Treading softly on a tragic past

Photos of Cambodian genocide victims now hang side by side with crayon and chalk drawings. Laughter echoes from rooms once used for torture. Wat Thmei is a place transformed.

By Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode
Correspondent

Former Khmer Rouge child soldier Teng Dara tells his story. The double amputee now sells books to tourists to support his wife and four children. Photo: Peter Winter
Touch's students anxiously wait for him before starting a Saturday volleyball match. An orphan himself, Touch is their English teacher and guardian. Photo: Peter Winter

SIEM REAP, Cambodia--For 100 children too young to remember and 8.5 million adults hoping to forget, this piece of Cambodia is more than just home. Weaving between piles of trash and the muddy ruts made by motorbikes, Touch Dara hardly looks at the ground as his bare feet tread softly across the country's second largest
Killing Field.

Beneath him lie the bones of both of his parents, much of his kin and an estimated one million Cambodians slaughtered or starved by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. Surrounding him are the 100 children who call Wat Thmei home.

Infected with HIV, many of the children here have lost both parents to the disease. Others have been orphaned by landmine accidents or continued guerrilla violence in the countryside. In one of the least developed countries, some children’s parents are simply too poor to care for them. How they arrived at Wat Thmei is neither remembered nor important.

25-year-old Touch says the children are his own: "I love these children. These children are like how I once was. No parents."

Touch, his students and their other teachers sleep in what was once a torture center. Bright orange curtains hang where concrete walls used to be. A volleyball net has replaced the landscape of nightmares Wat Thmei was. The Yale Cambodian Genocide Project estimates that 40 percent of the Cambodian population died in the name of the Khmer Rouge's "classless utopianism."

"Is it hard to live here sometimes?" I ask him. He blinks back tears, but keeps smiling.

The living and the dead
Next to Wat Thmei's traditional stupa containing the skulls, bones and clothing of genocide victims, Teng Dara waits for the predictable afternoon rain. Using a wheelchair but by no means confined to it, Teng sells guide books to tourists. He was forced to fight as a child soldier with the Khmer Rouge. It was during an ambush in 1992 that he stepped on the landmine that took both of his legs and part of his stomach. He is now one of Cambodia's 40,000 landmine amputees.

"I hope the world never uses mines again," he says. His femur is still visible from an unfinished surgery, and he touches it absentmindedly as he tells me about his four boys. The youngest is just three months old, which is why he will sell books for a long time, he laughs.

Cambodia formed its first U.N.-backed Genocide Tribunal to prosecute surviving Khmer Rouge members this year. Cambodians like Teng and Touch will now face their captors and kin's murderers in court for the first time. As the rain begins, the children run inside. The sky is dark, but not fearsome.

Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode is a junior Broadcast Journalism and International Relations double major at the University of Southern California. Her studies are focused on television reporting and the international political economy of Latin America. She worked and reported in Cambodia in July 2007. She will graduate in May 2009.