Loud music, announcements, prayers over loudspeakers are a big part of being in Cambodia.  We have experienced 2 days of a religious ceremony where prayers were played over a loudspeaker for almost 18 hours per day.

Then another 4 day session of a funeral/ceremony at a Buddhist Temple.

Weddings and funerals can run from 1 day to several days and are accompanied with music/prayers over a loudspeaker for all to hear.

It’s a normal thing in Cambodia, and it reminds me of when I lived in downtown Birmingham during college.  People would visit and comment about all the ambulances that they would hear, but after a while, I didn’t really notice it anymore.

We live relatively close to the Palm Container Night Market, a place with shopping, a soccer field, restaurants, rides for kids, and live music.

So stepping outside at night is a concert of local Khmai music, and quite a mixture of Western music – Ed Sheeran to Achy Break Heart (3 nights in a row we heard this “classic”).

None of it is really distracting and typically once inside you can’t hear anything.

Yesterday at the Cambodia’s People Party building, which is 50m from our house, the loudspeaker was playing all day.

I always try to find out why something is happening. Weddings are obvious, as is the Achy Break Heart from the Container Market. But random announcements from a political party’s office, not so much.

Turns out yesterday was Day of Remembrance, more commonly called the “Day of Anger” in Cambodia. It commemorates the killing of almost 25% of the population by the Khmer Rouge in the 70’s.  Around 2 million people died during this time.  It’s estimated that 60% of these deaths were direct executions and the rest were a result of starvation and disease.

There were reenactments of the killings yesterday in Phnom Penh.

Reenactment In Phnom Penh

Thousands were killed in “reeducation camps”. The most famous of these was named S-21, a former high school turned into a place of torture and murder.  I went to this place a few years ago. Estimate of 14,000 – 20,000 people came here, and only 7 survived.  School rooms turned into torture rooms. Beds with shackles, very small cells for prisoners, tools of torture displayed. But the worst were the thousands of photographs of the victims. Men, women, and children.

The image below is one of the “enemies” of the Khmer Rouge. Taken from a documentary on one of the photographers at S-21.

Documentary on the photographer, Nhem En, who was a teenager at the time.