Mango
I have been watching the fruit growing on the large mango tree at the front of the house with great interest. I love mangoes; what could be better than that soft, juicy, succulence? I was chatting to Ponheary on the verandah yesterday when she noticed hat one of the fruits had turned yellow and was just right for picking. It is very high up but Dara has an amazing ability to be able to do almost everything practical without the benefit of any modern device. He can fashion extraordinary tools that work wonderfully for the task in hand.
During the genocide time the family were kept, for a period, in a Pagoda compound along with several hundred other people. Ponheary said it was a prison without walls. Her mother, like many other people, had hidden some jewellery in the waistband of her skirt. Coming from the town they were classified as 'new people' The 'old people' were the original village occupants. There was a big divide between the two. The 'old people' controlled the food distribution, under the instructions from the KR, but it meant that old people were generally a little better fed, still hungry, but not quite so much. You look after your own. It was sometimes possible to secretly barter with the 'old people' for a little bit of extra food. It was highly dangerous though and punishable by death.
Ponheary told me that her Mum once exchanged her diamond ring for half a kilo of rice. They used to hide it under the poo from the baby. There were regular searches to make sure that noone was hiding anything but they never looked through the baby's poo. They used to save it up.
There was a woman with five children living near them in the Pagoda. She bartered a piece of jewellery for a mango and cut it into five pieces to give to her children. She had to rush off to her work duties and did not notice that the two year old had not eaten his piece. When he did eat it he was seen by a soldier. The punishment for this was that the woman and all of her five children were killed. All the other prisoners in the camp had to form a circle to watch while they were being killed and the soldiers made them all cheer and clap whilst it was happening. Death was never quick, bullets were too valuable to waste and so agricultural implements were used. Very small children were beaten against trees.
Children were expected to work as adults from about the age of eight. Below that age, they still worked but it would be in the communal kitchens. In the wet season the work was in the rice paddies for all the daylight hours and, when the moon was full, often at night too. All that hard labour on a diet of two bowls of thin rice soup a day. In the dry season Ponheary worked digging to build a dam. Everyone was allocated a certain length that they had to dig per day and failure to do so resulted in severe punishment. The bodies of the dead were just pushed into the ditches being dug. She told me that the reservoir, where people go to swim now it is built on the bodies of the dead.
I asked her how long it took after the Khmer Rouge first entered Siem Reap before they knew that it was not the good thing that most people had hoped for. Initially, everyone thought the Khmer Rouge were toppling the hated Lon Nol government had had been put in place after a coup backed by the US in 1970, and that things would improve. The very next day the KR called all the army officers to a meeting. Living next door to here was one such and he went off to the meeting as requested. He was never seen again along with all the others. The emptying of Siem Reap was systematic, unlike in Phnom Penh, and different professions had to leave at different times . Many people died on the forced march. From arriving at the first labour camp Ponheary said it took three months for the deaths from starvation to really start, although you could be killed for all sorts of other reasons.
It is estimated that between 20-30% of the population died during the three years and eight months of the Khmer Rouge regime.Noone really knows how many. I often wonder how it was not even more. Ponheary said that everyone, apart from the soldiers, was starving. How any survived in such appalling conditions with little food and no medical care whilst working so hard is a miracle.
During the genocide time the family were kept, for a period, in a Pagoda compound along with several hundred other people. Ponheary said it was a prison without walls. Her mother, like many other people, had hidden some jewellery in the waistband of her skirt. Coming from the town they were classified as 'new people' The 'old people' were the original village occupants. There was a big divide between the two. The 'old people' controlled the food distribution, under the instructions from the KR, but it meant that old people were generally a little better fed, still hungry, but not quite so much. You look after your own. It was sometimes possible to secretly barter with the 'old people' for a little bit of extra food. It was highly dangerous though and punishable by death.
Ponheary told me that her Mum once exchanged her diamond ring for half a kilo of rice. They used to hide it under the poo from the baby. There were regular searches to make sure that noone was hiding anything but they never looked through the baby's poo. They used to save it up.
There was a woman with five children living near them in the Pagoda. She bartered a piece of jewellery for a mango and cut it into five pieces to give to her children. She had to rush off to her work duties and did not notice that the two year old had not eaten his piece. When he did eat it he was seen by a soldier. The punishment for this was that the woman and all of her five children were killed. All the other prisoners in the camp had to form a circle to watch while they were being killed and the soldiers made them all cheer and clap whilst it was happening. Death was never quick, bullets were too valuable to waste and so agricultural implements were used. Very small children were beaten against trees.
Children were expected to work as adults from about the age of eight. Below that age, they still worked but it would be in the communal kitchens. In the wet season the work was in the rice paddies for all the daylight hours and, when the moon was full, often at night too. All that hard labour on a diet of two bowls of thin rice soup a day. In the dry season Ponheary worked digging to build a dam. Everyone was allocated a certain length that they had to dig per day and failure to do so resulted in severe punishment. The bodies of the dead were just pushed into the ditches being dug. She told me that the reservoir, where people go to swim now it is built on the bodies of the dead.
I asked her how long it took after the Khmer Rouge first entered Siem Reap before they knew that it was not the good thing that most people had hoped for. Initially, everyone thought the Khmer Rouge were toppling the hated Lon Nol government had had been put in place after a coup backed by the US in 1970, and that things would improve. The very next day the KR called all the army officers to a meeting. Living next door to here was one such and he went off to the meeting as requested. He was never seen again along with all the others. The emptying of Siem Reap was systematic, unlike in Phnom Penh, and different professions had to leave at different times . Many people died on the forced march. From arriving at the first labour camp Ponheary said it took three months for the deaths from starvation to really start, although you could be killed for all sorts of other reasons.
It is estimated that between 20-30% of the population died during the three years and eight months of the Khmer Rouge regime.Noone really knows how many. I often wonder how it was not even more. Ponheary said that everyone, apart from the soldiers, was starving. How any survived in such appalling conditions with little food and no medical care whilst working so hard is a miracle.
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