what i have learned by karen

What I Learned On My Trip: Part 1

By Karen

In Vietnam, our first country, we saw a museum which told the story of the Vietnam war with hundreds of pictures. This museum was so intense that ‘people who were for the war exit the room against it!’ The weapons that were on display were bombs that would explode into smaller bombs which would explode on the people, shooting nails deep into their skin. Out of 100 of these bombs, maybe 5 would not explode. Years after the war, a farmer could be sowing his crops and accidentally step onto one of the unexploded bomb. Within seconds, nails cover his body.

There are more bombs like the Napalm Bomb or Agent Orange. The Napalm Bombs are just bombs filled with gasoline jelly and Agent Orange kills all plants. Sometimes they were used to burn the jungle so that no one could hide in it, other times it would hit people and napalm would burn them alive. Agent Orange is a chemical that can case deformity. Even generations after the war, the children who’s parents had any contact with agent orange would be born deformed or have severe health problems.

The main thing that the museum showed was the soldier massacre. It showed pictures of laughing American soldiers holding ripped apart or burned bodies, high in the air. There was this one American senator who slaughtered a whole family. He and his whole group pulled little children from their hiding places and cut open their stomachs. Thirty years later, he continued to lie and hid the truth. Finally, when he was at the end of his turn of being a senator, he admitted it. Its almost as if the American soldiers are so scared from the war that they turned it into a game! Thousands of innocent women and children were bombed or shot!

The worst cases are of the people who do survive. Some of the pictures showed little children or 20 year old who had their body burned from a napalm bomb or have a body part missing from a land mine! One of the photographs showed a little child with little balls from a bomb shot into the child’s face. Even in today’s Vietnam, many people still have a leg missing from an unexploded land mine or are deformed in some way.

After walking through this small museum, I felt ashamed of my nation. I didn’t want to admit to everyone around me that I was an American! If you ever go into Saigon, Vietnam, you have to go to this museum. Pictures are describe more than words!

Even though the war was 30 years ago, Vietnam’s people are really pushing though! Vietnam is now SE Asia’s second largest rice exporter! I heard from an English banker that “Thailand is falling behind and Vietnam is ‘booming!’ Vietnam which is a communist country, seems to be doing excellent! All of the people that we met are hard-working and really smart! They all work 12 hours a day so they are sort of workaholics! This is the hardest working country we have been in so far! On top of being extremely hard working, they are skinny and fit because they exercise every morning! on the trains and around the cities there is a loud speaker saying in Vietnamese ‘get up early! stay fit!’ Every one is exercising, even the elderly people are playing Badmitten! everywhere is busy! the rivers are full of boats for construction. Outside the cities are full of factories, and tons of rice fields are in the countryside! When we were traveling around, everyone wanted to talk to you and everyone wants to learn English! It’s really a great country!

Even though Cambodia is right next door, it is a very different story. Twenty years ago, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge made the record for creating one of the most gruesome events in history! Their goal was to ‘relive’ the glory days of the Angkor Period! This was a great Cambodian civilization which controlled Southern Vietnam, Laos, and part of Thailand. To Pol Pot, this meant getting rid of the government, everyone who was close to the the old government, everyone who were leaders, and everyone who had an education. (teachers, doctors, lawyers, monks, etc.) What was so amazing is that it was all done in secret with lies! They would find people who had an education by saying ‘we need teachers or lawyers’. these people would go because they wanted their old job back. After they left, they were never seen again! I think the reason why the Khmer Rouge wanted to get rid of anyone with an education is because that way no one could question their authority! No one could even lift a finger against them!

One of the reasons why its so gruesome is that regular Cambodians were killing regular Cambodians! The biggest question we had was how did the Khmer Rouge get regular Cambodians to do this? The answer to this is that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge taught innocent children that everyone is against Angkor and to not trust anyone. In one prison that we visited called S-21, we found out that they would get innocent teenage boys and trained them to torture the prisoners. Pretty soon these boys would execute their friends and even their family members!

In one year, these boys would become viscous killing machines! They became so cruel that the Khmer Rouge would kill the whole group because ‘They knew too much’. Then they would bring in a whole new group and do the same as the last group. So the children were used for the executors and even as soldiers! They were all brainwashed into what the Khmer Rouge thought!

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge evacuated the cities by scaring the people into thinking that ‘the Americans are about to bomb the city!’ (This could have been true since America also dropped thousands of bombs on Cambodia during the Vietnam war because North Vietnam was bringing its supplies through Cambodia.) Just imagine thousands of people all walking, leaving an abandoned city like Phnom Phen! (which had over one million inhabitants) Even the sick and dying were walking! Even the pregnant women! What the Khmer Rouge really wanted to do was to turn Cambodia into a self-sufficient farming country. The Khmer Rouge wanted the guns so much they traded away all their rice to the Chinese for guns.They wanted to trade rice for guns so that they could invade other countries and become as large as the Angkor empire used to be! (the Chinese liked this because they were planning for Cambodia to be part of a Chinese empire. The Chinese would even come in and rape young girls to get them pregnant. This way, the next generation would be part Chinese and leadthe new Chinese power in Southeast Asia). But the Khmer Rough tried to invade Vietnam so many times that Vietnam finally got sick of it and invaded Cambodia which was the downfall of the Khmer Rouge.

Towards the end of the Khmer Rouge, the laborers growing rice who were working 20 hours per day were only given a small bowl of rice and water. More people starved to death then being tortured! Evem if you worked along side Pol Pot, you were never actually safe. A lot of times he would turn against his own men and put them in a prison and torture them to death. I read that Pol Pot put his main general’s wife and child into a prison camp. Later the general was also added.

What i thought was interesting was that Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, was so secretive that even his own family didn’t know who he really was. When his brother saw a picture of Pol Pot, he recognized him as his brother Saloth Sar. Later he commited suicide because he was so depressed his own brother had done all that killing. Even after the whole Khmer Rouge was finished, no one went after Pol Pot because no one knew what he looked like! Eventually, he died from heart failure on April 15 1998, twenty years after the genocide ended. Within 3 years the Khmer Rouge killed more then 3 million people. There are still mass graves left untouched.

Cambodia today seems to be doing fairly well since the genocide wasn’t that long ago. That’s especially impressive since they have had to re-train a whole new generation since all the educated people were killed. There seems to be little trading on the rivers compared to Vietnam, the road we went on were in pretty bad shape, but the people seem fit and hard working.

Where Cambodia succeeds, India fails. Its amazing how a religion could influence a country so much! From holy animals to holy places to the Caste system. Since monkeys and cows are holy, no one can hurt them. I also heard that when a cow dies, it is not eaten, instead it is buried or dumped in a holy river like the Ganges river. But I also that people only say that. A Vetrinarian working with a group that helps suffering animals in India told me that actually, when a cow is done producing milk or is too weak to pull a cart, the cow is just dumped onto the street. In many of the cities, there are cows roaming the cities, digging around in the trash eating a lot of plastic and other things that can kill them.

The monkeys are given offerings and are allowed to roam the temples. The monkeys don’t really bother me. What bothers me is that monkeys and cows are flourishing while dogs are starving and chew themselves raw because of mange which is hundreds of tiny creatures burrowing through their skin and driving them mad. A bath and some special soap could easily relieve their terrible suffering.

I have noticed that the places that are holy seem more damaged then the places that aren’t. One great example is the Ganges river. Every day the Hindu people of Varinassi and beyond, go to the Ganges river to bath and visit the god’s temples. At the same time as this, hundreds of bodies are being cremated right next to the river. After the body becomes ashes, the cremators dump the ashes into the river. The bodies that don’t get burned (pregnant women, children, holy people, holy animals), are tied to heavy rocks and thrown into the river. I also heard that hundreds of tons of sewage is dumped into this holy river every day. Combine all of this together (cremation, dead bodies, sewage) and you have created a disaster for the environment and for the bathing people.

I have noticed that India has the largest spread between the rich and the poor. I feel like the reason for this is based on the caste system. This system sort of allows the rich to not notice the poor. I heard that in the caste system, there are many lives. The life that you live is based in the last life. So every life, depending on how pure you were in the last life, you either increase or decrease in ‘rank’. A lot of times the people who are the poorest are the people who are missing a limb or are deformed in some way. But this isn’t always true many people are totally poor, living in a dirty shack their whole life, just because they were born in a low caste and no one will give them a chance to succeed.

I find that the people who live in the countryside are the people who are the happiest because they have their own life style and money is the least of their worryies. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people from the countryside still go to the city even though they are happier in the country. I guess why they would do that would be for hope of money or a job. I think its interesting how India has more overweight people then Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. The biggest reason for that must be the food. It is so greasy and fattening or it’s really really sweet.

I think its interesting how places could be so close together yet so different. Even though the climate and people look almost identical in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, their history is completely different! This increases or decreases how well off they are. Like for example; even though Vietnam had the war 30 years ago, the people are fit, healthy, happy, and hardworking. The roads are almost brand new and everyone seems equal. Thailand has had nothing happen to it yet it is falling behind Vietnam. In India, there are the most overweight people then anywhere else and out of everywhere we have been so far, India seems to have the worst off people, animal, and environment situations. The people seem not equal, there is a larger spread between the rich and the poor. What i find is interesting is that there is only a small wall dividing the two. The dogs have been run over, driven insane by skin diseases and dead animals seem to be left rotten for days. The rivers and streets are polluted and covered in trash.

Not that America is perfect. There are still homeless people but many of these people have a chance of going to a shelter home or getting help from a special program. The average person is overweight in America for the same reason as in India, because they like eating fast food which is full of grease and oil. Out of all of these places I like Vietnam the best!