West Coast’s first and second year players, together with John Worsfold and a number of other staff members, have travelled to Cambodia this week as part of the club’s ongoing induction process for new players.

The group spent Monday in Phnom Penh learning about the history of Cambodia, and midfielder Tom Swift took some time out at the end of the long day to reflect on what the boys had encountered so far.

Click here to see some incredible photos from the first day and stay tuned to westcoasteagles.com.au for further updates during the week.

Luckily after a footy trip to Cancun at the end of the season, many of the boys coped well with the six-hour flight times and 3am departure, although some boys would have loved a few extra hours sleep on their Sunday morning. Because we arrived so late, we didn’t really get to tackle the culture until this morning.

To be honest, I personally didn’t know what to expect heading into the trip and when speaking to a lot of the other boys, they thought pretty similarly. You know, you can hear as many stories as you want, but until you see something first hand and see the impact it’s had on a society and on a country, you really can’t appreciate how much turmoil and the sort of atrocities that the community has witnessed.

After visiting the Tabitha Foundation where we were properly educated on the Cambodian cultural history, we headed out to the killing fields which was 15km out of Phnom Penh. Well, in a nutshell this place was just a real shock to the system, seeing as though it was explained to us as basically a mass genocide. The closest thing you could relate to it would be Hitler’s regime and in a lot of ways, it probably was quite similar to the way he went about his work. It was really haunting in a way, shocking obviously, especially being from Australian where many of us are sheltered from that sort of stuff. At one stage, there was an exhibition of all the skulls from hundreds of tortured and killed Cambodian people from that regime that were still lying in fields and ditches until locals came and excavated them.

After a casual lunch with the travelling group, the next stop was the Toul Sleng prison, which was basically the location where many of the Cambodians were held captive prior to being sent to the killing fields. I think the most eye-opening moment of the visit was meeting one of the survivors who actually lived through the horrible experience. He spent a lot of his time in the prison and got through that tough time and lives today to tell the story. That’s just something you will never get the chance to do, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity really. The experience pretty much followed on with the same theme as the killing fields, but at the end of the day, you can’t help but to sit back and wonder what it possibly would have been like for these people and be thankful just how easy we have it.

In terms of recommending the trip to friends and family, I think it’s quite gentle in the way it’s presented, with not too many visions of graphic violence and not being too confronting in that sense. In terms of being used in an educational sense, I think it’s quite handy and I’d definitely recommend it to people I know, just to let people close to me know just how much these people have suffered. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen in Australia or Western countries alike. I think it’d be just a wonderful opportunity to learn about different cultures and what they have had to get over.

On the footy field, we face many conflicts and during a single game there may be plenty of times where you don’t know what you’re doing. Of course during a crunch game, we won’t be thinking, ‘what would the Cambodian people do’, but you will always have it in the back of our mind and be able to draw strength from it and put other things in life into perspective.

At the end of the day, if things are going tough, you just think: you get food and get a bed to sleep on, so it’s not that tough in comparison.

Another major plus to these experiences is that you get to see your teammates on a really deep level and discover what this means to them what really makes them tick inside. Obviously, some people react differently to confronting things and they are handy things to know about your own teammate.

I’m excited to be taking this knowledge back with me to the club so hopefully others can pick up from us because it’s definitely something we can use to improve on our growth as a squad.

I think I’m heading back down to the gym now to sweat out some of that Thai food I’ve been wolfing down. Tomorrow it’s off to the villages to construct houses for two days, I’m looking forward to it immensely.

Click here to read Jacob Brennan's account of the next phase of the trip.