How (Not) to Start an Orphanage

by Tara Winkler

  When Sinet was six years old, her mother had another baby girl. Her name was Srey Noit. She was very small and underweight. But she was smiley and sweet and, in Sinet’s eyes, she was the most beautiful baby ever.

  Srey Noit was never fed enough and was always crying from hunger. She looked like a little skeleton covered in skin, but with a very swollen belly. Sinet would often take Srey Noit in her arms and go and find her Ma—who was usually off gambling away the little money she had—and beg her to breastfeed Srey Noit. She ached for her little sister.

  One night during the wet season, Srey Noit developed a very high fever. Ma bought some medicine from the local pharmacy, but Srey Noit couldn’t hold it down. She started vomiting, had a seizure and died. She wasn’t even a year old. There are no photos or record of her existence—a fact that haunts Sinet to this day.

  Srey Noit’s death had a big impact on Sinet’s parents. Ma stopped gambling and stopped being quite so violent with her children. Sinet’s father borrowed money to buy a few chickens and started selling the barbecued meat at the market.

  They were also fortunate enough to be given a small piece of land by a French NGO. They pulled down the old house (which was squatting on someone else’s land), took the materials to the new block and built a small but more sturdy home.

  The house still leaked a little but it was more comfortable than anything they’d lived in before. They even made enough to buy their own television. Thanks to the barbecued chicken business, for the first time ever the family had enough to eat every day.

  For the next couple of years, Sinet’s parents worked hard. Their health seemed to suffer, but they took no notice of that. The two oldest boys left home to work in Thailand.

  But then, one day, their father was struck down with a bad cough, high fever and diarrhoea. Over the next ten days, his condition grew worse. So Sinet went with him to the provincial hospital and stayed there, nursing him for several weeks.

  The weight fell off him. The drugs the hospital gave him were expensive, and weren’t working anyway, so he decided to stop taking them and come home.

  Sinet and her family stayed by his side, and continued to look after him as best they could.

  He was in terrible agony for several months. And without his income, the family’s financial situation was soon desperate. Ma sold everything they owned; the TV, their clothes and all the chickens. They couldn’t even afford paracetamol to ease his suffering.

  Sinet was just nine years old when she lost the second member of her family. Her father’s frail body was carried to the nearest temple and cremated. After the cremation, the nuns at the temple took his bones, put them in a bowl full of water and made the children drink from the bowl to stop them from missing their dad.

  Sinet was numb. And Ma fell apart. After the cremation, she told her children she was going to find work in Poipet, a town near the Thai border. Sinet, her ten-year-old sister Sineit, and their two younger brothers, Phala and Sacha, were left at home alone with only a little money and no adults.

  Fortunately, the four children already had well-honed survival skills. They caught fish and frogs and picked the edible wild morning glory that grew along the sides of neighbouring streams, just as they used to do with their parents. The nearby French NGO saw what was happening and gave them rice almost every day. And every few months, Ma would return and give a few dollars to a neighbour to buy the children some food.

  Still, living alone was scary for the kids. Almost every night during this period, little Phala had night terrors and would run out the door in his sleep, calling for Ma and Pa to wait for him. Sinet would run after him in the dark, catch him, and bring him back to bed.

  After many months of living this way, Ma came home with some news. She had a new husband in Poipet and the whole family was moving there.

  And so they followed Ma to an unfamiliar town to meet their new father and move into a tiny rented house in a dodgy neighbourhood. Ma got a job selling fruit at a market across the Thai border. Their new stepfather had some work as a labourer. Sinet and her siblings helped to make money by working as rag pickers in the local rubbish dump.

  After about a year of living in Poipet, Ma fell ill. She had a cough, fever and diarrhoea, just like Sinet’s father.

  Sinet went with her to the provincial hospital in Banteay Meanchey Province and looked after her there, while Sineit and her younger brothers stayed with their stepfather, working in Poipet. After several months in hospital, even though Ma wasn’t at all well, she took Sinet back to Poipet to check on her sister and brothers.

  On their return, Ma had a terrible argument with her husband, and the couple split. Sinet had no idea what caused the breakup, only that it had something to do with her older sister, Sineit.

  Ma moved the kids back to Battambang. Her health was deteriorating fast. She spent several weeks at the Battambang hospital, but eventually decided that there was nothing more the doctors could do for her. She kept Sineit at home to look after her, and sent Sinet and the other children to live at the local pagoda.

  So now Sinet and her siblings were temple children—the impoverished or orphaned kids who help the monks in return for food and accommodation.

  A few months later, Ma died, and Sineit came to join them at the pagoda.

  Sinet was ten by this time. She didn’t cry the day her mother died. In fact, she didn’t shed a single tear for many years after. She says that pieces of her heart died on the day she lost her Ma and that’s why she lost the ability to cry for so many years.

  Life was tough for the temple kids. Each morning they were woken at four o’clock for chanting and then were assigned cleaning duties for the rest of the day.

  Rath was the head monk at the pagoda. He disciplined the temple children by beating them with sticks, often hard enough to break skin. The children, and even the other monks, lived in fear of Rath.

  But there was one thing to be glad about. Sinet was allowed to join the monks’ classes. She finally had the chance to learn to read and write. Reading became her greatest escape. She was never happier than when she had her nose buried in a book.

  Sinet and her siblings lived at the pagoda for two years. Then Rath decided to leave the pagoda and form an orphanage. He took the temple children with him. He called the orphanage Sprouting Knowledge Orphans (SKO).

  It wasn’t until much later that Sinet and her siblings learned that their parents had died from AIDS, and Sineit had contracted HIV.

  ‘Tara, I try so hard to forget about my old life,’ Sinet confided one night. ‘But I can’t. When I close my eyes I see it and when I sleep I dream of it. I can’t escape. I’m so happy I have a new life now, here with you, but still I always think about my life before. Why do I think so much about it?’

  Some instinct told me that, considering I didn’t yet have the Khmer words to comfort her, the most helpful thing I could do was listen. So I let her do most of the talking.

  As her story unfolded, I was more and more stunned that this beautiful, intelligent girl who I saw smiling every day could be the survivor of a life so incomprehensibly cruel.

  These talks became a time in which she could grieve for everything she had lost. Sometimes she cried on my shoulder until my shirt was damp. But how do you console someone who’s lived through horrors that you can barely imagine? Her life experience had been almost the polar opposite to my own.

  One night she told me: ‘At SKO we worked so hard in the fields, before and after school. We never had time off. When we harvested the rice and vegetables Rath would take them and sell them for his family. Our lives were very hard, but we were too scared to tell anyone about it—and about the other things Rath was doing . . .’

  ‘What things?’ I asked.

  After a long, painful pause, her words came out in a rush. ‘We were all so scared of him, especially me. I think I was the most scared out of everyone. I really am a coward, Tara. You know, Rath, he did something . . .’ Her voice trailed off.


  ‘What?’ I pressed. ‘What he do?’ A chill scuttled down my spine.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said, trying to fake a smile.

  ‘Sinet, please trust me. What you were going to say? What did Rath do?’

  She put her hand to her face and let out a little sob. I immediately regretted asking.

  Finally, she took a deep breath and looked around the room to see if any of the kids had woken. She looked back at me, and with tears splashing off her quivering bottom lip, she whispered: ‘He raped me.’

  In the days that followed, Sinet told me more. When she first moved to the pagoda, Rath seemed to notice her. He’d often say scary, seedy things about how pretty she was, how one day he’d like to take her for his wife.

  She was sixteen when he first acted. It wasn’t every day, but it was often.

  Life became a game of cat and mouse as she desperately tried to avoid him, and he orchestrated ways to get her alone. Like making her clean his office. Or look after him when he was sick. Or the time she stayed behind while everyone went to the water festival so she could avoid him, but then he came home early on his own . . .

  He threatened to kill her if she told anyone. She was terrified.

  When I arrived to volunteer in 2006, the abuse stopped for those two months until I went back to Australia. Then it started again.

  Thus Sinet came to associate me with safety.

  After Sinet’s revelation, my deep hatred of Rath intensified. I dreaded to think what he might have done to the other girls—and what he might continue to do to the girls we’d left behind. Sinet said she couldn’t be sure but she had seen him acting in similar ways towards Sopheap, his niece.

  I wanted to put him behind bars. I wanted to see him rot in jail for years and years. But Sinet swore me to secrecy, for all the obvious reasons, and I didn’t want to betray her trust.

  Meanwhile, Sinet’s upset stomach and lethargy grew so bad she started to miss school. I asked Davi, the nurse, to look into it, but she kept putting it off, saying she’d get to it soon.

  Davi was always nice enough to me and the kids, so I couldn’t work out what the problem was. Surely if a kid was so sick she was missing school, she should see a doctor?

  It sometimes felt like quite a struggle to get all the staff to act on their own initiative, without me having to ask them to do things all the time. Sometimes it just seemed like they lacked basic common sense.

  In the end I took Sinet to the local polyclinic myself. Naturally, I wondered if her illness was some kind of psychological fallout from what Rath had done to her, but I wanted to rule out any physical problem first.

  They ran some tests and told me she had Helicobacter pylori, a bacterial infection. This was not great news. If left untreated, it could lead to stomach ulcers and, possibly even to stomach cancer. They told me it was fairly common in Cambodia, and gave me a ‘stomach ulcer pack’ with all the medicines needed to clear it up. But as the weeks passed, Sinet just got worse. Eventually, we set off on the local bus to Phnom Penh to see Cecile, the French doctor at the Naga Clinic who had helped us when Sineit was sick.

  Cecile ran some tests and asked us to come back for the results. She was outraged by what she found. ‘She doesn’t have helicobacter, she has four different parasites!’ the doctor cried. ‘One of these, giardia, okay, it’s hard to catch. Sometimes you do a stool test and you miss things. But to miss all of these—it’s criminal!’ She gave a despairing sigh. ‘Maybe you should come to us from now on.’

  Great, I thought. So all the medical staff in Battambang are incompetent, and I’m supposed to travel for eight hours by bus any time one of the kids is sick—that bus ride takes almost as long as a flight back to Sydney!

  It was extremely disheartening.

  The good news was that Sinet improved quickly once she’d started on the treatment prescribed by Cecile. The bad news was that a lot of the kids had also started to have very similar symptoms. Cecile recommended we get them all tested.

  The pathology lab in Phnom Penh, the Institut Pasteur, offered to help me. They gave me a discount on their services and provided test tubes and containers for our nurse, Davi, to collect blood and stool samples. The staff at the lab showed me how to choose which tests to order and the test tubes required for each test.

  It was an epic process—at five in the morning, Davi would take blood samples and get the kids to poo into the pre-labelled containers. We’d pack them into a cooler full of ice, and I’d take the coolers all the way to Phnom Penh, drop them off at the lab and order the tests. Then I’d take all the results to a clinic with a western doctor and sneakily ask them to review all the results and prescribe the required medication. I was often told I should really have a separate appointment for each patient and the patients should be present at the appointment, but I always managed to talk my way around it.

  I learned a lot more about medicine in this time than I ever thought I would.

  One morning, a few months after rescuing the kids, I woke up and realised, Hey! I can speak Khmer!

  Okay—so it didn’t happen quite like that, but it’s not far off.

  I never thought to myself: You know what? I have to learn Khmer. I just picked it up because I was immersed in Cambodian life and no one around me spoke much, if any, English. So it was either speak Khmer or don’t speak to anyone at all.

  Sinet was one of my greatest supports as I learned her language. She was always able to get the gist of what I was trying to say and translate it into something everyone else could understand. Hearing her reshuffle my words back to the kids and staff definitely helped a lot.

  At first I learned to speak in phrases and sentences, knowing that ‘all these sounds strung together means this’, rather than learning the individual words. For example, I knew how to ask What time is it now? or Can I get a receipt for that? Only gradually did the meanings of individual words begin to emerge.

  Acquiring the language without much translation meant that I learned to think in Khmer from the very start. As a result, even today, translating from Khmer back to English isn’t as easy for me as you might think. I may know what certain words mean in Khmer, but translation is such an inexact science that it’s not always easy to find a word to convey the same meaning in English.

  In some ways, colloquial Khmer is an easy language to learn. The real challenge is the pronunciation. The phonemes—the sounds that make up the words—are very subtle in variation and many of them simply don’t exist in English. If you get it even a tiny bit wrong, you just won’t be understood. Khmer is not a tonal language though, so I suspect that Cambodian people are just not accustomed to hearing their language spoken with an accent.

  At the market, I once stood in front of a pile of coconuts, pointed directly at them and said ‘dong’ instead of ‘daung’. The two older women who ran the store looked at me blankly and shrugged, with absolutely no idea what I was on about. I pointed again, repeating ‘Dong! Dong!’ (thinking: Come on! It’s gotta be pretty close!). They shrugged again and hurried into the back of their stalls, leaving me frustrated and thirsty. There’s no mean-spiritedness behind this. Often, when Cambodians see a foreigner coming, they’ll start getting nervous that they aren’t going to understand what the foreigner wants—so no matter how close the attempt is, their standard response is ‘no, sorry, I don’t speak English and can’t understand what you’re saying’.

  I got around this obstacle by subconsciously mimicking Sinet. She would always pay out on me for making mistakes, but the joke was on her. For a while there, people said they couldn’t tell our voices apart when we were both speaking in Khmer.

  I have my own badass style now, so that no longer happens. But Sinet still relishes any opportunity to point out my mistakes.

  11

  A very good friend of mine, Vicky Baron, who is now one of Australia’s most esteemed makeup artists, once told me that the key to success when you’re first starting out in something is to say yes to everything. Every oppor
tunity to come your way—no matter if the pay is shit, or the hours are inconvenient, or you think it’s too easy, or you’re terrified and think you’re way out of your depth . . . you say yes.

  So when I got a phone call in September 2007 from a well-known Australian current affairs TV show asking to film a piece on my story, I said yes.

  And then I shat myself.

  As I tell you this story, I’m going to refer to the Australian TV show involved as ‘the current affairs show’ and I’m going to change the names of the major players. It doesn’t seem fair to name and shame people who were, after all, just doing their job.

  The producer, who we’ll call Fred Nerk, confirmed the offer with an incredibly friendly email, describing my ‘remarkable work’ and ‘infectious spirit’ and offering CCT a primetime spot on the network, as well as magazine opportunities. He pointed out that the story would be viewed by close to 2 million people, which would help us raise the funds he knew we badly needed. And he guaranteed that he would treat me, and CCT and the kids, with ‘a great deal of heart at all times’.

  Ho. Ly. Crap.

  The thought of being on primetime television may have been utterly terrifying, but what an amazing opportunity for CCT—with nearly 2 million viewers this opportunity could set the kids up for life.

  This was no time to let fear get in the way. It just had to be done.

  I forwarded the email to Sally and my family, saying: How amazing is THIS?! :)

  Their replies were far less enthusiastic. The show was notorious for its sensationalist reporting, and Sally was worried enough to call a contact of hers who worked at the same network.

  The contact told her that the current affairs show was planning to do a negative story about some high-profile Australians who were involved in a Cambodian orphanage and hadn’t come good on their promises.

  As I read this, my heart started racing and my palms turned clammy. A negative story on CCT could destroy us. No one would ever trust us again. We’d lose what little support we had. Fuck. Why does everything have to be so complicated!