by Gail Gutradt
This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2013, 2014 by Gail Gutradt
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in Japan, in different form, as In a Rocket Made of Ice: The Story of Wat Opot, a Visionary Community for Children Growing Up with AIDS by Heian-kyo Media, Kyoto, in 2013.
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Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gutradt, Gail.
In a rocket made of ice : among the children of Wat Opot / Gail Gutradt. — First edition.
pages cm
“A Borzoi Book.”
ISBN 978-0-385-35347-2 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-385-35348-9 (eBook)
1. Orphanages—Cambodia. 2. Orphans—Cambodia—Social conditions. 3. Orphans—Services for—Cambodia. 4. HIV-positive children—Cambodia—Social conditions. 5. Children of AIDS patients—Cambodia—Social conditions. I. Title.
HV1300.3.G87 2014
362.73′2—dc23 [B] 2014006731
Front-of-jacket and spine photographs by Gail Gutradt
Border detail (top) @ Sam Barnes / Alamy; (bottom) John W. Banagan / Lonely Planet Images / Getty Images
Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd., Madison, WI
Jacket design by Stephanie Ross
v3.1
Dedicated to Wayne Dale Matthysse
and the children of Wat Opot
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword, Dr. Paul Farmer
Author’s Note
Map
PART ONE: Sanctuary
1. Sita
2. A Workshop for Souls
3. Family Pictures
4. Exit, with Cookie
5. Miss Srey Mom: Those We Are Given to Love
6. Boys with Barbies
7. Opening the Gates
8. Ants-in-a-Line Village
9. Walls
10. Pesei
11. Chaos Theory Dominoes
12. Mister Ouen
13. Yei
14. “She Died Like This …”
15. Up the Mountain
16. An Exclusive Club
17. Singing Kites
PART TWO: Transformations
18. Pilgrimage
19. Wayne
20. Volunteers
PART THREE: Confusions
21. The Rapture
22. “We Did Not Know You”
23. “Go, and See!”
24. Hunting Frogs, Hunting Rats
25. Pagoda Boys
26. The Dance
27. A Seventy-Two-Year-Old Grandmother
28. A House with High Walls
29. And Yet…
30. Leaving, Returning
PART FOUR: Mysteries
31. Calling the Soul
PART FIVE: Departures
32. How It Was
33. Return to Wat Opot
34. The Cries of Children
35. Rice in Your Ear
36. Fund-Raising
37. “Sometimes I Hope It Not Rain”
38. Geewa: In His Own Words
39. Kangho’s Brother Does Not Believe in Yoga
40. Turning Points
41. Sweeping the Temple
42. In a Rocket Made of Ice
Gratitude
Photo Credits
A Note About the Author
Discussion Guide
Illustrations
Foreword
Dr. Paul Farmer
Wat Opot Children’s Community, pencil drawing by Pesei
With humility and discernment, Gail Gutradt introduces us to Wat Opot, a thriving community of over fifty children and young adults, many of them members of the first generation of Cambodians to grow up living with HIV. This community is the life’s work of Wayne Dale Matthysse, a U.S. Marine Corps medic who, having failed to prevent the deaths of two Vietnamese children on one gruesome day during his wartime service, has since served the orphaned, poor and ill in Central America and Southeast Asia. He and cofounder Vandin San opened Wat Opot as a hospice for people with AIDS in the years before antiretroviral medications were available in Cambodia. With the advent of effective therapy, Wat Opot has been transformed from a place in which the abandoned and castoff received end-of-life care into a source of hope and opportunity for its young residents, whose aspirations have grown apace. Gutradt’s admiration for Matthysse’s inexhaustible dedication to Wat Opot—as well as for his capacity for drawing on the resources, cultural and personal, that he sees all around him—is leavened by a frank account of what it’s like to lack other resources, money usually, needed to prevent suffering and early death.
Gutradt’s deep comprehension emerges from her own narrative, woven together with the individual stories of children at Wat Opot as they receive their initial AIDS diagnosis and then begin a lifetime of treatment. She charts their reflections as they assimilate the loss and abandonment they’ve experienced within their families, and as they come to understand the raucous, dynamic community at Wat Opot as home. Gutradt doesn’t shy away from examining the power imbalance between volunteer caregivers and those to whom they minister, the limitations of a visitor’s ability to care for the chronically ill, the unintended consequences of well-meaning projects and the often-agonizing moral dilemmas involved in caring for the sick and dying when certain resources are scarce.
In a Rocket Made of Ice offers readers rare access to the extraordinary people of Wat Opot, as well as substantive insight into the complexities of caring for the poor and sick in the developing world. Much more than a story of hope in the face of grim news and chronic disappointment, Gutradt makes a compelling case for the efficacy of ingenuity, imagination and a commitment to human dignity when we accompany each other through adversity.
Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, is Kolokotrones University Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and cofounder of Partners In Health. He also serves as UN Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community-Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti. Dr. Farmer and his colleagues have pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies for the delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings. He is the author of Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, among many other titles, and has written extensively on health, human rights and the consequences of social inequality.
Author’s Note
Indecisions and Decisions
In 2001, when Wayne Dale Matthysse and Vandin San founded Partners in Compassion, a tiny nondenominational nongovernmental organization (NGO), there were no AIDS drugs in Cambodia, and no means of testing for HIV either. The very idea of children “growing up with AIDS” would have seemed impossible.
Today, some treatments are available, and Wat Opot, a self-supporting program of Partners in Compassion, has evolved into a visionary community where HIV-positive and HIV-negative children live together as family. And because they are growing up side by side, the fact of AIDS deeply affects all the children. Whether they have been orphaned or watched their friends and siblings die, live with HIV or AIDS themselves, or are nurturing younger siblings who are infected—or if their family or community has been touched in some other way by the disease—these children are growing up with AIDS.
During my first five-month vis
it to Cambodia I had no thought of writing a book. I was not a writer, but I became one, because I found a story so worth telling. I am not a journalist, nor is this a book about AIDS in Cambodia. All the statistics you need are available online in the many publications of the United Nations and the Cambodian National AIDS Authority. But behind the spreadsheets are real people whose lives are acutely affected by abstract policy decisions, trade agreements and political dramas. As the African saying goes, “When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.”
When you first meet the children you would be hard-pressed to guess who is HIV positive and who isn’t. I first wrote In a Rocket Made of Ice using the children’s real names, but then realized that this breach of privacy might cause a child to be stigmatized in school or in the village. Neighbors know that some of the children at Wat Opot are HIV positive, but not which ones, and even after children leave Wat Opot this information could jeopardize their careers and social prospects. It is still a child’s own personal decision whom to tell, and whether to tell, and when.
For this reason I have chosen to change the names of most of the children and adults, both HIV positive and negative, and to not name the children in the photos or put their pictures with their stories without their permission. Thus the inclusion of any child’s picture says nothing at all about his or her HIV status. The names of some volunteers have been changed as well.
Renaming people is no small matter. Cambodian names are meticulously chosen with due consideration given to meanings and portents, and I found the struggle to change the names of my friends profoundly unsettling. I consulted many Khmer baby-name lists and names of friends of friends on Facebook, looking for more than forty new but common names that were easy to pronounce for a non-Khmer reader. Although I tried to find a name suitable for each child in sound, poetry and meaning, and in some instances asked a child to choose his or her own name, I apologize for any choice that might make a child unhappy.
Khmer is difficult for an English speaker, and I am ashamed to admit that in four long stays at Wat Opot I learned very little. Complex vowel sounds, implosions, unfamiliar gymnastics of mouth and tongue and my own aging brain made it hard for me to learn more than a smattering of words. Moreover, at Wat Opot there is a conscious effort to help the children grow up speaking and understanding both Khmer and English. Volunteers sometimes lapse into a hodgepodge of the two languages, but Wayne is careful to speak in complete, well-articulated English sentences, as a model for the children. During my time with them their English grew by leaps and bounds, while my Khmer remained risible.
Khmer words in this book are transcribed as this foreigner heard them, with no claim to accuracy. As Khmer has its own unique alphabet, descended from the ancient scripts of India, a child may spell his name in English one way today, another way tomorrow. A visit to any Khmer Facebook page will confirm the variations of spelling. Nicknames abound, often formed of the final syllable of a given name. Thus, Sothy becomes simply Ty. There are also affectionate pet names, such as Srey Mom (Precious Girl), or descriptive nicknames such as Srey Map (Chubby). Sometimes a child may decide they want to be called by another name entirely.
Throughout the book I have tried to make the Khmer words available to an English-speaking reader, and any inaccuracies are not a mark of disrespect for Khmer culture but simply my attempt to make foreign words accessible to people who may never have heard the language spoken and are unfamiliar with complex phonetic notation. Some of my transliterations come from pronunciation guides in Khmer-English dictionaries and guidebooks, but even these disagree. “Thank you” might be written o-ku!n. Or then again, it might be or-gOOn. What to do? In the end I have tried to write words and names in such a way that the reader will not trip over them or feel stuck. Although Khmer differs from Thai or Vietnamese in that it is not a tonal language, in a few places I have included stress indicators. Thus, Malis, a girl’s name meaning “Fragrant Jasmine,” is not pronounced like the English “malice,” but the more graceful mah-LEE.
Over the years, Wayne has worked on a document he calls his Statement of Passions and Beliefs. Many of the quotes in Chapter 19 and throughout the book are from these writings; others are from a series of taped interviews by Andy Gray, mostly on matters of spirituality; and some are excerpts from Wayne’s letters to me, or from my own journals, notes from conversations with Wayne during many a long evening.
Choosing just a few images from more than six thousand photographs taken over seven years felt like a treasure hunt. Over time, images and words have intertwined into a tumble of beloved faces and memories, and together they form a journal, the images complementing volumes of late-night notes written by candlelight. Now and then, as I worked on this book, a photo triggered a metaphor that became in turn the seed of a story. Thus, a simple image of a kite flying in the smoke of a cremation inspired the tale of the singing kites. (There are, of course, many others, but I leave them to the reader’s imagination.)
Sometimes I was concerned that the camera might come between me and the kids. I needn’t have worried. When they had enough of my prowling about, someone would sneak up behind and goose me just as I was about to snap a photo. I soon learned when it was time to put the camera away.
From 2005 to 2012, I spent a total of almost fifteen months at Wat Opot. I made four trips: October 2005 to April 2006, January to May 2007, December 2009 to January 2010, and December 2011 to March 2012. Most of my stays were during the dry season, when there is often no rain at all for four or five months, so when I picture Cambodia it is rarely the radiant washed colors of the rainy season I recall, but more often sun-faded surfaces covered with a patina of dust. December and January are cool months. The children wear sweaters in the morning and we all sleep under thin blankets at night. Toward the end of January temperatures begin to rise, and daytime heat may climb to the triple digits. Everybody naps.
After my second visit I thought to take a year off from volunteering to write a book, but one year stretched to nearly three. I spent one of those years being treated for cancer, but stayed in close touch with the people of Wat Opot. During the long summer and fall of chemotherapy and radiation I often longed to return one more time to see the children. Their experiences and mine were becoming intertwined as I found myself dealing with serious illness, and memories of their courage and joy often sustained me. Sometimes it seemed I might never see them again. I poured my longing and love into telling their stories.
Though slow and measured in some respects, life at Wat Opot can also be disorienting. There are dozens of children and an ever-changing stream of volunteers. Travelers you meet for a day may later return and stay for months—or not at all. People arrive on short notice: NGO groups, college students, government officials, donors. The children too come and go, sometimes returning to their families, leaving for university or taking a job. Sometimes—rarely, these days—they die. The structure of this book reflects my own leaving and returning, learning a little more each time, becoming closer to Wayne and the children as we have all grown older. What we learn about each other in life is not revealed all at once, but slowly, in increments, through a variety of interactions and events. Wayne calls these, simply, “the things we go through together.” So I ask the reader to relax into the chaos, knowing that life is not linear, but can perhaps better be viewed as a spiral, as we revisit certain events and people, explore expanding dimensions, recognize contradictions and deepen our love for each other.
In the end it all comes back to the children. Despite the name changes and other complexities, I invite you to do as I did: Stay a while with the children of Wat Opot and meet them as who they are, whole and vibrant, with their powerful personalities and enormous souls.
1
Sita
Shhhhhh. Listen. Sita is waking the day.
Sita turns on her portable radio the moment she wakes up. She raises the volume as high as it will go, way past the point of distortion, then twists the dial back and forth se
arching for something that pleases her: the trailing melodies of Buddhist mantras, a marching band playing the national anthem of the Kingdom of Cambodia, karaoke tunes, monks chanting, more mantras, marching, karaoke, monks and on and on and back again.
I open my eyes. It is still dark outside, and only the dim differentiation of wall from ceiling, sky from wall, barely perceptible through the pink mosquito net, shows where my single window looks out onto the world. In the distance a rooster crows weakly, sounding cross. Is it too early for him as well?
A wandering many-voiced chant arises from the Buddhist temple next door, the morning prayers of young and aged monks. One dog barks. From across the way another answers.
Sita is playing a Western song now with lyrics in Khmer. Her cheap speakers crackle under the strain.
A gecko begins chirping on the stucco wall.
On the porch outside my room Wayne is still a snoring mountain. His mosquito net is tucked into the black fleece blanket on his bed. Wayne says he sleeps outdoors so he can hear the children when they cry, and manages to sleep, often uneasily, through noises less urgent.
Somewhere in the children’s quarters a baby cries out from a dream and is comforted. Wayne rolls over and draws his body upright, dangling his feet over the side of the bed. He wears yesterday’s black trousers, dried mud still on the cuffs from working in the garden. The crying has stopped now so he sits quietly, wrapped in his blanket, collecting his thoughts for the day, breathing himself awake, perhaps praying. A pair of small feet drop over the other side of the bed and stumble off toward the bathrooms behind our house. Mister Phirun, at nine years old the oldest boy with AIDS, sometimes wets the bed. None of the boys wants to sleep with Phirun, so Wayne lets him crawl in with him sometimes when he is worried or lonely. Wayne wakes up often during the night and he will carry Phirun out to the yard, hold him at arm’s length to drain and return him to bed without waking him.