CC
After a rather exhausting overnight van, train and bus journey from Hoi an in Vietnam, via Saigon and including a slightly tricky border crossing, we made it to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. The journey didn’t end there however – a taxi, ferry and tuk-tuk were still required to arrive at our accommodation on the Island of Koh Dach, on the Mekong River. Sounds of hundreds of weaving machines, operated by local weavers, run frantically all day. At night, those sounds are replaced by the loud chatter of thousands of cicadas. It was here on Koh Dach that we met CC, Cambodian by birth, Canadian by citizenship.
CC is 64 years old and just recently retired. He is spending his retirement between Canada and Cambodia and was born on Koh Dach. CC became our friend and eventually opened up and told us about his lost childhood under the Khmer Rouge. He lost his sister and her daughter as well as a significant number of other relatives and friends – all murdered under the dictator Pol Pot’s maniac and genocidal reign of terror. He shared miraculous survival and escape stories: Together with his pregnant wife, months after the regime had been toppled in 1979, he escaped into a refugee camp on the Thai – Cambodian border, where his oldest son was born.
It was our first encounter with a survivor of the Pol Pot regime. This blog will however not document some of the more graphic details CC shared with us. As he himself said: “Any film you will see about it, is nowhere near as terrible as it was”.
Ball Moi, Beblopplob Moi
CC organised a tuk-tuk that took us to the northern tip of Koh Dach, as the sun was setting. We arrived in time to encounter a small group of children, who were as curious about us, as we were about them. Joaquin showed them a Khmer translation of the story of The Ball and our mission, but we soon realised that these children and the few grown-ups were illiterate. Eventually we found a girl who could read Khmer, she explained our journey to the others. By this stage the crown had grown dramatically in size. What followed was a highly emotional sequence of headers and signatures and the first practice of our motto “One Ball, One World” being translated into Khmer. Ball Moi, Beblopplob Moi.
