by Tara Winkler
After I’d spent a few minutes with the kids, Chan introduced me to a thin, bookish-looking man who was the orphanage director.
The man thanked me for the gifts in broken English and then lapsed into silence. I suddenly became aware that there had been no staff around when we arrived and so we had not asked permission before handing out the clothes and books. Was that a faux pas? I wasn’t sure.
I was suddenly very uncomfortable standing there, unable to make conversation, surrounded by kids and staff who stared at me like I was a big green Martian.
‘I think maybe they want small donation from you,’ Chan whispered to me.
‘Oh . . .’ I said, feeling very awkward. I whispered: ‘Chan, I just spent my day’s budget on the stuff we got at the markets.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry,’ he said, but I was flustered by now and pushed a US$20 note into his hand. Chan presented the $20 to the director with two outstretched hands. The staff and kids pressed their hands to their foreheads and sang what I assumed was the standard thankyou response.
I felt rather embarrassed. I wished I’d had more money to give them. From the state of the place, it was clear they needed cash—of course they needed it. It was an orphanage.
And now that I’d given them all that I could, hanging around any longer felt pointless. I turned to Chan. ‘So,’ I said brightly—too brightly. ‘Should we get going then?’
As we walked back to the tuktuk, Chan made a call to the next orphanage to let them know we’d be arriving a little early.
‘Chan, I don’t have any more money to give to the next two orphanages,’ I told him. ‘Is that a problem?’
‘No problem, no problem! I make clear when we arrive. Clothes and book is enough! No problem!’ he assured me.
‘Okay . . .’ I replied doubtfully, not sure how this could possibly be the truth.
The next orphanage was bigger, and seemed a bit better off. The children were waiting in a line at the gate, as if the Queen of England was about to arrive. A girl of about twelve greeted me, put a paper necklace around my neck and took my hand.
The director was a jovial middle-aged man. ‘So nice to meet you,’ he said. ‘Ah! You bring gift for the children! Do you want to give them now?’
‘Oh, yes, okay,’ I said, feeling rather awkward. The books and clothes I’d brought felt like rather a paltry response to the warm reception they were giving me. I doled out the books to the kids. They squealed and jumped up and down in excitement as they received them. Some of them squeezed my hand in gratitude.
‘I wish I could give more!’ I said to the director.
‘Oh, you are a very kind lady,’ he said, nodding. ‘We thankful for all the donation! Now the children will show you around.’
I let the cluster of kids lead me around the compound. They were incredibly charming and intelligent, and spoke a little more English than at the first orphanage.
They showed me their open-air classroom—a fairly empty room with a few wooden desks and a blackboard—then we moved on to a larger room with rows and rows of beds. A far cry from my childhood bedroom, filled with stuffed toys, books and colourful artefacts from our family holidays. There was rubbish everywhere in the big dormitory and I could smell the toilets over the other side of the room.
Next they led me to a pigpen, where they were raising two big sows and some very cute piglets. I stopped to scratch the piglets’ noses. They closed their eyes and made soft little grunting noises, and pushed each other aside for a turn.
I started to feel a bit sad—for the pigs and for the kids. I didn’t imagine that any of them had a very promising future.
I was feeling more than a bit emotional by the time we got back to the orphanage gate. I took a deep breath and swallowed the lump in my throat.
‘You want to take some photos with the children?’ the director asked me. ‘You can show your family and friends when you get home.’
Damn. ‘I didn’t bring my camera,’ I said apologetically, feeling like I’d failed again.
‘That okay!’ the director said. ‘Thank you for your kind gift. Come back again soon.’
Sitting in the tuktuk on the way to the next orphanage, the wheels in my mind turned over, trying to process why I was feeling so uncomfortable. After all, I was ‘doing my bit’, giving as much as I could honestly afford.
Slowly, I began to see the problem. If I didn’t make a decent-sized donation to these orphanages—which I didn’t have the money to do—then this whole day was just an empty exercise in self-gratification. This was just me buying a few books and pens so I could feel like a good person . . . It was a token gesture—especially when I hadn’t even thought to find out if books, pens and clothes were what the orphanages actually needed.
I was feeling pretty disheartened by the time we pulled up outside the third and last orphanage on our list.
The compound of Sprouting Knowledge Orphans (SKO) was surrounded by a tall fence with a big, dark wooden gate chained up with a padlock. Through the cracks I could see only two little wooden shacks. The rest of the compound was barren and dusty and eerily quiet. It didn’t look like children lived there at all.
Chan beeped his horn a few times and finally a tall, lanky, young Khmer man came to open the gate for us. About twenty or so kids trailed behind him. I was struck by how solemn and listless they all seemed compared to the bouncy, happy kids at the other two orphanages.
They were all very thin, and some of them seemed to be suffering from some sort of skin infection that covered their limbs and faces. The young man introduced himself as a member of staff. ‘My name is Reaksmey,’ he told me. Then he immediately launched into a long rave in Khmer.
Chan translated: ‘He say they have big problems to get enough money. Not enough food for the children for long time now. They eating scrap food left over from monastery down there.’ He gestured down the road. ‘One girl has HIV . . . she takes tablets from hospital, but she gets sick a lot, but no medicine, because not enough money. No money for doctor for any of these kids . . .’
Reaksmey, trailed by the flock of kids, showed me their dormitory, which was about the size of my bedroom at home in Sydney. The kids showed me how they slept—more than twenty of them lined up like sardines on the dirty tiled floor. No mattresses, no blankets, not even any mosquito nets—here, where mosquitoes carried horrible diseases like dengue fever and malaria.
One of the older girls, a pretty teenager with a thick braid down her back, dunked a metal cup into a big old urn, thick with wriggling mosquito larvae, and offered it to me. ‘Uh, no thank you,’ I said as politely as I could. She drank the water herself.
I wanted very badly to get away from this place. It was all too desperate for words. To speed things up, I started robotically handing out the clothes and books from the remaining bag. The kids smiled as they accepted them, but seeing smiles on their solemn little faces didn’t give me any comfort at all. I was trying to hold back tears—and not quite succeeding.
Reaksmey talked to Chan in Khmer, his tone urgent. I looked at Chan, my eyes begging to leave. Chan said: ‘He’s asking if you will stay to volunteer, Tara,’ he said. ‘He say the children real need the help. You could teaching some English and help with some writing to get the funding.’
The sweat on my back turned to ice. I was way out of my depth now. Cruising around on Chan’s moto handing out treats to excited kids now seemed ridiculous. These kids had real problems, and needed real help. There was a girl here with HIV. I’d never even met a person with HIV before, least of all one who couldn’t even afford treatment. I felt totally overwhelmed, and I felt guilty for feeling that way.
I started to stammer, brushing a rogue tear away. ‘Oh, Chan . . . I can’t. I want to. I really want to. But I can’t. Tell him I’m sorry.’ I blinked at the tiles as Chan translated. I knew I was too young and inexperienced to deal with all this. It was too big—far too big—for me. The three of us stood motionless for a long moment while t
he translation happened.
Reaksmey made some understanding hums—it was clearly the response he expected. And something about this response just did me in. My mouth opened impulsively.
‘When I go home I will help to raise some money for the children,’ I blurted.
Even as I made this promise, I had no idea how I could keep it. Chan translated again. Reaksmey nodded and attempted a smile, but I saw the scepticism and disappointment on his face.
The look on Reaksmey’s face made me all the more determined to keep my word. I looked him in the eye and said firmly, ‘Please can I have the contact details of the director of SKO? I will contact you again from Australia.’
Chan translated again and Reaksmey’s eyes brightened. He bowed, palms pressed together, and then scuttled back to the shack to scribble an email address on a scrap of paper.
I waved goodbye to the kids, who were all still standing quietly behind Reaksmey. They waved back.
As we pulled out of the orphanage gates in the tuktuk, I asked: ‘Why is SKO so poor, Chan?’
‘I not sure also,’ he replied.
I knew corruption was a problem in Cambodia, so I asked: ‘Do you think there is corruption at SKO?’
‘Can be,’ he said. ‘Yes, maybe I think you can be right.’
‘But, the kids, they shouldn’t have to live like that,’ I said, unable to stem the flow of tears any longer.
‘Yes, they real need the help,’ he agreed. ‘But now you must stop to think about this. Make you too sad. Tonight you come to eat rice with my family for your last night in Battambang. My wife, she cook very nice vegetari food for you!’
And so I got to meet Chan’s beautiful, soft-spoken wife, Mina, and his three gorgeous children—ten-year-old son Ponlok and daughters eight-year-old Bopha and three-year-old Chea. They seemed like the perfect family for a nice man like Chan and I took to them all immediately.
Their home, set on a tiny block of land in a crowded Battambang ‘suburb’, was a simple, one-roomed structure with a dirt floor. It was humble, but clean and comfortable.
Mina made me feel very welcome as she bustled around preparing food and laying it out on a straw mat in the middle of the floor. She smiled and gestured for me to sit. ‘In my country, we like to sit on the floor to eat food,’ Chan told me. ‘Even the king sits on the floor!’
Mina was an amazing cook. It was a meal fit for a (vegetarian) queen.
There were bowls of morning glory fried with chilli, tom yam soup with fresh mushrooms picked from her own small garden, fried tofu with bean sprouts, and green mangoes sprinkled with salt, sugar, chilli and my all-time favourite Asian condiment: delicious, delicious MSG. I love MSG—umami is the fifth (and the best!) taste. When restaurant menus boast No MSG! I go: ‘Dammit! I love that stuff.’
Mina sat next to me, with her legs tucked politely to one side in the traditional Khmer way and her hand resting on my knee. Her warm smile crinkled the corners of her eyes as she encouraged me to keep eating until I could barely sit upright.
When the dinner plates were cleared, I retired to a hammock that was strung up between the two poles that supported the little house. The kids then set about impressing me with endearing dance routines they had choreographed themselves, an entertaining combination of hip-hop and line dancing. Chan, Mina and I laughed and clapped all through their performances.
Despite their obvious poverty, this family seemed to be a shining example of the resilience I was learning to associate with Khmer people. They looked for ways to be happy instead of reasons to be sad. It was clear to me that these kids were the product of good parenting. They were intelligent, polite, inquisitive and playful. Their English was pretty good, too.
When it was time for them to go to bed, I said a heartfelt goodbye to the family. Chan drove me on the moto through the dark streets of Battambang back to the Teo Hotel. At night, Battambang was like a ghost town. All the shops were shut up with big steel grates pulled across the front and there was almost no one in sight.
‘See you in the morning, P’oun srey,’ he said.
‘Hey?’
Chan smiled. ‘It mean “little sister”. You are like my family now. You can call me Bong. It mean “older brother”.’
‘Goodnight, Bong. Thank you for a wonderful night. I like your family very much.’
He waited until I was safely inside the gates of the hotel then I heard the splutter of his motorbike engine starting up and moving off down the road.
I took a deep breath of the warm night air. Visiting Chan’s family had somehow revived me. I made up my mind that I would try to help his family somehow, too, after I got back to Australia.
The next morning, bright and early, Chan picked me up and drove me to the bus stop by the Stung Sangker River. Just as I was stepping onto the bus he handed me a note in the formal Khmer style, with both hands outstretched and a little bow of the head.
It was similar to the note he had given me when we first met, which already felt like a lifetime ago.
It read:
To P’oun Srey Tara,
Thank you for come visit my country. It is my happiness to know you. I keep you in my good friend for a long life. I never forget, I keep in my mind. I hope you come back to Cambodia again.
Love,
Bong Chan
After the confronting and heart-rending adventure I’d had in Battambang, it was a relief to head back to Siem Reap and the relative familiarity of the Landmine Museum.
When I pulled up in my tuktuk I was met with an eerie sight. There was a young boy standing at the gates, dressed as a Khmer Rouge soldier in green military fatigues with the traditional red-checked scarf wrapped around his head. I was startled—had Cambodia jumped back in time thirty years while I wasn’t looking?
‘Hello, Tara!’
It was Vanna!
‘Vanna, why on earth are you dressed like that?’
‘For the tourists! I’m happy to see you again! You come to volunteer like you say? Let me help you.’
He took my bag and led me inside.
‘Is Ethan still here?’ I asked, as Vanna led me towards a cluster of simple Khmer structures.
‘No, he go home. But Jilly is here now.’
Vanna was incredibly agile despite his prosthesis. He led me to the side of the tin shed that housed the museum, and carried my bags up a tall ladder to a tiny tree house. It was maybe four square metres, and its walls fell about a metre short of an old tin roof, but it had a nice view, looking down into the museum compound from the treetops.
There was already a bag and a makeshift bed set up in the tiny space. Vanna put my bags down beside them.
‘Is Jilly sleeping here too?’ I asked, feeling a little awkward about sharing such a small space with a complete stranger.
‘Yes,’ Vanna said. ‘We can fit two volunteers here, no problem.’
Julia (or Jilly as the kids called her) turned out to be a lovely Irish girl a few years older than me. She had arrived a week earlier and, like me, she was on a tight budget. But, in return for volunteering, we were provided basic accommodation and food.
Akira, his wife Hort and the twenty kids lived simply, of course, so for the next three weeks Julia and I slept in the tree house with no electricity, showered out of a bucket and ate cucumber stew with rice three times a day.
There were no creature comforts in sight, but I barely noticed because life at Akira’s was really fun—possibly because I was a little enamoured of Julia.
Julia was completely at ease with Cambodia, as if she’d been living there for years. She’d sweep up her skirt and hop side-saddle onto the back of a moto, just like the locals did. She knew everyone’s names and had the script for the museum tour and all the kids’ clapping games down pat. She had even managed to pick up an impressive amount of basic Khmer. She was very beautiful and smart, completely capable and sweet and everyone adored her—including me.
I threw myself into the routine at the museum with gusto, pa
rtly motivated by my experience in Battambang and, if I’m being honest, partly to impress Julia. In a couple of days I had learned almost as many words as Julia, and I, too, had the clapping games and the museum tour down pat.
The tours were always the most sobering moments in my day. I often had to explain to the tourists that stepping on a landmine isn’t like it is in the movies. You don’t hear a click and then have time to plan a ‘Houdini escape’. You just put a toe on these things and boom. You’re toast.
The landmines seeded across Cambodia in three decades of war were usually designed to maim, not kill. Injuring one soldier means that two other soldiers are put out of action, because they’re forced to stop and help the injured soldier. Pol Pot called the mines his ‘perfect soldiers’ because they never slept, and they didn’t need to be fed or clothed or given toilet breaks. And, sadly, Pol Pot was just one of the many warmongers from all sides of the conflict who laid these horrors in Cambodian villages, farms, footpaths and fields. It meant that for decades to come, kids like Vanna stepped on the mines.
Today it’s estimated that around 40,000 Cambodians are living with landmine-related injuries. For a long time, the economy and social development and mental health of Cambodian people was badly damaged by the landmines. But thanks to the many de-mining projects being run by the Cambodian government, de-mining NGOs, and people like Akira, Cambodia’s landmine problem is slowly being resolved.
After the tours, most people were kind. Their donations covered the costs of running the museum and looking after the kids.
Hanging out with Julia and the kids was fast becoming the highlight of my trip. Julia and I got on famously. It wasn’t long before my infatuation with her turned into a full-blown crush.
I had never really had a crush on a girl before. And, luckily for me, it turned out she quite liked me too. We embarked on one of those holiday flings that casts a rosy glow over everything. We’d go on romantic dates to Angkor Wat in the late afternoon when entry was free and all the tourists had gone. Sometimes I would take my sketchbook and try to capture the play of light on the mystical statues. Other times we’d just sit quietly together, absorbing the awe-inspiring atmosphere.