cambodia.

these kids were selling pictures of themselves with that snake for $1.

         The second morning, I awoke bright and early to meet the Semester at Sea group I was traveling to Cambodia with. I had always wanted to go to Cambodia. I learned about the genocide inflicted on its people during the Khmer Rouge Regime when I participated in a summer program through Putney Student Travel my sophomore year of high school. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge, headed by Pol Pot, was responsible for the systemic killing of nearly 3 million Cambodians (about one fifth of the population). The regime targeted anyone considered to have connections to the previous government, professionals and intellectuals, urbanites, and anyone remotely related to an ethnic minority. This criteria and the subsequent killings left a very young, unskilled Cambodian population in its wake. Today, 50% of the Cambodian population is under the age of 25 as a result of the genocide.

            It was this fact that initially struck me about the Cambodian population. How is it that a population, a country, is meant to recover after loosing such a large and integral portion of its population? Yet, they were doing it, rebuilding their infrastructure and society, when I first heard of the genocide back in high school, and they continue to do so today. The strength of the Cambodian population and their willingness to rebuild and reinvent their nation is what has stuck with me since that summer nearly 7 years ago. It was for this same reason that I signed up to travel to Cambodia through a Semester at Sea sponsored trip months before I got on the boat.