Sarah Bartels

I'm writing this really late, but it would feel wrong to not include a last post from Cambodia 😅

I ended up doing a sunrise group tour to Anghkor Wat with other people from my hostel. We had our own tour guide that took us around to 4 of the main temples (there's like hundreds of then in the area). I learned so much about Anghkor history, the history of the rediscovery of the temples, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Something that really changed our perspective about things, was the story our tour guide told us about his own experience with the Cambodian civil war and genocide. It turns out that when his mom was pregnant with him, his dad stole 2 fish so that she would have something more nutritious to eat. He ended up getting arrested and executed for doing this. This was at the start of the 4 worst years of the civil war. Then, when he was 2 months old he was taken from his mother by the Khmer Rouge, and she was told he had been killed. 2 years later when the killings ended and they were going around recording from each family how many they lost, she asked that he be written down as unknown instead of deceased since she had never actually seen it happen. When she found out there were many lost children in the capital who had survived, she begged her father-in-law to take her because she believed her son was still alive. Everyone thought it was a lost cause because he was only 2 months old then, and there was no way she'd be able to recognize him now if he even was alive. But she remembered that he had a little red dot on his cheek, and the moment she stepped into the children's camp she saw a toddler with a birthmark on that same spot and she instantly knew it was him. Such a sad story 😭 and it's crazy to think this happened not that long ago AND we're not taught about it in school...Read more