One of the places every visitor to Cambodia sees is Tuol Sleng (or S-21), the genocide museum in Phnom Penh, which is the site of the secret prison where thousands were tortured by the Khmer Rouge before being marched out to the infamous ‘killing fields’. I have visited the place twice - most recently on my twenty-fourth birthday (not the most celebratory choice, to be sure).

The feeling you have as you leave Tuol Sleng is much like the feeling you have leaving the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. But whereas the holocaust museum is shiny and imposing and was designed specifically to make you feel a certain way (which it does very effectively), Tuol Sleng is crude and dirty and has been left almost exactly the way it was when the Khmer Rouge fled in 1979. Plus, there is no mistaking that before it was a secret torture prison, it was a school, which makes the feeling you’re left with, whatever that feeling is, even stronger.

As you pass from classroom to classroom, you see photos on the walls of beaten bodies lying on beds. The beds, the instruments of torture, and the plain tile floor - visible in the photos - are all still there. Another part of the museum has hundreds of black and white mug shots taken by guards to document their prisoners. If you want to know how they tortured and killed the estimated 17,000+ people who passed through the prison (with only eight known survivors), there are plenty of harrowing details out there.

The mastermind behind it all, the former chief of the secret police with the Khmer Rouge, is Comrade Duch. He is the first and only Khmer Rouge leader to admit to any atrocities and this week he has been testifying before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. CNN.com is covering the story here.

What is particularly interesting about this story, if you ask me, is that Duch became an evangelical Christian in the 90s and was actually ‘discovered’ by a foreign journalist, found working under a different name as a humanitarian and lay pastor near the Thai border. You can read his story at Wikipedia.

If you think of it, and you’re the praying type, say a prayer for the long-suffering people of Cambodia and for Duch. Pray that somehow justice and mercy would shine through. Pray for healing. And for hope.

I’ve been back in the country for about two weeks now. After an initial 72 hour period with about four hours of sleep, I have since slept an average of 8 or 9 hours each night since then. This means that thankfully, I have conquered jet lag, and with much more haste than the experts’ prediction of a day for each time zone crossed.

My routine these days entails a lot of sleeping in, hanging out with friends, and spending time in atmospheric locations where coffee is sold and people like myself go to type. You know, all the things you’d expect from an unemployed 24-year-old recently returned from Southeast Asia who is trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life, or at least with his immediate future. I do have some ideas that are pending, but for the moment I’m in limbo. Many of you were aware that I had applied for a two-year position in Cambodia, but you may not know that I have since withdrawn from the selection process. This was a the culmination of a tough process of prayer and soul-searching over the past month. The future is now wide open, but I have peace about it.

I wasn’t sure what it would be like to return home after my 92-day hiatus from life as usual, but in many ways, it was as if I had never left. There are a few new turning lanes and stop lights on the roads, there is a nice new coffeeshop on Prince Street, and the heat of August has given way to Old Man Winter, but otherwise things are basically the same. Of course, I doubt it is possible to spend three months in Cambodia (or anywhere) and come back unchanged. These changes have been mostly subtle, however, which has led me to identify as of late with the words of Paul Simon when he sang: “Nothing is different but everything has changed.”

I thought that once I returned home I’d be able to articulate what these three months have meant to me, but I still haven’t found the words. Nonetheless, in the coming week I will have two opportunities to share publicly about my time in Cambodia.

This Sunday (the 17th) I will be speaking for five minutes or so during the evening service at Calvary Church about what I was doing this fall and how it has influenced my life, and I will have some photos to share. The service runs from 6 to 7.15pm and I’ll most likely be speaking towards the beginning of that time. Anyone is welcome to come on out for that.

I’ll also be speaking briefly at C4, the young adult ministry at Calvary, during the weekly large group gathering this Tuesday (the 19th) at 7.30pm. So if you consider yourself a young adult, feel free to swing by.

Finally, and slightly off topic, the C4 Christmas coffeehouse will be this Friday (the 15th) at 7pm in the student ministry wing at Calvary and best of all, it is free. There will be hot beverages, tasty treats, and a whole slew of Christmas music performed live by super-talented artists. A few skilled orators like myself (ha!) will also be doing Christmas readings that are sure to warm our hearts and stir our affection for the One this season is all about.

You can only hope I’ll be wearing a festive holiday sweater.

Here is an incomplete list of the plusses and minuses of being back in the United States generally, and Lancaster more specifically.

+ fast internet without megabyte restrictions

+ hence, being able to download 33 songs from Lancaster native Denison Witmer for free in a short amount of time

+ feeling at home listening to Denison

+ reflecting on the timeliness of his song “Everything But Sleep” as I recover from jet lag (see below)

- not being able to sleep

- fat and temperamental airport security people (having grown accustomed to skinny and polite Asians)

+ carpet

+ warm water for showers

+ having/driving a car

- everything is expensive (except gasoline, which has fallen considerably)

+ family

+ friends

- no more flip flops

+ being able to print things out on paper other than A4 size stuff

The highly anticipated photos from last weekend at Siem Reap and Angkor Wat (I know you have been going crazy waiting for them) are up in a brand spanking new album of their own. Check it out here. Also, I have added the final touches to the Cambodia - Fall ‘06 album, which is full of what I consider to be the photos that best capture glimpses of my experiences throughout the past three months.

When you get in a routine over three months, the final week is all about realizing that this blank can be aptly filled in many different ways. The following is a random spattering of what crossed my mind shortly before leaving to return home.

1. No more moto rides with my driver Veasna.
2. No more french bread for breakfast at the roadside stand around the corner from my house, purchased for about 12.5 cents.
3. No more dinner meals with the Cambodian family.
4. No more hearing the geckos barking in the house at night (the geckos only recently learned to be rather dangerous, after weeks of living in ignorant bliss).
5. No more smelling the occasional wafts of incense from the family..s shrine when I leave my room in the morning.
6. No more trying to distinguish between moto horns on the street outside and calls to dinner echoing from the bottom of the staircase inside.
7. No more hearing dinner referred to simply as “eat rice.”
8. No more taking my flip-flops off when I get to the office door and greet the staff with my best rendition of hello in Khmer.
9. No more little kids running up beside the vehicle to wave and say ..hello.. even though they have never seen me before, will never see me again, and they will never get anything out of it.
10. No more kids having a blast just being able to see themselves on the LCD screen of my camera.
11. No more hair-raising rides on ricketty motos through red lights at crowded intersections at rush hour.
12. No more mien fruit.
13. No more meatballs of questionable texture and content. Oh wait, meatballs in the States are just as freaky.
14. No more fried tarantulas, crickets, cockroaches and maggots in the market, just around the corner from the eels and the fish that people eat eyeballs and all.
15. No more rain until the sewers flood and bubble up into the streets, which bogs down the moto engine and forces you to roll up your pants and walk the rest of the way.
16. No more bathroom at home with no hot water, no sink, and a drain in the floor and a fixture on the wall for showers.
17. No more only speaking like fifty words of the dominant language.
18. Hence, no more amusing locals when I unveil one or two of said words.
19. No more saying sarcastic things and then being corrected for being way off base, with the joke having not been understood as such.
20. No more bus rides across the country with cheesy karaoke music videos and locals singing along the whole way.
21. No more $1 meals that please the taste buds and leave you satisfied.
22. No more barrages of solicitations from moto and tuk tuk drivers.
23. No more barrages of solicitations from moto and tuk tuk drivers who have just seen me get off a moto or a tuk tuk and could not possibly expect me to be ready to go somewhere else.
24. No more being a barang (white, and therefore, rich, person) who can and should pay ten times as much as everyone else.
25. No more bargaining on t-shirts at the market, getting the price down from the ridiculous barang price of $3 a pop to something a bit more reasonable.
26. No more scratching my head at the fact that professional wrestling is very popular here.
27. No more watching the hustle and bustle of the noodle shop on the street corner from my fourth floor balcony.
28. No more walking through crowds where women arbitrarily believe it is beautiful to be pale, and therefore cover virtually every inch of their skin to prevent any further tanning (though I’ll be returning to the land where they [also arbitrarily] believe that the opposite is true, and women pay good money to spend time in an oven so they look liked a baked potato by the time they’re thirty-five).

and

29. No more wondering what it would be like to spend three months in Cambodia.

I’m sitting in this retro/futuristic all-white air-conditioned lounge with free wi-fi Internet as slow as molasses in January and perhaps the best banana milkshake ever to make contact with my taste buds. And they are closing in 13 minutes, so I’ll make this quick.

Spending a couple of days galavanting around the largest religious structure in the world (and its environs) has proven to be a good time. Here is where I should have done some research, but I haven’t even had time for Wikipedia.com on this one, but I am going to suggest that maybe Angkor Wat is at the center of global tourist growth. I say this because if I am not mistaken, Cambodia has one of the fastest rates of tourist growth, and every tourist (probably without more than a handful of exceptions) visits Angkor. More flights come in and out of the airport here than out of Phnom Penh, the country’s capital. Again, I heard this somewhere. It hasn’t been verified on Wikipedia.

A more interesting and perhaps well-researched entry to come later, along with some photos, but for now let me leave you with the quote of the week.

Josh (in regards to some stone carvings at one of the temples): Oh, here are some decent carvings.

Me: Decent? Really? Are you sure they aren’t half decent*?

Josh: I don’t think I’d go that far.

* “Half decent”, in Josh’s arsenal of compliments, ranks right up there with “snazzy.”

Ming Visal had extended the invite for Josh to come eat dinner with us at the house, and last night was the night. On the moto ride down, my driver Veasna in front, me in the middle and Josh on the back, we hit a red light which happened to be manned by a handful of police officers and when the light changed they kept traffic in its place.

It was at the street that comes into town from the airport, and we soon discovered that the King had just returned from his travels in China and France. His escort was something to behold as a bunch of matching black cars streamed past, led by police cars with flashing lights, followed by a swarm of police motos clustered around one not at all conspicuous black car in particular, and then several other black cars, police cars with flashing lights and then Land Cruisers and finally more police motos. I had always thought that when you have some sort of an important person in an escort out on public streets you wanted to make it a secret as to which car he was actually in, but maybe I just picked that up in Clear & Present Danger.

The original invitation for my brother to come eat dinner was to entail rice and whatever else at the house but as it happens, we went out to eat. It was a great place and I was ticked that the batteries in my camera had died earlier in the day and I had left the camera back at the house. The place was a huge restaurant on the other side of the river and just outside of town, and our table was up a couple flights of stairs and overlooking an open-air dining area directly in front of a stage with live karaoke music entertainment. But the thing that sets this restaurant apart, above the rest, was the retractable roof over the stage that is capable of closing over the dining area below in the event of foul weather. It looked like something right out of one of the new-fangled ballparks back home. But a close second to the retractable roof were the ladies at the door who are sitting down on either side of the exit and then stand and bow as you pass. I wanted to tell them I was not the president or anything, and never could be, having been born an American citizen in Guatemala (unless of course Arnold is able to change that law). But then I would tell them, those girls at the door, that I really don’t want to be president anyway.

Anyway, so as not to allow the technical difficulties with my camera to thwart your viewing pleasure, I have done my best to recreate what my photos might have looked like, using a black Pilot G-2 05 pen and a pad of paper featuring the former logo of World Relief Cambodia in both English and Khmer. These works of art might even be better than photos because they are stunningly realistic and have captions built in. Enjoy.

I should preface this entry by saying that due to the particular nature of the details within, photos and miscellaneous anecdotes will serve to further enhance your reading experience, and I have decided that including these as appendices would serve our purpose well. I don’t know how to do superscript numbers like you see in legitimate publications, so I have developed my own slightly different (and inferior) system. Whenever you see a bold letter in squarish brackets, such as [x], you know my system is at work.

Well, Brother Josh [a] has been visiting for just over a week now. He spent most of last week at two WR offices a few hours from Phnom Penh, where he was working on computer stuff with the staff, giving them bits and pieces of his computer engineering degree from RIT [b] for free. I, meanwhile, was here in town, working hard to crank out the final stories and especially a brochure.

Friday night, as per Engchy’s recommendation, we went to eat at an Indian restaurant called Chi Cha’s [c] near the riverfront. My only regret is that I didn’t know about this place sooner. For two bucks, you get all-you-can-eat rice and that amazingly tasty Indian bread, along with whatever meat dish you want, a bowl of lentil soup, a plate with some mixed vegetables and then another plate with tomatoes and cucumbers. For an extra 25 cents you can add a bottle of Fanta. As if the food wasn’t enough, the oscillating fan mounted on the wall above the table had a remote control for Pete’s sake [d]. Just before leaving, the waitress gave us their business card, saying we should know they did free delivery. I asked if they delivered to America, and she said no, just Phnom Penh. I am not sure if she knew I was joking or not [e]. She didn’t look very Indian, but then again neither does my Indian friend Rebecca in Lancaster, so I went ahead and asked her if she was Indian. She kind of laughed at me like I was dumb, and said she was Cambodian. I was hoping she could have taught me some words in Hindi, but it was not meant to be.

The riverfront area in Phnom Penh is where the young people all go in the evenings with their special someones. They park their motos and sit on the little ledge overlooking the river and it is all pretty romantic, until a guy a few feet away, oblivious to the idea of ambience and public etiquette, lets loose and starts urinating. Josh and I walked down along the riverfront, and after stopping for fraps at a trendy café I like [f], we continued on past the royal palace before turning around and walking almost all of the way back to the hotel. We were talking about all kinds of things, including theology and community development, so we just kind of last track of time I guess. Josh noticed, and I photographed, cooked snake on a stick, all zig zagged and crispy [g]. We were walking back on Street 70, north of Boeung Kak lake, and shortly after I told Josh how this area had traditionally been brothel central until it was forced underground, down hallways and such, we passed a bonafide brothel right out in the open, complete with scantily clad teenage girls sitting under a fluorescent light glowing red. At about this time the area delved into a deeper level of shadiness, so we got on a couple of motos for the remaining part of the trip. Back in his hotel room I showed him on a map just how far we had walked, and it was concluded that we’d walked more than a quarter of the way around the perimiter of the city, which is pretty impressive [h].

Early the next morning we got on a bus and headed to the beach at Sihanoukvile, which, if you have been reading my blog with any regularity, has been mentioned a few times before. This was my third time there, but I never tire of it. We stayed at the same bungalow place where I stayed my first time down there [i]. This time the wooden thatched roof bungalow we got was half-way up a hill and raised up on stilts, allowing for a pretty cool view of the ocean. I read one and a half books over the weekend, and while the currently jelly fish-infested waters didn’t allow for swimming, God put on a pretty remarkable show for us with wind and rain and a rip-roaring but brief thunderstorm on Saturday afternoon. You don’t normally think of the words rain, beach and good as belonging in the same sentence, but sitting in that little beachside open-air thatched roof bar, safe from (and yet exposed to) the elements, and watching the islands in the distance disappear into the mist struck me as about the coolest place in the world to be at that moment.

I was feeling sick over the weekend, with a fever and aches and such. I was fearing that my negligence in taking my malaria meds [j] had caught up with me, but fortunately today I feel just about back to normal. It did occur to me, however, that if one has to be sick, the kind of sickness I experienced was just about ideal. I was tired and achy, but it was not miserable. It was the kind of thing you can comfortably sleep off. So I did just that, sleeping maybe 11 hours Saturday night and then another 9 or 10 last night, not to mention some dozing off on the bus.

On Sunday, before returning to PP, Josh and I went to the Snakehouse for lunch [k]. The Snakehouse, as the name would suggest, is pretty much a house with a lot of snakes. They say the owner goes out into the jungle and catches the snakes. I can think of about six billion occupations I would prefer to the one he has chosen for himself. Looking at snakes from behind the glass is creepy enough, if you ask me [l]. And what was even creepier still was how every few cages you’d see the sign for a pit viper or whatever and there was no snake to be seen. Sure, it is possible that the snake had died, but that kind of thing still does make you wonder what kinds of critters happened to be lurking in the gardens around the path you’re on [m], preferring freedom and access to human flesh over glass boxes.

Insert Twilight Zone music here.

APPENDICES!

[a] This is Brother Josh purchasing papaya for himself yesterday while I sit in the shade because I am sick.

[b] RIT = Rochester Institute of Technology (www.rit.edu)

[c] The sign in front of Chi Cha’s:

[d] That’s right, Pete. That remote-controlled oscillating fan goes out to you.

[e] This is a loose reference to a film I recently saw, titled Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. Much of it takes place in India where an American comedian realizes his sense of humor is not funny to Indians. You can watch the trailer here.

[f] Cafe Fresco (www.cafefresco.fcccambodia.com)

[g] Snakes on a stick.

[h] This map of the city shows you the basic route we walked, starting with Dot 1, Chi Cha’s restaurant, then down to Dot 2, Cafe Fresco, then eventually back up past Dot 3, snakes on a stick, and then to Dot 4, moto pick-up. The grey line then follows the moto route back to the hotel where Josh is staying, and where I had left my backpack, represented by Dot 5. Finally, the blue line is the moto route I took to get home, at Dot 6. Stalkers and other unsavory creatures, Dot 6 is not placed exactly in the right place, so as to throw you off. Don’t even try to find me. I blend right in with the locals anyway.

[i] Coaster’s (www.cambodia-beach.com/coasters.htm)

[j] Geof, health advisor and male nurse, who knows more about these things than you and I, said that taking malaria meds in Cambodia this time of year was a waste of time.

[k] In the photo of the dining room below, please note that the under the glass on the table is a big ol’ snake to further enhance one’s dining experience.

[l] One of many slithering serpents to be seen.

[m] See what I mean?

I read an article in the paper today about an American guy who just died here in Cambodia. He was in prison, charged with pedophilia after allegedly molesting young girls. The article said he reached through the bars with a mop handle and slid an officer’s gun into his cell and then blew himself away. He was just cremated at a pagoda, and his remains are being sent home to his family in the States. Besides the guy who did the cremation the only other person on hand was the ambulance driver who had brought the body and served as the witness. No mourners, no one.

If this man were to have a funeral, what would people say? Honestly. What can be said? I can’t even imagine the family’s pain in this moment, to have lost their son, their brother, and to have lost him in a way that will not garner much sympathy from anyone. You feel sympathy when a mother of three dies of cancer or when a kid is tragically killed while playing sports on Saturday at the park. But what do you say when a pedophile shoots himself? That’s just sad and shameful.

But this man, this pedophile, started off as a kid like anyone else. Maybe he had a happy childhood, or maybe he was caught up in a cycle of abuse like all too many. Maybe his upbringing brought him to this. Or maybe he grew up with loving parents who cared deeply for him and maybe at some point there was some small but powerful event that drove him off the deep end. Maybe a bully, or a careless word, or one small bad decision. The article didn’t say. Or maybe this man was just particularly evil and a lost cause all along. Is that it? Or are all of us, given certain conditions and circumstances, prone to the same kind of thing? Am I capable of evil like that?

You just wonder.

Then I also wonder, what will people say at my funeral? And will they mean it, or will it just be a bunch of nice stuff you’re supposed to say at funerals because it is not polite to sound like the person who died was actually a selfish jerk or a piece of scum or whatever? It’s sobering to think about these kinds of things, but in a way, it is also invigorating. Why? Because I’m not dead yet, and judging by the fact that you’re reading this, I’d guess you’re not dead either. Maybe death will come knocking tomorrow, or maybe it will be fifty years from now. There’s still some more of the story left to write. Maybe if I were to die tomorrow the eulogy would be positive and sincere, but if I lived a while longer and never did another good thing and never cared for anyone from tomorrow until the age of 80, why should anyone say anything good in my memory? “The Tim who just died may have been a jerk, but he started off well, and that counts for something.” Who cares, really, about the first 24 years if the remaining 55 are characterized by self-indulgence that made everyone around miserable?

It would be great, wouldn’t it, to live the sort of life that when you die, whether “prematurely” or not, people would be able to really mean it when they say that you were one of the most loving people they have ever known? What if the first thing they were to say about you had to do with your vibrant relationship with God, and how your joy was so cantagious?

We get to asking these kinds of questions and slowly, a lot of the things we put so much value on in our everyday lives tend to kind of fade into insignificance. I heard someone say once that if you reach back into eternity past, all you have is God. If you reach into eternity future, you have God and people. It only makes sense, then, as people of God, to place a pretty high value on people, to be concerned about who we are becoming personally, and intentional about how we live in relation to those around us.

Death is not the end. It is a new and never ending part of the story, for better or worse. But the story is already underway, and while you and I may not have control over very much in this world, the decisions we make today, and even the small ones, really add up.

Let’s write a good story, people. Let’s not leave people lying about us when the fat lady sings.

I wrote last time about discovering Java Café. If I come back here for a while I plan to frequent the place. I’ve been back a couple times and the owner guy now says to me, “See you tomorrow.” I say, “We’ll see, but no promises.”

I heard about Elsewhere, this other expat hangout where they periodically have free movie nights, and upon discovering that it was just around the corner from my house, I checked it out last night. They set up this big screen and have a projector out in this garden around a mini swimming pool. It was almost enough to make you forget you’re in Cambodia, except for the fact that Scarlett Johanesson’s voice was continually interrupted by the sounds of Karaoke wafting over from the place across the street. Elsewhere had been described to me as a place where folks with the Peace Corps and other young idealogue-types sit around, drinking, smoking, and talking about changing the world. I wouldn’t say that description proved to be very far off, although people mostly sat quietly during the movie. I was tired so I left when the credits rolled, but I’m assuming most of the others stuck around long enough to figure out what ails the world, even if they don’t remember any of it in the morning.

My time left here in Cambodia has now come within the two-week mark. It is difficult to know how to approach this from a psychological and emotional standpoint, not knowing whether I’ll be returning home just for a month or for the indefinite future. Do I scramble to do all I can during these remaining two weeks here, soaking it all in one last time, or do I kind of take it easy, with another two years coming up, which will give me plenty of opportunities to do all of these sorts of things? That is my quandary.

For those yet unaware, I’m in the preliminary stages of the interview process for a position here as Church Partnership Coordinator, which would basically mean keeping the lines of communication open between WR Cambodia and the six partner churches, and then coordinating all the trips people make here. The decision about this position won’t be made until after I return home, however, so I’m just taking it a day at a time and trying to make the most of my time here.

It has been a great two and a half months. It is embarrassing to even admit that I thought three months was a long time. My brother arrived here on Sunday and is spending this week a few hours from here with Engchy, where he is doing some computer training with the staff at the rural WR offices. This weekend I think we’ll go to the beach, and then after spending the first half of next week here around town, we’re off to Angkor Wat. This will pretty much be the exclamation point at the end of the trip for me. Josh will fly back that Monday and I’ll leave two days later.

A fortnight from now, I plan to be sitting around with good old friends in Lancaster, drinking coffee and catching up on each other’s lives.

I think they call this kind of time in life bittersweet.