Rosenfield speaker

A survivor of the Khmer Rouge brutality, Chivy Sok, takes centre stage in a week-long symposium on genocide prevention.

"Being stripped of family or any concept of love was probably the most horrifying experience of my life. From the time you woke up to the time you went to sleep we worked digging ditches, planting and harvesting rice," she is quoted here as saying.

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Chef recalls terror

The Herald Sun piece about Hutchison's life since serving as a United Nations peacekeeper in Cambodia shows that even Australian are still feeling the effects of events in 1992.

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Another view of crunchy spiders

One of our older post that rates well among folk searching Google involves fried spiders of Skoun. Ewen Bell has this offering that shows business is still booming.

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Historic trail set for tourist revival

Guy Nicholson says a long-lost stone roadway once linked the Laos ruins of Wat Phu Champasak with Cambodia's Angkor.

If it still existed today, it would be a cultural and historical superhighway comparable to the Inca Trail or the Silk Road, but the route was already long overgrown by the time the region's modern borders were drawn in the colonial era.

The revolutions of the 1970s closed temples and borders alike. Geography and security issues have long made it cumbersome and dangerous to visit these ruins as a united whole.

... When the infrastructure improves, there's every chance that tourist demand will resurrect the historic connection between Laos and Cambodia.

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Traditional salves and western methods

The International Herald Tribune offers a few sobbering figures concerning mental health in a nation of 12 million traumatized people.

A study of Cambodian refugees in the United States, published last August in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 62 percent had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder in the past year, compared with a rate in the general American population of 3.6 percent.

Most have turned to faith healers and herbalists, as there is only 26 Cambodian psychiatrists who practice today (10 of whom have been educated abroad).

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