I am in between trips and decided to go back to some of my pictures to add narrative to what I experienced in the countries I have seen.
Cambodia and Laos touched my heart in profound ways. When you walk through the streets of Siem Reap there is an eerie knowing that a profound gap exists between generations.
Why? Because between 1975 - 1979 The Khmer Rouge communists murdered close to 2 million of their people while the rest of the world stood by and did nothing (Actually, countries like the US offered military support to this government). Two million intellectuals: teachers and professors, writers, journalists, scientists, Buddhist monks and nuns....and so on. An entire generation is missing.
Cambodia has the distinction of having the most killing fields or mass graves in the world. Spain comes next and the poet I wrote about in my novella, Federico Garcia Lorca, still lies in one of those unmarked graves.
Like Germany whose schoolchildren are mandated as part of their education to visit Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps so that this lesson is never lost, so Cambodia has its monuments too.
And why this is important is because when atrocities of this magnitude occur in a country, the healing of that culture takes generations. The atrocities of a Hitler, for instance, will never be forgotten.
It can never be buried, as Franco sought to do in the Spanish Civil War, because the cries of the dead will always be heard until peace prevails.
In this critical time on our Earth, all is being revealed. A New Age of hope and tolerance, of kindness and Light, can never be built atop the shoulders of infamy.
Cambodia and Laos touched my heart in profound ways. When you walk through the streets of Siem Reap there is an eerie knowing that a profound gap exists between generations.
Why? Because between 1975 - 1979 The Khmer Rouge communists murdered close to 2 million of their people while the rest of the world stood by and did nothing (Actually, countries like the US offered military support to this government). Two million intellectuals: teachers and professors, writers, journalists, scientists, Buddhist monks and nuns....and so on. An entire generation is missing.
Cambodia has the distinction of having the most killing fields or mass graves in the world. Spain comes next and the poet I wrote about in my novella, Federico Garcia Lorca, still lies in one of those unmarked graves.
Like Germany whose schoolchildren are mandated as part of their education to visit Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps so that this lesson is never lost, so Cambodia has its monuments too.
And why this is important is because when atrocities of this magnitude occur in a country, the healing of that culture takes generations. The atrocities of a Hitler, for instance, will never be forgotten.
It can never be buried, as Franco sought to do in the Spanish Civil War, because the cries of the dead will always be heard until peace prevails.
In this critical time on our Earth, all is being revealed. A New Age of hope and tolerance, of kindness and Light, can never be built atop the shoulders of infamy.