A thousand years ago Angkor Wat at Siem Reap was an economic powerhouse like Hong Kong is today. Abandoned it lay in decaying ruins and is now being rediscovered. The lake shown around the temple in the photo below and the rectangular lake in the distance were all dug by hand a thousand years ago.
This an interesting carving. It is one thousand years old.
In the 1970's the Khemer Rouge communists took over the Cambodian government. They forced everyone out of the cities and into labor camps in the jungles and rice paddies. There they slaughtered an estimated 3-4 million people, 1/3 of the population of Cambodia. They targeted anyone perceived to be educated, which made you a threat to the government. They would go into the camps and ask for anyone who knew math. They got into trucks and drove off. No one knew they were being taken to the killing fields. The next day anyone who could read, and so forth. You wore glasses it was a death sentence.
And they didn't just murder everyone with a bullet. A lot of people were tortured to death here in this school converted to a torture chamber. When you walk in you can feel the evil.
They would take young children and infants by the ankles and smash their heads against this tree all day long, 7 days a week.
With every educated person dead you can imagine the impact it had on the society. Today it is rapidly recovering, with schools and a reviving economy. As the Governor of a State there once told us, wherever you Christians go, good things happen.
