While in Cambodia, I learned a lot about the nation’s recent civil war and learned even more from a book I bought there called First They Killed My Father, written by a survivor or the war. What’s amazing is that this war started in the 1970s and only ended in 1992, and during that time 1/3 of the Cambodian population was killed. When the Khmer Regime took over, they attempted to cleanse the country and bring everything back to its agricultural roots – meaning anything modern (tvs, watches, cars, etc) were outlawed and everyone had to move to the countryside where they lived in collective compounds and people were essentially forced into slave labor. There were severe food shortages because the Khmer regime traded a lot of the food grown in Cambodia with China to get weapons, and many people starved to death. People who had any connection to the former government or who were viewed as being corrupted by modern society were executed. And this was happening during many of our lifetimes, including mine, and I’m only 25! That is mind-blowing to me.
Mr. Bobo was alive during the civil war, and he remembers always being hungry. He told us anytime he was hungry, he would try to wait two more hours to eat because those two hours were two more hours that he could be saving money to better his situation. In some of the temples we visited statues were beheaded or parts we missing, and this is because during the war people risked their lives to steal them and sell them on the black market so they could buy food.
Picture: Statues with missing heads.
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