Greetings from Siem Reap! My name is Maya Murry, and I’m a 4th year computer science student in the College of Engineering. I arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, yesterday, and today we officially started our program’s first day.

We began by visiting the breathtaking campus of the Center for Khmer Studies, where we were kindly welcomed by staff into their beautiful spaces and library.

We were able to look through and access a diversity of texts, from books on Cambodia’s political history and French colonial trials to collections of archived magazines from before and after the Pol Pot regime.

 

We were then shown around one of their designated study spaces where a detailed mural of a Buddha tree and a forest for meditation. Students could come study or relax any time they would like within the study spaces or outside in the fresh heat and greenery.

Upon closer inspection of the mural where deer were painted, we realized the signs of erosion were something quite different. Rather they originated before the mural itself, when the cities of Siem Reap and Phnom Penh were entirely deserted of their populations and civilians were sent to labor camps. The holes are the remains of bullet ricochets from militant training, echoing decades later throughout the building, and now through artwork that has breathed a new form of transcendental life into the scars.

As unsettling as it was, this mural has established itself as a profound reminder of how the land we are walking on, every building we pass by, and every temple, continues to hold the generational vestiges physically and spiritually of the genocide. And now everywhere around us, the campus continues to be a haven for students, locals, and families studying or driving through with the nearby temple of Wat Damnak being an easily accessible site of spiritual preservation.

After touring the campus, we had the honor of meeting a Buddhist monk at that temple. We each offered a flower that had not yet bloomed, so that it may blossom in time as a blessing of gratitude. During our visit, we meditated in silence while the bells rang through the warm air, the dogs howling throughout the streets and alleys of Siem Reap.

 

 

Around 1:00 pm in Siem Reap and 1:00 am in New York, we moved on to lunch. We visited a neighborhood frequented by the elderly community, filled with people clearing their minds and meditating amongst each other.

Before our evening plans, we watched the documentary called The Tenth Dancer, in preparation for our dinner show, learning about a Khmer woman who had been the only dancer out of her troupe of ten to survive the genocide. After she escaped, she was unable to find any of the buildings, houses, or people that once filled her life. She has since passed away, but she spent the remainder of her life diligently training young women to become professional dancers and revive the cultural heritage of storytelling through movement.

Many of the women she worked with had also been survivors or descendants of survivors who continue to experience the impact of genocide. Seeing her channel devastation and grief into new life through her students, mothering those who have lost their own, and guiding them to recall the inner spirit within them through dance.

Finally, we moved on to our last event of the day, a traditional Khmer dance dinner show. The performance started with the Mani Mekhala dance and ended with the Apsara performers.

 

When we left the moon was a thin crescent that night, we were home around 10 pm. We spent the evening getting ready to explore Angkor Thom, the core of ancient Angkor, by the time the sun rises…