BasimMousilli.com » Cambodia

Backpacked Southeast Asia for the 1st time ever with Noura, this year

Basim Mousilli — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:22:15 +0000

Backpacking in 2010 was an incredible experience for me. It was a great way to get in touch with my inner self and really get to know my wife and spend quality time together.

Remembering March 2010: this is a 2010 year-end special

Noura and I traveled all around Southeast Asia trekking Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand for nearly 2 months. I learned a lot of life lessons from backpacking and met people from all over the world that truly touched me.

Those were some of the best days of my life with Noura. I never knew how adventurous she is! Notwithstanding stereotypes aside, my Syrian friends in Brunei were pretty impressed that she had the aptitude and athletic prowess to backpack with me. She’s definitely a guy’s type of girl.

If you missed it, you can catch all of my backpacking adventures organized here.

This is part 2 of a 3-part series. Read about the 3 blessings that changed my life in 2010 »

What blessings are you thankful for this year?

Why did man create Angkor Wat?

Basim Mousilli — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:28:47 +0000

Why on earth did man create such large enigmatic structures? Life defying sizes, absolutely huge, powerful, billions of engravings of small and big angelic and demonic figures on millions of sandstone bricks can be found at Angkor Wat. I am wondering what inspired humanity to create this beautiful structure?

Maybe it’s because people want good luck and to live a long life to enjoy worldly things. Maybe people create large things to make themselves insignificant and invisible? Is it for them to hide beneath? Why would man dedicate himself to create such large structure in the name of a God king with a body and spirit much like their own? What do you think?

Genocide, 1.5M dead in Cambodia

Basim Mousilli — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 23:30:30 +0000

You come to discover the darkest despot side of the demons of humanity here in these upturned soils of native Kampuchea. Men, women, and children were taught to forget their past, trust no one, uproot plants, forget the present, and rebuild a Cambodia built on the puritan practice of growing rice and tilling fields as farmers. Kids were trained on the principles of self-hate and family hate in order to sustain the murder of their own peoples.

I am here at the Killing Fields, remnants of the genocide of the 1970s where an estimated 1.5 million people died here under the bloody hands of the Pol Pot regime. This is too much to take in.

People were brainwashed that they had a mental disease called “thinking too much” and that they should release themselves to the free will of Angka, the supreme authority of the land. People were told that God had died and Angka would now sustain their needs. Educated countrymen were summoned forward for their skills in order to rebuild the nation…only to find out they would be the first to be massacred.

It turned out there was not enough fuel, time, or precious ammunition to deal with the thousands of citizens every day that needed to be evacuated from the cities to the countrysides to concentration camps to be murdered. Hateful human torture agents were trained and manufactured as quick as victims were being exterminated who would turn against their own people killing their families and friends for the lords of the land.

Somber, sad, stoic, sedated, sorrowful: this is Cambodian mood. In their Khmer eyes a million untold stories of the past.