Tending Memories of the Dead: Antakalnis Cemetery

         My grandparents on their wedding day: Janina Ciurlyte-Simutiene and Anicetas Simutis 
                                                             Kaunas, Lithuania, 1936

Death is the great equalizer. Like the bones of the dead, layers of history intermingle in Antakalnis Cemetery. The cemetery’s incongruous monuments and grave markers reflect varying points of reference—religious, political, cultural, ideological—as they have played out here in Lithuania over centuries of humanity. “Antakalnis” in Lithuanian means “on top of the hill.” Here, from its hilltop location the cemetery bears witness to the overlapping stratums of human life, and strife, in this northern European country of three million. This is a land that has known little peace, a crossroads between Eurasia and Europe, a tiny country surrounded by three giants, Russia, Poland, and Germany. The cemetery holds the remains of foreign occupying armies and armies passing through; the peacemakers and the traitors; the priests and the atheists; the artists and the pragmatists. My grandparents, Ambassador Anicetas Simutis and Janina Čiurlytė Simutienė, are buried here. I am the family caretaker of their grave. I am the keeper of their memory.

           In the spring of 2007, my mother and I had my grandparents’ remains cremated and the ashes packed into a small metal container about the size of a jewelry box, something shiny and decorative that my grandmother would have liked. We flew from New York City across the Atlantic with the box tucked deep inside a quilt carrying bag, each of us holding one handle, as we negotiated American, and then European, airports.

            My grandparents’ burial took place in the spring of 2007 on one of those May days when the sky is aquamarine and crowded with cumulous clouds, and the northern sun draws out the deepest purples and brightest yellows from the wildflowers creeping up the cemetery’s hillsides. As our family walked the cemetery path flanked by tall pines behind an honor guard sent by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, my mother whispered to me, “If she can see us, Bobutė will like this.” My grandmother liked pomp and circumstance. I could not remember eating a meal at my grandmother’s table, even a casual one, when she did not set out silver and cloth napkins. My grandfather was modest, preferring to ride to United Nations sessions by subway rather than in a limousine at his struggling country’s expense.

           My mother was born in New York City in 1939. I was born in 1966 in New Jersey. Although I was born two generations removed from Lithuania, my grandparents taught me to love and respect my heritage and to make it a priority to return to live and work in an independent Lithuania. In the past twenty-five years of my life, I’ve returned to Lithuania twice as a Fulbright lecturer and have worked, conducted research, and lived in Vilnius in a variety of capacities. I maintain a second home in Vilnius. I have dual citizenship. I have cultivated the same social circle since I was a student at Vilnius University in 1988 and 1989.

To reach my grandparents’ grave from my apartment in the center, I exit the building’s gated cobblestone courtyard and step onto Saint John’s Street, into the shadow of the bell tower of the baroque Church of Saint John. I enter the flow of pedestrian traffic on narrow winding Castle Street that wends from the Gates of Dawn, where Catholics pray on their knees on the cobblestone street below the miraculous painting of the Virgin Mary, to where it ends at the foot of Gediminas Castle, situated on a forested hill towering over Vilnius.

Vilnius is a city built on a dream. The legend is that in the early fourteenth century, after a weary day of hunting in the hills, Grand Duke Gediminas lay down to sleep on the ground in the forest and had a vivid dream of an iron wolf howling at the top of the hill. The wolf instructed the Grand Duke to build a great city nestled between these hills and protected by three rivers. Centuries before Jungian dream interpretation, the Grand Duke sought out the help of the pagan shaman, Lizdeika, who instructed him to heed the iron wolf’s message. Vilnius is first mentioned in the letters of Grand Duke Gediminas as the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1323.

I weave my way between a myriad of café tables set directly on the street, populated with lingering coffee-drinkers and wine tasters, heads bent together deep in conversation, or tilted back, laughing easily. The usual beggars and con men work the tables. I pause to listen to the street musicians; cross the street to Cathedral Square. Here, in the shadow of classical Vilnius Cathedral, with its tall white columns and statues of saints and angels on the roof, beside the elegant slim bell tower painted white with ancient copper bells that resound across the city every evening precisely at six, I take a brief hiatus to let the local chapter of Hari Krishnas glide across the square on their evening procession, swirling in their scarlet and purple robes, beating drums, and singing hari hari with a distinctly Lithuanian inflection. I stop in my tracks to let the occasional marching band pass, or uniformed school group, or to guard against my shins being run into by teenage skate boarders gliding down the white marble stairs, designed five hundred years ago for pause and reflection.

I glance up at Gediminas Castle, tenacious and steadfast. If I climbed the cobblestone road up to the castle, from the battlements I would see Antakalnis Cemetery, and just beyond the cemetery, the forest that extends 33.8 kilometers to the Belarussian border.

I cut through the leafy green park that stretches along the Vilnelė River—perfect for idyllic summer afternoon boating in the style of nineteenth century impressionist paintings—and walk at a brisk pace down Antakalnis Street, dividing the suburb of Antakalnis in half—one side populated by crumbling Soviet-era brick and cement apartment buildings and their similarly crumbling occupants; the other side sporting mirror-image crumbling buildings, only, interspersed between them, are charming side streets with even more charming names, like Sea Goddess Street (Jurates Gatve) or Street of the Goddess of Love (Mildos Gatve), that lead up the steep hill towards well-maintained cozy wooden one-family homes that are populated by “new” Lithuanians—young families in their twenties and thirties with West European educations and promising careers.

Once I reach the baroque Church of Saint Peter and Paul with its ornate interior of pudgy angels and a ship made of crystal that hangs above the altar, I know I am almost at my destination. Situated in front of a precarious (and infamous for fender benders) traffic circle where for some reason the traffic lights have never been switched on, the Church of Saint Peter and Paul is my landmark for the road that leads up the hill and into Antakalnis cemetery.

Between tall swaying pines, in the shadow of the forest that was once the Sapeigine hunting grounds of the medieval Grand Dukes, I find my grandparent’s grave. Here is my point of reference. Here I remember my grandfather, two meters tall and as a broad as a refrigerator. My grandfather, who for half a century represented a country that had been wiped off all the maps of the world. My grandfather, who struggled to support a family of four on a symbolic income from the Lithuanian émigré community while hunted by the KGB, badmouthed by traitors and informers, glorified by patriots. He stubbornly maintained his post as Consul General of prewar independent Lithuania, working out of a rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. My grandfather issued pre-War independent Lithuanian passports to political refugees; helped displaced persons find work and shelter after World War II; gave fiery anti-Soviet speeches on The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and pressured the State Department not to recognize Lithuania’s incorporation into the Soviet Union. With his voice of reason, making the argument that drains on the Soviet economy would eventually cause the Soviet Union to implode, Anicetas Simutis led his community of postwar refugees through the long dark years of the Cold War until 1991, when at the age of 85, he was appointed newly independent Lithuania’s first Ambassador to the United Nations by Lithuania’s fledgling democratic government.

I once asked my grandfather if he was an idealist.

“No,” my grandfather answered, “I am not an idealist. I am duty-bound to my country.”

He and my grandmother were duty bound to a country they could never return to while the Soviets were in power—unless they were willing to face imprisonment or a death penalty. They waited fifty-five years to be able to come home.

In the meantime, I went home for them. At the time I was studying at the Lithuanian Gymnasium, a high school in Germany that taught courses in a combination of the German and Lithuanian languages, a carry-over from the post-war refugee schools. I traveled to Soviet-occupied Lithuania for the first time in 1983 as a guest on a KGB-sponsored tour for the children of Lithuanian émigrés. I visited again in that Orwellian year, 1984.  I was one of the hand-picked students selected to go. I knew immediately that I had been selected because the KGB was very interested in my grandfather’s activities.

I wrote in my journal about my trip to Lithuania when I was seventeen:

            My first thought was that I absolutely could not go. I could not compromise my grandfather's principles and life work. How would it look? The granddaughter of Consul General Anicetas Simutis traipsing off an all-expense paid propaganda tour of Soviet-occupied Lithuania?  I went to our dorm supervisor’s apartment and paid her five Deutsch marks to use the phone to call America. I told my grandfather that I had been selected as one of the students to go on the trip to Lithuania. I told him that obviously I would refuse the trip. “Laima, you must go,” my grandfather said. “No matter what you do, people will talk about me. You must go and stick your nose everywhere possible and then when you come back you will report everything you saw and heard to me.

 

Dissidents who worked at Radio Free Europe in Munich gave me a stack of Bibles, political books, papers, letters, and medicine—all of it contraband in the Soviet Union—with instructions on how to deliver them once I was behind the Iron Curtain to the appropriate sources, political prisoners and underground dissidents who were working to undermine the Soviet Union from within. I was warned that at the border between Poland and the USSR our luggage would be checked. Each coupe was allocated fifteen minutes time for inspection.  To get around the inspection I buried my “illegal literature” deep on the bottom of my suitcase. On top I scattered copies of light porn magazines and lingerie. When the soldiers came in to inspect our coupe—two young boys around my age—they became engrossed in leafing through my “contraband” magazines and never dug any deeper in my suitcase. They curtly informed me that they needed to confiscate the magazines and admonished me for trying to bring “pornography” into the Soviet Union, where such corrupt magazines were outlawed. That was how I delivered necessary medicines, letters, and political and religious materials to people working the underground in Lithuania, my grandfather’s people. At the same time, I dutifully attended every propaganda tour and session.

In 1988 and 1989 I returned to Lithuania to study Lithuanian Literature for a year at Vilnius University. I arrived just in time to witness the “singing revolution” that led to Lithuania’s independence from the Soviet Union. It was a carnival-like time when it seemed as though the entire country poured into the streets to speak their minds. The revolution was dubbed the “singing revolution” because massive crowds sang folk song after folk song, protest song after protest song, as they peacefully gathered in the spirit of Ghandi and Martin Luther King.

By car Antakalnis Cemetery is no more than fifteen minutes’ drive from the center—providing there is no traffic. At a brisk pace this distance can be walked in forty minutes.

Or longer, if thousands are walking in procession together, as was the case on January 16, 1991, when the remains of fourteen peaceful demonstrators (thirteen of them students in their early twenties) were laid to rest in Antakalnis Cemetery in the bitter cold and twilight darkness of a northern winter afternoon. The demonstrators gathered on the night of January 12-13, surrounding the Vilnius Television tower in a human chain, to protect the tower from Soviet troops, who were ordered in with tanks and machine guns. They had been singing folk songs when they were attacked and killed. Their graves are laid out in a sweeping arc, nestled against a protective hill, with a marble Pieta in the center.

After independence in 1991, my grandparents were finally able to go home. Friends they had parted with in 1936, when as newlyweds they sailed to New York to fill my grandfather’s post as a young diplomat, students and young professionals then, greeted them at the airport in 1991 leaning in over their canes to shake hands. The few who were still alive, that is.  Almost all of them had been through the Gulags of Siberia. After my grandfather died, my mother and I found a manifesto written out by hand in elegant script on the back of a black and white photograph of my grandfather and his three closest friends taken in 1933. The foursome were in their twenties, had just completed their university studies, and had embarked on a tour of Western Europe. Inspired by the sights of Europe, they wrote their manifesto. They vowed to remain close friends until death parted them and to always choose the decent, courageous, and righteous path in life. Ten years later only my grandfather was still alive. Tucked behind the photograph and manifesto there was a letter dated 1953, the year Stalin died. The letter was from Siberia. In the letter the daughter of one of the friends in the photographs describes how her father died of starvation in a concentration camp in Siberia in 1943; how his dying wish was that she write to his friend, Anicetas, and let him know.

In the spectrum of an extended family’s gene pool, I connect most with my grandfather. I knew this from the age of sixteen. We look alike. We think alike. We intuit alike. We obsess alike. And we shared the same birthday, February 11, which we always celebrated together with tea and cake. When I read through my grandfather’s personal journals after his death, I felt how the space he carved for his own private reflection reminded me of my own fingerprint of thought.

After my grandfather’s death in March 2006, I was cleaning out his house in Long Island. In the garden shed I found cartons and cartons of his writing, accumulated over the years. It was just like him to store his work in the garden shed. My grandfather was a modest man, a practical man. Once the writing had served either its public purpose or private function, it was relegated to the garden shed. He wrote for Lithuanian newspapers before the war and émigré newspapers after the war. He wrote detailed diplomatic pro memorias to his boss, Stasys Lozoraitis, in Washington, but he worked out his private thoughts in his personal journals.

Antakalnis Cemetery was established in 1809. In the early nineteenth century mostly soldiers—Russian, German, and Polish—were buried here. On the left side of the sandy footpath that divides the cemetery into two halves the remains of Polish soldiers from Józef Klemens Piłsudski’s army are laid to rest in diagonal sweeping rows marked with identical white stone crosses that plummet and dip across the sloping valley. They fought to annex Vilnius to Poland in 1919 – 1920. Vilnius and its environs remained under Polish control until 1939 when Stalin returned the historic capital and surrounding areas to the Lithuanian republic in exchange for permission to station Soviet troops on Lithuanian soil.

Every year on All Soul’s Day members of the Polish community honor the fallen Polish soldiers by placing three simple white candles on each point of each cross, creating a sweeping visual image in the ink-black November night. Some Lithuanians take the gesture as a reminder that although the Poles have retreated for the moment, they will be back. After all, they reason, Piłsudski’s heart is buried in Vilnius and his body in Poland. Certainly one day he will have to come back to retrieve his heart

Only footsteps from the remains of Piłsudski’s army lie the remains of 3,000 soldiers from Napoleon’s Grand Armee. Their bones are consolidated into one mass grave marked with a common marker. In 2002 a construction company was excavating in the suburb of Žirmūnai when workmen uncovered layers of bones. At first they thought the worst, the typical story in this region, either Holocaust victims killed during the Nazi occupation of 1941-1944 or Lithuanian resistors to the Soviet occupation killed during the 1944-1956 partisan war. But testing proved those first guesses wrong. The bones dated from the early nineteenth century, when Napoleon left his Grande Armee to fend for themselves on the streets of Vilnius after his retreat from Russia in the deep of a northern European winter. Further testing revealed that Napoleon’s soldiers had frozen to death, died of exposure, or died of starvation. When I wander through the cemetery, I often think of these men of the Mediterranean, of warmer climes, and of the reckless futility of their winter march on Moscow.

For Lithuanians, living so deep in the hinterlands of Europe, any brush with greatness, no matter how infamous, is noteworthy. Once when visiting a friend’s dacha, my friend’s mother enthusiastically pointed at a trench in their backyard and proudly said, “Napoleon’s army marched through here.” On my father’s side relatives boast a dash of French blood, thanks to Napoleon. My great-great grandmother found a wounded French soldier in the fields and nursed him back to health, later becoming his wife. Subsequent generations point fingers at this distant French ancestor as the cause of any family lunacy and the explanation as to how in this gene pool of blonds some of our relatives have black hair and olive complexions.

            My grandparents’ grave is located in my favorite part of Antakalnis Cemetery—a hill top devoted exclusively to dreamers. Here creative people are laid to rest: artists, poets, writers, actors, musicians, theater directors, and alongside them, émigré diplomats who served as Lithuania’s diplomatic corps in exile during the Soviet occupation. They all grew old together, united by their cause, the fight for independence for Lithuania, and now they all rest together.

            The creativity of the people laid to rest here is reflected in the graves themselves. There is no “standard” or “uniform” or “traditional” grave stone. Each grave is a sculpture and the sculptors who create them strive to create monuments that are works of art. The grave of an actor is expressed as a stone sculpted tastefully in the shape of the comedy and tragedy masks. Another grave, of a writer who committed suicide, consists of a simple circle of stones with a slender linden tree growing gracefully through the center.

Beside my grandparents’ grave is the grave of Birutė Pūkelevičiūtė, a writer and poet of my grandparents’ generation, who was also an émigré in America. She corresponded with me, commenting on my poems when I was first learning the craft as an adolescent. In 1992, before I gave birth to my first son, Birutė wrote me a letter in which she described the dichotomy between birth and death: “When a woman gives birth, death hovers close by.” She enclosed this poem about her own birth, which I translated into English: 

Bird-Cherries

 

My mother was slender, like the bird-cherry.

Heavy with me, her misfortune ripened.

Wide bowls filled with wild flowers—

The yellow painted shutters remained

Closed: she was painting for me.

I came during the very Consecration—

When all the roads are empty, the organ still.

Throughout the night my cradle filled

With jagged, fallen, harvest stars.

And my mother cried out bitterly

For the first time.

Because I had broken away,

Like a land-slide, and will rush

Down. Without her. 

Really—

She holds my hands from slipping out of hers.

Autumn orchards burn red.

Wild drakes fly south; their wings

Smolder bronze.

Then I say good-bye.

The path through the rushes hunches in.

The sedges are like sharpened knives.

Toothless trunks gape at me;

My joints shake.

But I do not turn back.

On the second tier of the hill lies my dear friend, the poet Nijolė Miliauskaitė, who died in 2002 at the age of 50 from breast cancer. I remember our last visit together in May, 2001. She wore a big floppy wig with bangs that fell too far down on her forehead. Nijolė prepared a table full of Indian delicacies for my visit. Nijole and her husband, the poet Vytautas Bložė had embraced Eastern teachings, mantric singing, dietary control, and an enhanced sense of transcendent mystical connection to the world made possible through their belief in Hindu teachings. They never ate in restaurants because they could not be sure of the karma of the cooks who prepared the food. The especially never ate store-bought bread because the process of kneading the bread ensured that a stranger’s karma would enter it and by eating it that karma would pass into them.

After lunch we drove from their apartment in Druskininkai to Nijolė and Vytautas's cottage in a nearby village. I was amazed at the amount of renovating and gardening the couple had done—he in his seventies and in poor health and she with her chemotherapy and radiation treatments that required long hospital stays. In her kitchen Nijolė had painted every appliance aquamarine blue, along with the kitchen floor and walls. Blue was a healing color, she told me, a divine color, a spiritual color. Months after her death, Vytautas said to me: “Everywhere I look, I see her unfinished work.”

About a year before her diagnosis, I translated one of Nijolė’s poems. Now, upon reflection, I believe she sensed then that her time had come:

Time to Transplant

this spring I must transplant, it's about time.
my aloe, old, gnarled,
aloe vera treasured beyond words
by those who know its healing qualities
hidden deep within

what a tangle of roots, tiny ones, thick ones
so tight that there is no way
I can remove them no matter what I do—
I grab a rock and smash the vase

and why after all
were you so stubborn clinging
to those clay walls 
with all your strength?
what was it that you were holding onto?
stop scratching me, stop scraping my arms

don't tell me you liked 
your prison narrow and poor as it was
where you never had enough water or food, after all
you'll get a new vase, spacious and beautiful!

my soul, don't tell me that you too
are clutching at the unstable
temporary walls 
of your prison

            Nijolė’s grave marker consists of a playful angel with pudgy cheeks carved by a local woodcarver. The angel wears a smirk on his face. Knowing Nijolė, I think this hastily written poem of hers could have served as her epitaph:

ach, not again! I cannot
do two things at once:
if I'm writing a poem
then there's no doubt
that I'll burn the potatoes

 A few footsteps down the path, the writer Jurga Ivanauskaitė rests.  She earned her stripes as a controversial post-Soviet writer when she wrote a novel about priests having sex with young girls. After independence, when Lithuanians could travel for the first time, she hitch-hiked to Dharamsala, India, to study Buddhism with the Dalai Lama. She wrote a nonfiction trilogy about Buddhism and Tibet. Jurga died of cancer at the height of her career at the age of 45. I translated her last book of essays, The Sentence, written during the two years of life she “borrowed” after her cancer diagnosis by getting specialized treatments in a hospital in Lund, Sweden. The essays are honest, spare, written in a race against death, and in my opinion, are her best work:

 

On the same evening I find out that I have cancer, I find out that I have been awarded the National Prize for Culture and Art. … On that memorable evening I did not feel pain or fright or even panic. … My only wish— to get home from the hospital and to cry my heart out in the kitchen, chain smoking—was fated not to happen. I had barely got a good cry going when the phone rang and a cheerful voice congratulated me on winning the National Prize.  Again, just as the tears managed to come and get me past my rock hard wall of self-control, the phone rang again, and I was obligated, as winner of the prize, to give a blitz telephone interview to a journalist. My cry gets lost in the emotional underbrush and does not return, like a stepchild led out into the forest, who has tossed away his breadcrumbs in vain. During my year of overtime I rarely cry. I laugh much more. And I smile almost all the time…

Jurga’s mother often comes to tend her grave while I am tending my grandparents’ grave. We share a common water spigot. She is my cemetery friend. When we each finish our weeding and watering, we take a stroll together around the cemetery, and Jurga’s mother advises me on what plants grow best in this harsh northern climate and which plants to avoid. She speaks softly, pointing to this shrub, that groundcover, offering me sound advice. She sometimes speaks of her daughter. One time she brings me a book of her poetry. It is not natural for a mother to outlive her daughter, she tells me.

The bard Vyautas Kernagis is buried a few plots away from Jurga. On the All Souls Day after Vytautas died, also of cancer, a fan sat beside Vytautas Kernagis’s grave, strumming a guitar, sipping dark beer from a glass bottle, tears streaming down his face, making toasts, crying out, “Oh, Vytautas, I miss you so!

The Catholics honor their dead on November 1^st and the communists honor theirs on May 9^th, the anniversary of the end of World War II and Russia’s victory over Germany. One May 9^th, forgetting the date, I made one of my usual Sunday afternoon trips to Antakalnis Cemetery to tend to my grandparents’ grave and found myself in the middle of a sea of Russian-speakers, dressed in suits and formal gowns, carrying bouquets of blood red carnations to their people’s graves.

Painful as the Soviet occupation was for many Lithuanians, a percentage of the population collaborated with the Soviet regime and intermingled with the Russian colonists brought in by train to occupy the homes and jobs of those exiled to Siberia. Many of them are buried in Antakalnis Cemetery. The entire hilltop directly behind the graves of the students killed during the demonstrations for independence is populated by the graves of Soviet communist aparatchiks and collaborators. These graves reflect the aesthetic of social realism, an aesthetic that now comes across as absurdist, or even comical, but at the time conveyed the symbolism of a very concrete ideology. Besides the expected hammers and sickles and red stars, these graves are adorned with carvings of social realist depictions of the working man or working woman. For some odd reason, communist party leaders are sculpted into stone still wearing their square rimmed spectacles perched on their noses, even after death, as though they’d forgotten to remove their glasses before dozing off to sleep.

There were people at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who questioned my choice to lay my grandparents’ remains to rest just a few hundred meters away from the communists my grandfather dedicated his life to fighting against. However, my grandfather was a liberal-minded man who took a measured view of other people’s convictions and did not hold their political views against them personally. I read in his diaries about how he would secretly arrange to have lunch with former Soviet citizens who had escaped from the Soviet Union in order to learn more about life behind the Iron Curtain. He wrote that he felt sorry for them because of the poor living conditions they endured. When the occasional Cold War escapees came trickling into the Lithuanian émigré community in New York City in the seventies and eighties, he opened up his home to them, setting politics aside and helping them establish themselves in America. For the entire duration of the Cold War, my grandparents mailed packages to relatives in Siberia and Lithuania, even in the years when they had very little for themselves and their own children.

A friend once showed me a secret burial ground situated in a patch of forest just beyond where the cemetery grounds end. In a forgotten corner overgrown with thick tangled weeds KGB officers and NKVD soldiers of the postwar period lie in communist peace. No religious ornamentation here. A single red star decorates each of the identical graves bearing names in Cyrillic. A year later I came back to this spot and was surprised to find the weeds cleared out and the graves restored. A new memorial plague dated from 2009 read that the Russian government had funded the restorations: Putin’s steely fingers reach even this far I thought to myself.

            I once took a group of writing students from Concordia University through Antakalnis Cemetery. I showed them a monument built for Lithuania’s first Soviet puppet president Antanas Sniečkus, a cement wall with his larger than life Big Brotheresque image carved into it. He was a real traitor, disowned even by his own mother, who fled to the West when the Soviets invaded Lithuania in 1944. Sniečkus organized the mass deportations of Lithuanians to Siberia and I suppose she felt that he would not have spared even his own mother.

            In the group there was an Inuit woman from Greenland. She had grown up in a small tribal community in northern Canada. After I narrated the story of Lithuania’s traitor, Antanas Sniečkus, she asked:

            “Was he a Russian?”

            “No,” I answered.

            “If that is so,” she insisted, “how could he have betrayed his tribe? In our culture, you do not betray your tribe.”

            Unfortunately, sometimes we do betray our own tribe.

            In interviews I conducted with Lithuanian Holocaust survivors, I listened to stories about how before World War II Jews and Lithuanians and Poles and Germans and Russians lived in Lithuania peacefully, side by side, for centuries. Then, during World War II, during the four-year Nazi occupation of Lithuania, ninety percent of Lithuania’s Jewish population was murdered by the Nazis along with local help. At the same time, other Lithuanians sheltered and hid Jews. There are no Jewish graves in Antakalnis Cemetery, however. The Jewish cemetery is located in the center of Vilnius and was destroyed during the Soviet occupation.

During the years of the Soviet occupation people could not openly celebrate All Soul’s Day, a holiday in Catholic countries where families visit the graves of their loved ones and decorate them with carnations and candles. In fact, my good friend, Dalia, now a mother of six, was arrested when she was a student, on November 1, 1987, by the KGB and almost expelled from Vilnius University for secretly lighting candles and placing them on the grave of the great Lithuanian poet and 19^th century nationalist leader, Jonas Basanavičius. A year later the Lithuanian communist party, in an attempt to placate the rapidly growing independence movement, allowed people to visit their family graves on All Souls Day. Today All Souls Day is an official state holiday and schools and businesses shut down for the entire week so that families can travel to their home villages to honor their ancestors.

Every November 1^st Antakalnis Cemetery is flooded in a sea of candles carried by people who come to the cemetery after dark to visit the graves of their family members and the graves of people they admire. My brother once flew into Vilnius on All Souls night and saw thousands of twinkling candles down below in Antakalnis Cemetery from the airplane window.

When I fly out of Vilnius, I look down from the oval of the airplane window at the patch of forest green where I know the Antakalnis Cemetery lies. I think of my grandparents lying beneath the deep dark, under thick vines that I dug up from my friend Virginia’s garden and replanted on their graves, a tangled green blanket to comfort them. There have been days that I have lain across my grandparents’ grave and cried—like a character out of a nineteenth century novel.

A few years ago I flew into Vilnius very late from London on the night of All Soul’s Day. Although it was already ten o’clock, I asked Thomas, who is French and not familiar with Lithuanian culture, if he would mind visiting the cemetery with me. I had bought candles a week before and had set them aside.

            “You want to visit the cemetery ten o’clock at night?” he asked quizzically.

            I explained the tradition. Although it was unfamiliar to him, for my sake he agreed to go. We parked at the small parking lot at the foot of the hill and walked through the ink black night to my grandparents’ grave. By five o’clock, when darkness descends, this cemetery is packed, making it difficult to get up the hill at anything faster than a crawl. Now the cemetery was deserted. Only candles flickered in the darkness surrounding us.

            I lit three candles and set them down on my grandparent’s grave. Thomas gazed around him at the sea of candles flickering in the night. Many of the graves were covered with dozens, even hundreds, of candles.

            “Laima, why did you bring so few candles for your grandparents?” Thomas asked.

            “One for the father, one for the son, one for the Holy Ghost,” I answered, my Catholic upbringing kicking in.

            “Your grandfather was a great man,” Thomas said reflectively. “He was a leader, like Martin Luther King. He deserves more than three candles.”

            At Thomas’s insistence we drove down the hill in search of a supermarket that was still open. We went to three supermarkets before we found one that stayed open late and had not run through their stock of candles. Thomas bought an entire case. We returned to the cemetery, climbed back up the dark hill, and spent half the night patiently lighting each candle until my grandparents’ grave was bathed in light.

Laima Vince

Twenty-Four Teens and a Teacher in Siem Reap, Cambodia

As our plane began its descent into Siem Reap, Cambodia, Larisa, a twelfth grader from the American International School of Hong Kong, one of my 24 students on our group’s week-long community service trip, called out to her friends in the seat in front of us: “Is that flooding down there?”

            I leaned over towards the oval plane window to take a look. Vibrant green rice fields had given way to a rippling murky brown with patches of green poking through—those patches, we soon realized, were the very tops of palm trees.
            “No, that’s not flooding,” Joshua, a ninth grader in the seat in front of us, called over his shoulder. “I don't think we'll be rowing to the village.”
            “Bet you ten dollars it is,” Larisa retorted.
            Larisa won the bet. We were landing in a country under water.
This year’s rainy season was unusually heavy and started in the third week of September. Seventeen provinces in the north-west and along the Mekong River in central and southern Cambodia were heavily flooded. More than 1.7 million people were affected by the flooding and 168 people were killed. As of October 18, 2013, when our plane was making its descent into Siem Reap, the flooding had only partially receded. Some 231,484 houses, 1,242 schools, 78 health centers and hospitals, and 533 pagodas were flooded. Roads, bridges and infrastructure were damaged.
         In Siem Reap province, where we would be spending the week, the waters had partially receded, but the roads were still choked with mud, and many of the villages were flooded. Our assignment was to construct a village house in the traditional method out of panels made of woven dried palm tree leaves for a type one poor family who had lost their home in the recent flooding. The classification of type one poor is applied to families who cannot feed themselves on a daily basis and have no savings. Our other assignment was to teach English in a local English-language school that served type one poor families. Our school’s students would teach in shifts and also help cement the school’s boundary fence, which had been built from recycled plastic bottles stuffed inside a chicken wire frame. As a believer in John Dewey’s model of leading students in experiential learning by active teacher participation, I would throw myself into the work alongside my students.
            The students at our school are mostly Hong Kong Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, Korean, and Taiwanese. As students enrolled in a private English-language international school, they are the new Asian elite. They come from comfortable backgrounds and enjoy the typical lifestyle of the upper classes in Hong Kong. They live in luxury climate controlled apartment complexes, speed across Hong Kong on the ultramodern MTR,  and shop in the air-conditioned malls that serve as the exit and entrance point of almost every MTR stop in Hong Kong. Many are raised by Philippine nannies and maids, euphemistically referred to as “helpers.” Maid service comes cheap at 60 Hong Kong dollars an hour ($7.73 US). The Hong Kong monthly minimum wage for a full-time live-in helper who works six days a week and is on duty 24 hours is 4,010 HK ($517 US). With high Hong Kong salaries, often exceeding six figures, and a fixed 15% tax rate, domestic labor is affordable and is relied upon. With the deteriorating economic situation in the Philippines, there is no shortage of domestic workers willing and able to work in Hong Kong. It is possible in Hong Kong for a kid to grow up never having washed a dish themselves; never having done their own laundry; never having cleaned their own living space; and especially not ever having done manual labor. The goal of our school’s community service project is to broaden our students’ horizons by pushing them out of their comfort zones and putting them to work in impoverished communities.
            When the plane landed, we piled out and walked across the small runway towards the airport terminal.  My co-teacher and I distributed the two visas each student needed to enter Cambodia. As the kids slowly snaked their way through immigration, each of their foreign passports checked and double-checked and then stamped with three separate stamps pounded out in those familiar rhythms of the bureaucratic machinery of a formerly totalitarian state, I could smell the old stale blood of the killing fields in the air. I especially smelled it when a stern-faced woman in her fifties, dressed in an austere olive-colored military uniform, demanded that I tear out the visa I had neatly glued inside my passport, for her closer inspection. I could sense the paranoia in the many forms we all needed to fill out simply to enter the country.
            As I stood at the immigration booth, being stared down by the officer, who could have been one of the Khmer Rouge child soldiers for all I knew, I thought of my entry into Hong Kong just eleven weeks ago. Two girls in comfortable, friendly-looking uniforms, giggled and gossiped in Cantonese behind the immigration booth glass, as they took people’s passports, glanced through them, and waved them on. One of them gave my passport a perfunctory glance, noticed my work visa, and then pulled out a tin box covered in pink Hello Kitty stickers, unlocked the box with a key the size of a child’s jewelry box key, and placed one neat stamp inside my passport.
            Once through Cambodian immigration we headed outside where we were met by our ground operators, David and Jo, and their local Cambodian guide, Lim. David Whitaker and his partner started Indigo, tailored school trips, seven years ago. Their vision was to make a difference in impoverished communities and at the same time to open the hearts and minds of teenagers to the possibilities of contributing to solutions to global poverty by participating in making change happen. Over the next nine days we would learn many lessons on how to help communities in a way that was community building and self-sustaining. Indigo made connections with non-governmental organizations on the ground and with local people, embracing the belief that “if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for the rest of his life.”
           David explained the ground rules to the students and told them that this week they would have the opportunity to make a difference in a poor family’s life, in a poor village’s life. They could chose to either hang back and behave as tourists and go home having had a nice time, or they could throw themselves into the experience and feel that they truly contributed something of themselves to the global community.
           Our group had already contributed before they even left Hong Kong. They had collected 70 pairs of blue jeans and had lugged them all to Cambodia. We would be donating the jeans to a group of type one poor women who had been taught to sew and who now work in a sustainability project sewing toys, laptop covers, I-phone pouches and other touristic items out of old jeans and fabrics. The money these women earned enabled them to pay for basic needs for their families.
            David told us that we had about two hours before the sun went down and we would use them by hopping into the row of tuk-tuks waiting for us and ride to a 1,000-year-old temple in the jungle. A tuk-tuk is a three-wheeled cart attached to a motorcycle. A driver rides the motorcycle that pulls the cart, which seats three, or at the most, four passengers. Throughout the week tu- tuks would be our only form of transportation, other than our feet.
           In Cambodia few roads are paved; therefore, most of the time we were rattling across the countryside on clay roads riddled with deep pot holes and crevices: An obvious example of how war had impeded Cambodia’s infrastructure.
            The views from a tuk-tuk are amazing: oxen and water buffalo graze in the muddy waters, roadside establishments sell barbequed foods and chips and petrol poured into recycled whiskey bottles; vibrant green rice fields beg to be harvested; traditional village houses built from palm tree leaves and suspended high on stilts sway gently in the tropical breeze. Most amazing was the ingenuity of Cambodian transportation. It was not unusual to see husband, wife, and several small children—even infants and toddlers—balanced on one motorcycle bouncing down the pot-holed roads. Children maneuvered large rusty bicycles through the dirt, often balancing a sibling or two on the backrest or on the handlebars. I was amazed at the local people’s sense of balance and at the same time saddened that it took that much physical effort for them to travel even the shortest distances.
          As we traveled through the countryside in our tuk-tuks one thing that caught my eye was large blue tin sign posts everywhere with the same message: Cambodian People’s Party. The signs were suspended over the entrances into people’s village homes; planted in the ground on metal posts at almost every intersection; loomed over roadside eateries and meeting places.
         After we arrived at the temple, as we walked through the temple ruins, the stones a combination of green from moss and fungus bred by Cambodia’s constant heat and humidity, toned orange from the light of the setting sun, amid the jungle sounds of chattering monkeys, I asked Lim what those signs meant. What was the Cambodian People’s Party?
        “Basically,” Lim said, “they are the old Khmer Rouge under a new name. The old perpetrators are still around, but they’ve changed their colors. Recently we had a democratic election in Cambodia and the opposition party won, but the Cambodian People’s Party rigged the election so it looked as though they won. The people want the United Nations to get involved, but nothing is happening.”
         This was a typical scenario in post-Soviet countries as well. I recognized the dynamic; the evolution of a party that had committed genocide against its people into a more passable political form: a wolf in a lamb’s hide.
        “They are simply power hungry,” Lim continued. “The Cambodian People’s Party is full of Vietnamese Communists. There are two things the Cambodian People’s Party refuses to fund adequately, and that is medicine and education. Teachers are paid $25 a month and teach in over-crowded classrooms. It is not uncommon to have 60 pupils in a class. The ones who have nowhere to sit crowd in the back of the classroom hoping to catch a few words of what the teacher is saying. The Cambodian People’s Party doesn’t want people to be educated. Because of these conditions there is a teacher shortage and a shortage of schools. Children must go to school in shifts: morning or afternoon. Doctors are also underpaid, and in the countryside health clinics are understaffed. There is no medical care for women. Women give birth to their children in their village homes up on stilts assisted by their mothers and sisters. Because rural people drink the water around their homes, the infant mortality rate in this region is one in five. Where we have installed water filters, the infant mortality rate has gone down to one in seven.”
             I asked Lim if the Cambodian People’s Party had a lot of support from the people, since their signs are everywhere, even on private property.
           “People are afraid,” Lim said. “It’s because of the Khmer Rouge. Everyone remembers. When the party tells a villager that he will place a sign on his land, the villager does not dare disagree.”
           As we walked, Lim told me about his background. He was half-Chinese, which made him an ethnic minority in a country of Khmers, or people descended from Indians. His father, during the years of the Khmer Rouge, was rounded up into one of the rural camps. Being of Chinese heritage, he was an “enemy of Angka,” or the “organization,” a vague name for the political group that had seized power in Cambodia. In the camp, he was forced to marry a Khmer woman, Lim’s mother, in a wedding ceremony in which thousands of single men and women were brought together and paired up and married by the Khmer Rouge. These couples did not even know each other before they were married. They were paired off randomly, to mix up their ethnicities. However, Lim’s parents lived together until his father died a few years ago. They raised four children.
          “My mother is not beautiful,” Lim said, “she has very brown skin and a flat nose. She is from the peasant class. My father was from the upper classes.”
          I was surprised by Lim’s openness. Why tell a complete stranger like myself, whom you’ve only just met, something that personal?
          Later over dinner at the hotel David explained that Khmer people are exceedingly open, honest, and transparent and say things that westerners might consider rude or too personal. They did it innocently and they meant no harm by it. He gave an example. He had not been in Cambodia for half a year. When he came back to lead a trip, his Cambodian guides met him at the airport, pointed at his stomach and said, “Your stomach is getting fat, David.” It was a simple observation, not an insult, David explained. They simply express what is on their mind and what they see without reservation or filtering.
             A few days later I experienced that Khmer openness and hospitality. We went to the Night Market, a market place oriented towards tourists in which one could buy anything from Khmer silk woven scarves and tablecloths to foot massages. I bought a traditional silk tablecloth and scarf from a vendor that Lim assured me weaves all their own silk in the traditional Khmer style. I took a long time choosing the color and pattern and during that time had a friendly conversation with the young woman who wove and sold the silks. She urged me to buy another scarf. I declined, joking that on a teacher’s salary I could not afford that many scarves. Later, walking through the market, the same young woman came running up to me, telling me she had been searching all over the market for me. “I like you,” she said, “You came to Cambodia to help us. Please, let me give you a gift.” She led me to her stall and insisted that I choose another scarf, but this time as a gift. She modeled different colors and styles for me. Her friend jumped in and began competing with her for me to choose one of her scarves. In the end, I chose a pale blue and orange scarf, which she wrapped up for me and handed to me with a blessing, palms pressed together.
          Already on our first morning in Cambodia we were off to the village where we would be building a house. David and Lim introduced us to At and Tia and their four children, who had lost their home in the flooding. They were a type one poor family, which meant that they often went without food. Nights, Tia would fish to feed his family and sell whatever was left over. At stayed home with their four small children. She was pregnant with their fifth.
         Before we arrived, the villagers had hacked the palm tree leaves off with machetes, shimmying up the tall trees to reach them. Then the leaves had to be soaked in water for a week to make them insect repellent. Then they were folded over a long piece of bamboo and woven together with a bamboo cord. We would use wire to weave the palm tree leaves securely to the frame from both sides.
          We were split into work groups and were taught our tasks by our Cambodian guides. One group would nail together bamboo frames. The other group would weave flaps of dried palm tree leaves onto the frames. At the end of the week, we would raise those panels onto the frame of the village house on stilts, nail them in place, and we would have built a house for one family.
         As our groups worked, curious children, half-naked, naked, or dressed in ragged bits of clothing, watched us from a safe distance. These were the six out of seven who survived their childhoods. The children laughed, played, giggled, like children anywhere. Some of the teenagers in our group were very good at engaging the children, carrying them around on their shoulders, showing them card tricks, laughing and smiling with them.
          I was truly proud of our students, especially the girls. They threw themselves into the work, methodically performing the tedious repetitious tasks in the hot sun without complaint. Many of them held a hammer in their hands for the first time and for the first time were taught how to use it. No one complained. Everyone understood. The poverty around us was obvious: men wearing loin cloths for lack of any other clothing (I even saw a man wearing a woman’s flowery blouse with ruffles); pregnant women carrying heavy loads or working knee deep in murky water harvesting rice; women cooking rice for families of five or six in a clay pot outdoors on an open flame outdoors. Our Cambodian guides had explained that Khmer people only considered food cooked outside on an open flame tasty, but still, this did not make the process any easier, especially during the torrential afternoon rains.
           In the afternoons our group would work in the school and the other group would come to the village. The English School was founded by Anthony and Fiona, a couple in their forties from Australia. Anthony and Fiona are an example of those rare people who live their dream and make it work. They are from Melbourne and both held down corporate jobs, working for an Australian electrical utility. They worked long hours, traveled often for work, and after a decade of this lifestyle, grew tired of the rat race. They both trained as English teachers and went abroad to teach in China for a year. The idea was to get away from it all for a year, one year, and then they would go back to their old lives. While in China they took a trip to Cambodia. It was love at first sight. They had discovered two loves: a love of teaching and a love for Cambodia. Both were more satisfying than the corporate world. They have been in Siem Reap for eight years now and are raising their two sons, ages 6 and 2, in the local community. Their older son is fluent in Khmer, English, and French.
         The couple opened up a few local touristic businesses and used the profits from those businesses to create their own NGO, HUSK. The goal of HUSK is to raise the level of poverty in the Siem Reap province by focusing on improving living conditions in two villages; educating children to become fluent in English, so that they could find employment in the Siem Reap tourist industry; and supporting public health through building health clinics. Of the many projects undertaken by HUSK, and assisted by students working with Indigo, besides building the village house and working at the school, two other projects that we saw were the vertical farming project and the water filter project. One of the causes of poverty in Cambodia is when a family does not own land or very little land. HUSK brings PCP pipes into the villages and erects structures that create three tiers in which families can grow vegetables inside the pipes for much needed vitamins. The other project is to install water filters to purify the water that is taken from local ponds, streams, rivers, etc. My favorite project is the school.
          Using an enthusiastic, student-centered, active call and response approach, Anthony and Fiona teach village children English in grades one through eight. Because students in Cambodia only go to school half a day, the other half of the day they are welcome to come and attend free English lessons. The students are enthusiastic and eager and cycle long distances to come to school. Anthony and Fiona show obvious love and concern for the children, know all their names, and are passionate about giving through teaching.
          Classes take place in two cool, shaded, cozy cement classrooms that were built out of recycled plastic bottles. Outside of the city of Siem Reap there is no trash collection. Therefore, mountains of plastic bottles litter the countryside. Villagers burn the plastic, which causes noxious fumes; cows and water buffalo try to eat the plastic and die; the bottles clog up the water supply. HUSK started paying villagers for every plastic bottle they brought to them. They accumulated tens of thousands of bottles. Teams of students and local Cambodians then stuffed the bottles with plastic debris and fitted them inside chicken wire frames. These frames are then cemented over and painted. Because of Cambodia’s tropical climate, insulation is not needed. Plastic does not biodegrade. The structures are timeless.
             I was observing one of my groups of students enthusiastically teach a class, when a young Cambodian man sat down beside me. Immediately, small children encircled him, eager to demonstrate that they could count to ten in English. This young man, whose name was Balam, had recently begun teaching at the school. Soon our conversation drifted into politics.
          “The problem in Cambodia is that the Khmer Rouge killed off the intellectual class,” Balam said. “Those who managed to survive the genocide are too frightened to express themselves. They hide. We are trying to rebuild the country from nothing. This is our work.”
         Balam explained that he was a member of Cambodia’s dispossessed because one of his uncles had worked for the American Embassy. They were an intellectual family who had to live underground and who are still cautious about revealing too much about themselves.
         David had told me that Cambodians do not like to talk about the four years of genocide that took place under the Khmer Rouge, a genocide in which at least four million people were murdered. He said that Cambodians are a cheerful people who do not want to dwell on past evil.
         Balam confirmed that the Khmer Rouge genocide was a taboo subject. “We cannot talk about the genocide publicly,” Balam said. “The Cambodian People’s Party uses the propaganda that we must all move on and forget bad things in the past. But they only do this to cover up their crimes and not be held accountable.”
         I asked Balam how he learned English. He explained that like many young Cambodian men, as a teenager he was sent to live with Buddhist monks. The monks were educated and taught him English. Lim had told me that he lived with the monks for three years. Because the monastery he lived in was a popular tourist sight, he took advantage of the situation by conversing as much as he could with foreigners. I had to laugh at some of the uniquely American phrases Lim used, such as, “Don’t be a wimp,” or “Push the pedal to the medal.” He had never been inside an English speaking country and yet he knew more idiomatic phrases than the average American.
        As we were talking, a small child climbed into Balam’s lap and wrapped his arms around him.
        “I love teaching these children,” Balam said. “They are Cambodia’s future.”
         On our last morning in Cambodia our guides brought us to a local temple to offer alms to the monks. We were given careful instructions on what we should do. We must sit on the mat with our bodies in the half lotus position and with our palms together and raised at the level of our eyebrows. When the monks come, we may not look at them, touch them, talk to them. We must listen to their chanting and then each take a bowl of rice and make our way down the line of monks, standing before us in their ragged orange robes, oldest to youngest, and scoop rice into each one’s rice pot. This is a tradition that dates back thousands of years to the times of Buddha. It is a gift. An opportunity to speak the names of one’s ancestors softly while distributing the rice to feed their spirits.
          It is a time of blessing.

Laima Vince
Contact: Laimavince@gmail.com

Please note, the name of the young teacher at the school has been changed to protect his identity.

If you are interested in learning more about Cambodia's recent history, I recommend Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor and Roger Warner

One of our group's drivers waits for us with a tuk-tuk. We travelled all over Siem Reap province in tuk-tuks. David instructed the students to always greet their drivers in Khmer when seating themselves in the tuk-tuks and to always thank them at the end of the trip.

Few roads in Siem Reap province are paved. Tuk-tuks, motorcycles, and bicycles dominate the road. Cars are a rare site.

A typical Cambodian roadside establishment.

 

Our students arrive by ox cart to the village to begin their work.

 

These children live in this house. They spend their days playing, helping their parents, and going to school.

Before our arrival, people in the village cut down palm tree leaves, soaked them in water for a week, dried them, and sewed them together to create the panels for the walls.

                     The students begin attaching the dried palm tree panels to bamboo frames.

One person stand on one side of the frame and balances the palm three leaves, then pierces them with a piece of wire. Another person twists the wire into place from the other side.

                          The walls are ready. Students carry them over to the frame of the house.

                                  
                                       It is now time to lift the walls and secure them in place.

                       We are all very proud to have secured the front and back walls in place.

 

The house is complete! First Tia and At will invite a monk to the house to perform a blessing. Then, they will move in. Once the house is blessed everyone must take off their shoes before entering the living space.

 

In the villages the bicycle is the main form of transportation. Typically small children balance on the back and the front of the bicycle as the mother, or father, or older sibling rides.

 

It is time for lunch. Our Khmer hosts have brought sandwiches wrapped in palm tree leaves.

 

It is time for lunch for the village children as well. Cambodian people in the villages subsist on white rice, which is boiled in a large pot on an open flame outdoors. When they are available, vegetables, or chicken is added to the rice.

 

This is a more ecological way to wrap sandwiches. Rather than using plastic wrap, in Cambodia people wrap foods in fresh palm tree leaves.

 

Our students enjoy a much deserved break.

 

Our local guide leads us out of the village.

 

A traditional way of growing vegetables when one has little land.

 

One of HUSK's projects has been to set up vertical farming projects using PCP pipes.

 

This is the interior of a village house. I was surprise to learn that now most villages have electricity and people watch TV and listen to music in their village homes.

 

Lim shows a student how to measure with a hammer.

As we worked, the village did their work as well. This woman is harvesting rice with a scythe. She invited us to join her in the rice paddies.

 

Everywhere we went we saw evidence of the recent flooding.

 

 

A typical village home.

 

These students were proud to show off that their white sneakers were no longer white after a hard day's work.

 

Cambodian people do not consider food cooked indoors on gas or electricity to taste good. It is typical in the village for women to cook all the family's meals outdoors on an open flame. There are roadside stops where families cook rice and porridge in big pots outdoors on an open flame. They sell bowls of rice or porridge to people on their way to work.

 

These large clay pots are common in the villages and are used to collect and store water. In the village people take their water from ponds and streams.

 

The family kitchen.

 

A rice field after the rainy season.

 

                                                           

 

This school was built out of recycled plastic bottles.

 

The school playground is built out of old tires.  When we were there the playground was still partially flooded.

 

We cemented over these bottles to complete the school's boundary fence.

 

Our students, who have all learned English as a second or third, or in some cases fourth, language loved teaching Cambodian children English at the school.

 

Our students posing with their class after the lesson is finished. The Cambodian children who study at the English school all come from the local villages. Many of them are Type One poor.

 

 

Views of Ankor Wat.

 

 

Group photo: Teachers and students.

 

Our students have a positive attitude and are a pleasure to work with.

 

This temple was lost to civilization and grown over with trees for 500 years.

 

Although the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy Buddhist traditions in Cambodia, the Buddhist religion has now recovered and temples have resumed their old place in Khmer life. It is very common for families to send preteen and teenage boys to a Buddhist monastery to live and study with the monks. In these photos young boys relax and socialize during the hottest part of the day.  

 

The enlightened Buddha.