next may seem like a bit of a downer at first, but I hope that you will be able to read through to the end and see how it might not be a totally dark experience.

After the buffet the four of us left for the killing fields while Nathan went home and Victor waited to pick up Vermont as he arrives after us.  At the killing fields, we followed the audio tour and learned about the terrible things that were done to the people of Cambodia.  While all of it was terrible, two things stood out to me the most.  The first of them was something that was called "the killing tree" which was a thick tree that was part of the killing fields.  The tree was given that name as it was used by the Khmer Rouge to smash open the heads of helpless infants and babies as they held them by their feet.  The second was while walking along the trail, Sherry and I saw a part of a jaw just laying on the ground, not part of any exhibit that was formed by the staff there, but just laying there on the ground.

After going through the killing field tour we went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum to see the things done by the Khmer Rouge in the high-school converted to a security prison.  Again the things that were described there were terrible and I personally felt like there was no way that I could actually connect with how the Cambodian people must have felt at the time as I have never been through anything remotely close to what they've been through.  The part of the Museum that felt the most real to me was a series of rooms, one after another, of boards filled with pictures of all the people that were put through the prison.  It just seemed to go on and on; some of the boards contained pictures on one side of the board but many contained pictures on both.  Each picture was of an individual, each different and unique, who just got assigned a number and eventually tortured and executed.

You may now be getting depressed hearing of atrocity after atrocity; I'll admit that I was starting to feel down myself.  At dinner, however, Nathan mentioned that he didn't want to show us these things just to show us how bad things were, but also to see how things are getting better.  After hearing this, I thought a bit about what we had seen earlier in the day and realized that I was missing a vital part of the experience that Nathan was trying to get us to see.  From the killing fields, there was a Stupa made to honor and remember those who were killed in the killing fields.  The act of creating a tour of the killing fields means that they want to spread the word on what happened and they want the world to learn from what happened in Cambodia to prevent more genocides from happening.  From the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, there was a section at the end that was set up by the Hiroshima Peace again showing that they are hoping the rest of the world would be able to learn from the genocide that happened in Cambodia, along with those around the world, and to prevent genocide from happening again.

Well hopefully you did manage to get through to see the light at the end of the tunnel as I was brought to see with the help of Nathan.  After the museum, we didn't do anything as intense for the rest of the day.  By the time we were done with the museum, Victor had just picked up Vermont and they were on the way back to the hotel so we headed back there so that we could meet up with our final team member and get together for dinner.  For dinner, a few of us tried fried tarantula and there was much screaming and fright XD

I apologize for the lack of pictures (and in the case of the tarantula eating, videos) as I did not actually bring my camera or cellphone.  I'm sure the other members will upload them in a post once they're all over their jet lag though.

So guess you'll just have to check back if you want to see pictures/videos of people eating tarantulas!

(check back anyways even if you don't, you can just skip that part if you want, there will be plenty of other good stuff)