Former S-21 head of prison guard, Him Huy, and former S-21 child survivor, Norng Chan Phal who lost his parents at S-21, are distributing the textbook, "A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)" to high school students in Cambodia. At S-21, approximately 14,000 prisoners were tortured and executed. When Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia and discovered S-21 on 10 January, 1979, there were only five survivors at the prison; all five were children and Norng Chan Phal was one of them. The textbook book distribution is part of the Documentation Center of Cambodia's (DC-Cam) Genocide Education project in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport. In Cambodia, there are 1,321 high schools with one million students from grades 9-12. DC-Cam aims to distribute textbooks to at least 500,000 students by December 2009. (DQK)
Photo by: Heng Sinith (Him Huy is in blue shirt and Norng Chan Phal is in white shirt). Date: Octoer 9, 2009 at Youkunthor High School in Phnom Penh.
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About Me
- Duong Dara
- Dara Duong was born in 1971 in Battambang province, Cambodia. His life changed forever at age four, when the Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975. During the regime that controlled Cambodia from 1975-1979, Dara’s father, grandparents, uncle and aunt were executed, along with almost 3 million other Cambodians. Dara’s mother managed to keep him and his brothers and sisters together and survive the years of the Khmer Rouge regime. However, when the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia, she did not want to live under Communist rule. She fled with her family to a refugee camp on the Cambodian-Thai border, where they lived for more than ten years. Since arriving in the United States, Dara’s goal has been to educate people about the rich Cambodian culture that the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy and about the genocide, so that the world will not stand by and allow such atrocities to occur again. Toward that end, he has created the Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, which began in his garage and is now in White Center, Washington. Dara’s story is one of survival against enormous odds, one of perseverance, one of courage and hope.
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