Magazine Sep-Oct 2016

Cambodian history is fascinating even if marred by terrible violence and bloodshed. But it was when King Sihanouk was overthrown in 1970 and Cambodia was renamed the Khmer Republic that Cambodia entered its darkest period...The Khmer Rouge killed nearly 1.5 million Cambodians and as many as 3 million from 1975 to 1979, spreading like a virus from the jungles until they controlled the entire country, only to systematically dismantle and destroy it in the name of a Communist agrarian ideal. Today, more than 35 years after Vietnamese soldiers removed the Khmer Rouge from power, the genocide trials still continue – a bittersweet note of progress in an impoverished nation still struggling to rehabilitate its crippled economic and human resources. As we cycled through the countryside we saw the scars from its war years, including the Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge had slaughtered millions.

and is still a poor country, there is every reason to be optimistic about its future. In the early years of the 21st Century, the Cambodian economy grew rapidly. As of today, the textile industry in Cambodia is booming and so is tourism, and in 2005 oil was discovered in the sea off Cambodia. But if you had any concerns about the future of the country, the Sala Baï scheme would instantly placate them. No longer do the young women of Cambodia see only one way out. Education has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to nip human trafficking in the bud. As they say, if you educate a woman you educate a nation...or in this case, save a community. WomenOnAMission (WOAM) is an non-profit organization headquartered in Singapore, which combines challenging self-funded expeditionary travel to remote locations around the world in support of humanitarian causes. The objective of this Cambodia bike trip was to raise awareness and funds for Sala Baï, a hotel and restaurant training school in Siem Reap that is moving mountains to stop human trafficking in its tracks.

Despite the fact that Cambodia has faced such horrors

38 THE AMERICAN CLUB SEP / OCT 2016