How (Not) to Start an Orphanage

by Tara Winkler

  ‘It’s just, Loak Khrew, isn’t family really important in Cambodia? Don’t most Cambodians end up looking after their poorer relatives? A bit like you, no? You are supporting your brothers and sister on the small salary you get from CCT, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, it’s very hard,’ he agreed. ‘I have a salary now but I’m still just as poor as I was before. It’s a very sad situation, but they are my family and I can’t stand to see them suffer, so I cannot say no.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if your siblings all had the opportunity to get an education too so they could all find good jobs and support themselves?’ I replied.

  ‘That would be wonderful. Yes, I see what you mean, Tara.’

  It wasn’t an easy ‘get’ for Jedtha and Savenh—they’d grown up immersed in the system. But to their credit, they could see that bringing up the kids with their siblings made sense. Most of the kids, as far as we knew, grew up in a pretty desperate situation. It was highly probable that their siblings badly needed help, too. With a bit of effort, we could track down the siblings and reunite them with their brothers and sisters at CCT, which wouldn’t be such a big extra cost.

  As a start, we decided to look for Makara and Nimol’s siblings. Full of youthful enthusiasm, I wrote up a report for our handful of private donors to help them understand the situation and what we were planning to do. We called it CCT’s sibling reunion program.

  In some ways, it was a step in the right direction . . .

  13

  Now that I had the sibling reunion program to raise funds for, and the whole ‘family atmosphere’ approach to keep us all on our toes, life at CCT got a little busier. But we never forgot the kids at SKO, and we were as determined as ever to put Rath in jail and see some justice for Sinet.

  As soon as we had time, Jedtha and I went to the office of LICADHO, a Cambodian human rights NGO, to ask their advice. It was a typical Battambang office—a converted retail space with a desk up one end and a few seats up the other where customers could wait.

  Jedtha met with one of the LICADHO managers. They talked quickly and earnestly in more formal Khmer, which I had a bit of trouble following.

  Also, my attention was drawn to a trembling, distressed little girl who was sitting with a middle-aged woman in the waiting area. I’d never seen such a broken little person. The girl was tiny, with a soft, round face covered in scrapes and bruises. The pained expression on her face made her seem older than her years, which I guessed was around eight years old. She was trembling with fear and jumped at every sudden noise that drifted in from the street. When her aunt spoke softly to her, she froze and didn’t seem to be able to answer. It broke my heart just to look at her.

  I whispered to Jedtha: ‘Sorry to interrupt, but is that little girl okay?’

  Jedtha asked the LICADHO manager, who replied in a low, sad tone, ‘She was raped by her cousin. He beat her badly, too.’

  He and Jedtha went back to their conversation. Meanwhile, I was reeling from this information. I was certainly not expecting that response. I couldn’t fathom how anyone could do that to a child.

  I couldn’t sit there and do nothing, so I left the meeting in Jedtha’s capable hands and hurried off to the markets. I hunted down the biggest, cheeriest rag doll I could find and rushed back to LICADHO. If ever there was a kid who needed a friend, it was this one.

  I put it gently in her lap. ‘This is for you!’ I said. The rag doll was almost as tall as she was.

  ‘Say thank you,’ the aunt said, smiling.

  The merest shadow of a smile crept across the child’s face. She pressed her little hands together and mouthed ‘awkun,’ the Khmer word for ‘thank you’.

  ‘My name is Tara. What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Akara,’ she whispered, so softly I could barely hear her.

  Before we left, I asked Jedtha to find out what would happen to little Akara.

  The human rights lawyer assured us she’d be kept safe under their care.

  The next day, as I wrote my emails, as I took photos of smiling faces to send to our supporters, I thought of Akara. As I watched Sineit’s serious face light up with laughter again after three days sick with fever, as I had another supportive little chat with Sinet, I wondered about that little girl. How was she doing? Was the cousin caught? What happened when a child was raped by a family member in Cambodia? Was she staying at the courthouse? Was she safe?

  By lunch time, I couldn’t take it anymore. I asked Jedtha to call, just to see how she was. My Khmer was improving, but talking on the phone was still difficult.

  ‘Her aunt took her back home,’ Jedtha reported back to me. ‘The cousin was arrested. He will stay in jail until the hearing.’

  ‘Can we go to visit her?’ I asked. ‘Just to check up on her?’

  ‘Yes, sure we can,’ said Jedtha. ‘That would be a nice thing to do.’

  Later that afternoon, he and I set off on the moto to visit the little girl’s home.

  The address we were given was about half an hour out of town, which can feel like a long way when you’re on the back of a moto. Trees thickened around us until we pulled up at a cluster of decrepit pole huts nestled within a gloomy, jungly area near a bend on the Stung Sangker River.

  A few children were hanging around and three or four adults sat under one of the huts, drinking and chatting. A plump guy in his fifties lounged in a hammock. He had no shirt on and rested a bottle on his impressive gut. They looked up as we approached.

  Akara emerged from around the side of the house and ran up to greet us, her aunt following behind her. The girl didn’t say anything, though, just looked up at me shyly, recognition in her eyes. You could still see the bruises all over her face and arms.

  We said hello to Akara’s aunt, who then invited us to sit down on a wooden plank near the shirtless drunk in the hammock. She sat down next to us and Akara squeezed herself timidly in between us, completely silent, clearly trying to make herself invisible. Her little hand crept into mine and she held it tightly. I gave it a reassuring squeeze and smiled at her.

  ‘How are things going at the court?’ Jedtha ask the aunt.

  The older man in the hammock interrupted. ‘Why do you come here asking this? She is my niece. Her parents are dead and now she’s just a nuisance. She is causing our family a lot of trouble.’

  ‘We met her at LICADHO and we just wanted to know how she was doing,’ Jedtha explained.

  ‘She’s fine!’ he barked, giving Akara’s aunt a death stare. He was a scary guy and clearly very intoxicated. Akara’s aunt got up, excused herself and left.

  ‘Okay, we will leave you,’ Jedtha said to Akara’s uncle. ‘Come on, we can talk more with her aunt,’ he said to me quietly.

  Akara kept hold of my hand as we went to find her aunt. We walked about fifty metres. Then Akara suddenly stopped in her tracks.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. Her hand still squeezed mine tightly.

  ‘I’m scared,’ she said in a high-pitched little voice. Her cousin was in jail, but after meeting her uncle, it wasn’t surprising. Even her aunt seemed on edge.

  I crouched in front of the little girl and said softly, ‘What are you scared of?’

  Akara didn’t answer. I looked up at Jedtha helplessly, hoping he could go into teacher/counsellor mode. He tried, but she just stared into the middle distance and wouldn’t answer, her face closed, impassive.

  ‘Akara,’ I begged. ‘You can tell me . . .’

  ‘I don’t want to stay here!’ she blurted.

  Her assertive tone was completely at odds with her cringing body language, the scrapes and bruises that I could see on her legs as well as her face and arms. This was a child who was so traumatised she was barely talking and this was what she had to say. I made up my mind in that moment. I’m not leaving her here. I don’t know what’s going on, but she’s obviously terrified . . .

  Jedtha asked her: ‘Do you want come stay with us at our onga with other kids? We
have—’

  ‘Yes,’ she interrupted.

  I looked up at Jedtha, hoping that was going to be possible. She couldn’t come to CCT without written permission from whoever had custody of her, and I knew that wasn’t going to be easy to sort out.

  Akara’s aunt was sitting alone in a shed not far away. She’d overhead the conversation.

  Jedtha pressed her for more information, and eventually she told us a little more about Akara. The girl’s mother was an alcoholic. A few months ago she went to the river to wash some clothes with Akara and passed out, face down in the water. Akara couldn’t rouse her and so she drowned, just like that, right in front of her daughter’s eyes.

  The aunt paused for a second to listen. Akara’s uncle had company now and they were talking loudly, drunkenly.

  Very quietly, she told us: ‘Akara is very badly treated here. My brother and my nephew are very bad to her.’ She went on to tell us about the rapes. Akara’s cousin had taken her three times into the forest, raped and bashed her and then ran. Each time it was her aunt who found her, covered in blood and bruises, terrified and alone. She was so worried for Akara that she decided to take her to LICADHO to ask for help. Her brother was furious at her for reporting his son and for bringing shame on the family. The uncle was abusive too—he treated Akara like a dog.

  She drew us in closer and said in a low whisper: ‘Can you help Akara?’

  Jedtha said softly, ‘Yes, sister, we can. Don’t worry. We just need permission from you and your brother.’

  So the four of us—Jedtha, me, Akara and her aunt—went to talk to him.

  He was immediately defensive. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong by this girl! No one here has done anything wrong!’ I could practically see the steam shooting out his ears. ‘I don’t know why the police have put my boy in jail. He didn’t do anything. This whole thing is stupid!’

  He continued on like that, getting increasingly loud and aggressive.

  I felt quite worried. This guy seemed so volatile, and the atmosphere was so tense that I didn’t want to push him over the edge.

  ‘If Akara comes to live with us, you will not have to pay to feed and clothe her anymore, and she will get an education,’ Jedtha explained to the girl’s uncle, in his usual calm and restrained tone.

  ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ the uncle snapped.

  I felt Akara grip my hand tightly.

  ‘But why not?’ I asked. ‘You can always come to visit her . . .’

  ‘Just because!’ he shouted. His bleary eyes slid across to Akara and he barked: ‘Where do you want to live?’ His tone was thick with threat.

  Akara stiffened as if she was about to take a blow, but she answered with amazing force: ‘I want to go live with the foreigner!’

  My heart really started pumping then, because Akara had basically said: Fuck you!

  Her uncle glowered at her. This was the moment on which everything turned. Losing face like this in front of Jedtha, in front of me—it wasn’t good. Not for the uncle, and not for Akara.

  So this was it. Akara had just put her life in our hands and we couldn’t leave now.

  I turned to Jedtha and asked in English: ‘Can we get the officials from DoSVY here right now to help?’

  Jedtha looked at the sky—the sun was going down. ‘Tara,’ he replied quietly, ‘DoSVY don’t work this late. And we are not safe in this village after dark. It is dangerous.’

  ‘I know,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘But, Jedtha, I’m not going to leave Akara here. I’ll sit on this bench all night if I have to.’

  ‘Yes—I know—we must help,’ Jedtha said unhappily. I could see he was thinking: Oh, fuuuuck . . .

  We spent another half-hour sitting there while Jedtha tried to negotiate with Akara’s obnoxious, drunk uncle.

  After a while, we all lapsed into a very long silence. It was hard by now to see much in the shadows of twilight. My arse was numb from sitting on the plank and my stomach was grumbling.

  Jedtha suddenly leaned forward and said intensely: ‘What if we give you some rice?’

  I looked up at Jedtha in surprise. Was that a bribe?

  To my complete astonishment, the uncle said: ‘Okay.’ (Probably because he was completely fed up with us by now.)

  ‘Okay. I’ll go get it now.’ And Jedtha was off.

  He roared away in the dark on the moto. I sat on the bench with Akara thinking: Did we really just exchange a child—a child!—for a bag of rice?

  But the situation was desperate enough that I could see why he did it. In Australia you can rely on the child protection system to act in situations like Akara’s. But here, there is no system in place yet.

  The uncle poured rice wine down his gullet and rocked in his hammock, occasionally turning rheumy, hostile eyes on Akara and me. It wasn’t the most comfortable evening of my life.

  After about twenty minutes, we heard the hum of Jedtha’s moto coming back. Like the superstar that he is, he reappeared under the house, staggering slightly under the weight of the fifty-kilo bag of rice. Akara slipped away with her aunt to pack her things. The uncle put his thumbprint on the temporary paperwork that we’d drawn up, muttering: ‘Go, then.’

  We said goodbye to Akara’s aunt, put Akara between us on the moto and set off down the pitch-black roads back into Battambang. The girl clutched a little plastic bag against her chest, filled with all her worldly possessions. I chatted away to her, trying to say comforting things like: ‘So we are going to CCT now—there are lots of kids who are very nice and you’ll be very safe there. And shall we stop before and get some nice dinner? What do you like to eat? How about fried rice? Would you like ice-cream after dinner?’

  She sat in silence, not responding to me at all. But as the lights of the town started to appear on the roads, I heard her utter a tiny squeak.

  ‘What?’ I asked, leaning down out of the wind so I could hear her.

  ‘Never take me back there again,’ she said in her fierce little mouse voice.

  I gave her hand a squeeze. ‘No, don’t worry. You never have to go back there again.’

  She nodded and held my arms even tighter and declared: ‘And they can’t come to visit me, either!’

  We stopped off at the White Rose restaurant. Akara wolfed down a plate of fried rice with beef followed by ice-cream. She barely spoke a word. She was such a timid thing, but somehow still had this iron will. I hoped we could help her after everything she’d been through.

  After she’d been cheered up a little by her dinner, we took her back to CCT. She was silent through all the introductions, but the other kids seemed to understand and gave us the space she needed. Savenh got her showered and into bed.

  The next day, we took her to hospital to get all her injuries dealt with and provide further evidence to the police. Jedtha and Savenh also went to register her case officially with DoSVY.

  That afternoon, after she’d settled down a little, I sat with her in the common room and explained how CCT works. ‘So next week you can go to school. And we have extra tutoring after school, and on weekend we do art classes and PE and sometimes we go to the circus, or on a picnic or something nice. It’s lots of fun!’

  Little Makara bounced around us in his cheerful, slightly hyperactive way while I was explaining all this.

  ‘And on Sundays we can watch TV!’ he informed her in his gruff little voice. ‘But if we fight we have to stop.’ And then he added: ‘I used to fight. But now I’ve stopped.’

  Akara was still settling in when Jedtha pulled me aside and told me: ‘Savenh just told me about a baby girl in her neighbourhood who is being badly neglected by her grandmother,’ he said. ‘They asked Savenh if CCT can help her. I think we should take a look.’

  I wasn’t confident we would have the resources to assist. We’d only just taken on Akara and our budget was already tight, but we couldn’t just dismiss Savenh’s concerns. She was CCT’s social worker, after all. So Jedtha, Savenh and I went to check out the situation
and see if there was anything we could do.

  Savenh took us to a tiny wooden house in the street where she lived.

  Sure enough, when we looked through the open front entrance we saw a very small baby inside, scooting around listlessly on her knees. She was less than a year old, dressed only in a ragged singlet.

  I picked her up and she didn’t protest. She was a mess, in desperate need of a bath. She looked malnourished, too. She had a pot belly, her ribs were sticking out and her hair was sparse and dry. She was also covered from head to toe in what looked like mosquito bites and the surrounding skin was red and extremely dry. It seemed to be pulled strangely tight all over her head, torso and tiny limbs—as if she were recovering from terrible sunburn.

  Some neighbours appeared in the doorway, looking concerned. ‘Do you know where her grandma is?’ Savenh asked, adding for our benefit: ‘They told me it’s her grandma who normally looks after her.’

  ‘Oh, she’s probably off playing cards,’ a woman said. ‘I’ll go find her.’

  The other neighbours told us the baby was left alone most days, and this had been going on for months. They tried to help look after her but they were away at work most of the time.

  The conversation was cut off when the neighbour returned, leading a very old, painfully thin lady with cropped silver hair.

  ‘Hello!’ the old lady cried, clearly surprised by all the fuss in her yard.

  She and Jedtha had a long chat.

  The old lady said that her daughter was a sex worker. She had taken off the day after the baby was born and never came back. The baby’s name was Sovanni. The old lady had been trying her best to look after Sovanni for the last nine months, but she herself was sick with hepatitis C and looking after Sovanni had been hard.

  When Jedtha asked her why she left the baby on her own so often, she just shrugged and said she needed to find money to feed them both, and she was too old and tired to take Sovanni along with her.

  I was always amazed in those early days to see how open people were about the details of their lives, how matter-of-fact. Jedtha asked her if she had a gambling problem and again, without flinching, she agreed she did. She’d been gambling for years, so it was hard to stop now. She’d never planned to have such a small child to look after so late in life. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t a bad woman, but the baby’s situation was clearly desperate.