Mario’s Story Part 1

“When I see a family like yours, I think you are from heaven…and I remember what I saw when I was younger than them.” Our tour guide, Mario pointed to our twins and began to tear up and walk away to gain composure. We let him.

We had been with Mario for over a day. He took us to many temples the day before all the while explaining Cambodia’s history, from former kings to brutal battles to the murderous Khmer Rouge. He pointed to the carvings on the walls of the temples that showed the history the Cambodians fighting with the Jam people, the Muslims of the area that have been around for hundreds of years. He then would tell us the Kings that had come and gone and which temple they had built. Each king would make a temple that would eventually become a type of mausoleum for him and his family. Mario would then explain the major momentous elements of each temple, like the spueng tree that had overcome the tomb raider temple as if it were a parasite, the monkeys that inhabit and crawl all around another temple posing for tourists or jumping on them, and the elephant terrace where former dynasties would train elephants for war! I tried to get a grasp of Cambodian Buddhism and Hinduism as each temple displayed art and architecture that represented the religions. But even after going through a museum that explained each, I still didn’t have a huge grasp of this concept. It does seem as though they are intertwined both in the history of Cambodia and in the hearts of it’s people. Although Mario says if the people and government really understood Buddhism, there would be no war as Buddha practiced right thinking and action. War is neither. He was a wealth of historical knowledge and interspersed through all of this Cambodian history he told bits of his own.

From what I had gathered, he grew up near the Vietnam border during the time of the Khmer Rouge. He lived in the forest area with his mom, older sister, and his dad when his dad wasn’t working. His mom was so thin from starvation that she could not produce milk to feed him or his sister, so his sister drank from dogs that were nursing pups and he was given milk from coconuts. He remembered being so hungry, so hungry, yet food could not be found. His family in normal times were rice farmers and pickers. No one had an education and not many could read. It seems to me they must have been hiding during Pol Pot’s reign as I can’t think of another reason why they were in the forest.

The day he teared up he was walking us through the pictures and displays at the Killing Fields Museum. He told the history of how the Khmer Rouge gained control and how they tortured their own people. (Although later, he quietly admitted to me that he believes the Vietnamese may have been a part of the torture as the soldiers never spoke, they just acted. Vietnam wanted the land of Cambodia so they used the Khmer Rouge as a cover to gain access. I can neither confirm or deny this detail, I just found it intriguing.) The cruel deaths they ensued to dissenters, disobedient, defiant, or educated people is beyond description. Those that got their throats sliced or were simply shot received death in the best way possible. Others were suffocated with plastic bags, water boarded, thrown into wells, or had their gall bladders removed before their fateful end. After he walked us through the pictures and history, he showed us the bones.