Choeung Ek

Most of the time I write these items in a state of excitement. This one I write out of profound saddness. You may not even want to read this one. It's gruesome.

I visited killing fields. It was a deeply moving experience and I was saddened to see the very place where so many people died so brutally. I thought it was important to visit this place to understan Cambodian culture and attitudes. The memorial is very effective. One cannot walk away untouched by it.The first thing you see is a tall structure made mostly glass, and as you approach you see that it contains shelves of skulls, some intact, some with great holes in them. The are the remains of some 8000 of the victims. In the years 1975-1979 thousands of people were sent here to be brutally executed. They were bound and taken to the edge of a pit and either bludgeoned or stabbed to death and pushed into a common grave with other prisoners. The Khmer Rouge couldn't affoard to waste bullets on executions, so they were done in a primitive way. Some 300 people were trucked to this place and killed here each day. The slaughter was indiscriminate: men, women, children and even infants were executed. One of the most sickening things in this place was to see the tree with a very wide and strong trunk against which infants and small children were bashed. It seemed that no one was exempt from the kiling: pesants, intellectuals, government ministers, laborers, teachers--the whole gamut of society was subject to execution. It was a horror beyond imagining.Today the place is peaceful. Yet they have left the common graves from which they exhumed the remains of the victims as great big holes in the ground. One is very aware that this is no park: these were the killing fields.

Just before I joined my friend, Alison to make this trip, a friend gave me a copy of Killing Fields, Living Fields, the story of how God was at work to bring people to faith in Himself even as this barbaric spate of genocide was happening. There is no situation so dark and hopeless that Lord cannot transform it into a means to glorify Himself. Thousands and thousands of people escaped over the border into Thailand and scores of thousands of these came to faith in Christ while there. So many times when I have asked people old enough to have lived through this period how they came to faith in Christ, they have told me that it was in a refugee camp. Since that dark and horrifying time there has been a profound spiritual hunger among people here. Certainly God has brought good out of an unthinkably evil situation.