In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  Wayne calls all the kids Mister or Miss, especially the very little ones who run around with no pants. It is a matter of respect for the children but also on occasion affords much-needed comic relief, as in “Mister Vantha! Where are your shorts?”

  The children begin to wander in from their various sleeping quarters, gathering near the bathrooms outside my window. They are still half asleep, most of them, and sit in dazed solitary silence on the bamboo slat bed next to the wall in the manner of small children softly awoken, holding their toothbrushes and soap and waiting their turn in the bathroom. Their towels are draped about their shoulders or dangling unconsciously from their hands. Now and then a little one nods off to sleep as he waits, and his towel drops to the ground and he draws his bare shoulders in and up against the morning dampness and hugs himself and looks even smaller than before.

  Now Sita squats by the faucet outside her woven mat house and draws a little water to wash herself. She wears a worn flowered sarong hastily tucked in above her breasts, and her hair tumbles uncombed about her neck and shoulders. In spite of the radio, in spite of the insects and the chirping gecko and the whispers of children, in spite of dogs and roosters and monks chanting, the air has until this moment still possessed the integrity of night. But when Sita opens the tap her simple gesture signals the onset of the day’s activities, because somewhere else Mr. Sary has opened the valve that allows water to flow down from the holding tanks on the roof and the water hits Sita’s plastic bucket with a noise like a string of small firecrackers. In the bathroom next door I hear the cistern beginning to fill and the children splashing about, giggling and whispering, washing themselves modestly under their clothes.

  Sita has lived here, on and off, for six years, her residency interrupted by a series of transgressions, petty thefts and infractions that have made her at times unpopular with her fellow residents and unwelcome in the community. Each time she has left and failed to make a life for herself in the outside world Sita has returned, tentatively at first, testing the boundaries, subtly insinuating herself, promising that she has mended her ways, until finally Wayne’s resolution fails and he persuades the other women to allow Sita to move her few belongings back into her small house.

  As with nearly everyone here, her life has been a series of the setbacks and rejections, catastrophes and abandonments, that beset people infected with HIV/AIDS the world over. Such stories abound, every imaginable permutation of sorrow and many that are unimaginable. Sita’s own story includes elements not uncommon: an abusive father, a lover who impregnated her and infected her with the HIV virus, then the death of her baby and beatings from her family and, when her illness became public knowledge, a village that tormented her and made of her a pariah. Perhaps like many poor women she has sometimes been forced into prostitution, at least informally, to feed herself. Wayne considers these things when he advocates for her in the community, and the others relent because, after all, Sita’s life has not been so different from their own.

  The daylight has begun to come up now and Sita emerges from her house, dressed for the day, and begins sweeping the pounded dirt courtyard, bent over her short broom. Her dusty sarong has been properly tied, falling in a modest pleat from her waist. She wears a black blouse with panels of openwork lace, a garment that hints of the dressier ensemble it may have been part of before being sold as surplus from the sweatshops of Phnom Penh. Her high cheekbones, full mouth and high forehead give her a face that might be called sculpted rather than pretty, with a trace of knowing irony in her eyebrows. Yet I have seen her transform, and once, when she was clearly smitten by a young volunteer, she became girlish: radiant and unguarded and wonderfully soft. I could see then the beauty Sita had been and the wife and mother she might have been and the passionate woman she can be.

  She moves aside a grass mat barrier to reveal a small space adjoining her house. It is no more than eight feet on a side and forms a tiny walled garden on one side of which Sita has planted pink, orange and red zinnias. Once the garden was open, but the bony cows that are allowed to graze freely in the dry season, topping Wayne’s young mango trees and eating whatever else they can find, made a meal of Sita’s flowers. So she has enclosed it, a hidden jewel, radiant in a dusty world. It is her refuge, her pride and her testament, like her radio that blares forth its witness every morning to the world and declares before Heaven, “Yes. I am still here. Listen! I am alive!”

  2

  A Workshop for Souls

  My favorite way to arrive at Wat Opot is by tuk-tuk, an open-air surrey made of welded rebar and decorated with a bright fringed canopy. The tuk-tuk is the poor man’s chariot and can accommodate several generations of a large Cambodian family, or one Western visitor with luggage for a lengthy stay. It is towed behind a motorbike, attached by a ball hitch. On the back of the tuk-tuk is a sign welcoming “Responsible Tourists” to Cambodia and announcing that the driver is “Absolutely Against Child Sex Tourism.”

  You hail a driver outside the Golden Gate Hotel on Street 278 in Phnom Penh. He knows you by now, knows all the volunteers and knows which of the ornamental gates off Highway Number Two South to turn through to access the rough dirt road through the village of Sramouch He and on to the Wat Opot Children’s Community.

  The trip takes about an hour and a half, as the tuk-tuk is slower than most other forms of public transport, but more enjoyable than being crammed with your parcels into a crowded bus or shared minivan and even nicer than riding in the back of a private taxi, whose air conditioner and windows may not work and whose driver’s taste in music—always loud—may not agree with your own. In this surrey you can see and be seen, make funny faces at children along the road, enjoy the view of life and, if the rains come, you can let down the plastic shades and breathe the moist ozone-scented breeze that will settle the dust at last.

  Wat Opot (a wat is a Buddhist temple, also called a pagoda) is a small village sanctuary, which in 2000 donated five acres of unused land for a small project to provide palliative care to some of Cambodia’s poorest people who were dying of AIDS. The temple itself had been desecrated in the late 1970s by Khmer Rouge forces who had used it to store corpses. The land in question was known to be haunted.

  Wayne Dale Matthysse, an American who had been a medic in the Vietnam War, began the Wat Opot Project with a young Cambodian Buddhist, Vandin San. Over the years it has grown from a hospice into a vibrant community for children whose lives have been impacted by HIV/AIDS. About a third of the children are HIV positive, and all have lost at least one parent to AIDS. At any given time between fifty and eighty-five children, HIV positive and HIV negative alike, live together at Wat Opot as family, along with a number of adult patients.

  On the last day of October in 2005, three months after my sixtieth birthday, I arrived in Cambodia and took the first of many tuk-tuk rides to Wat Opot. I had imagined Cambodia to be somewhere between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The night I arrived I wrote in my journal,

  First impression of Cambodia is that it is like the other poor places—same materials—bam-bam [corrugated tin] roofs, concrete or wooden houses—and except for the temples no decoration—along the roads very few places that are new, none that are fancy. Some neighborhoods in Phnom Penh with little row houses. But overall the dust, people making small market, nothing extra. Still, a lovely sweetness and quick response to a smile. I am met by the director and cofounder of the program, Vandin San.

  Then south to Wat Opot. Arrival, meetings, many children and helpers. The kids are wonderful, beautiful—one boy runs out and hugs me. Lunch is fish from the little pond and string beans, rice, fruit, fried potatoes. Wayne gives me the tour—suggests some projects—I am still numb, exhausted—going through the motions of civility. I crash in late afternoon and wake for dinner saved for me—crash again till 4 a.m.

  Wayne tells a litany of stories, of children here who have been abandoned or exploited—sold to prostitution, strip-searched when they vi
sit family for any penny or anything worth selling. Adoptive parents who bought a boy, dropping him off at Wat Opot when they suspected AIDS. They wanted a child to raise who would care for them in their old age, not one for themselves to love and care for. Men getting drunk, raping their wives. Now the woman is pregnant, has AIDS or has a sick baby. Stories on top of stories. Women here who have lost children, now caring for the children of other women who have died. Wayne seeing God even in the least of these.

  Where does the social contract break down? Where is the heart lost? Is it poverty, or some flaw in human nature? Is this the natural state, and the rest only stories that make us play out care and kindness? Or are these perversions caused by the collapse of culture, trauma of history, poverty and fear? For my part I will need to focus on the children, in the present, on being kind and giving them whatever I am able, and not whether one or another is HIV positive. Just be with them as they are and love them as well as I can.

  When my friends heard that I would be going to Cambodia to volunteer for five months they questioned whether I might instead stay for a shorter time, “to see whether you like it.” I had never spoken with Wayne, the director, but had received a few enthusiastic emails, welcoming me in spite of my inexperience and lack of professional qualifications. Rebecca, a pediatric nurse who had been volunteering at Wat Opot for some years, had phoned me when she was in the United States. She had first met Wayne when she visited Cambodia with a Christian mission group. She could see that he needed help and had begun praying that he might find someone who could make a commitment to the project. After a while she came to realize she was that person. Rebecca left her job and grandchildren and moved to Cambodia. She had now been living at Wat Opot for about five years and told me stories of the children, how they would love me, teach me Khmer and guard me from all harm.

  Although I grew up in a Jewish family in New York City, as a child of the 1960s I had also dabbled in Eastern philosophies. I had little experience of Evangelical Christianity, and the sort of fundamentalism that was gaining political clout in the United States seemed more foreign to me than Cambodian Buddhism. I wondered how Rebecca and I would get along. Wayne, in contrast, although he came from a devout background, seemed dedicated to making Wat Opot a nonsectarian refuge, free of proselytizing. In the end I told myself that there would surely be things I wouldn’t like, and if I knew I’d be leaving soon I would never try to come to peace with them. I figured I’d better plan to stay awhile.

  Before many weeks had passed at Wat Opot, I would find that the problems were different and the joys more profound than I could have imagined. I will tell you about both in this book, and to that extent I could not help but write a book within a book, one about une femme d’un certain âge who goes off to find her soul by volunteering in the so-called Third World. It’s a familiar theme in this isolating age, and although some of my own story inevitably crept in, the book I hoped to write is not about that. It is the lives of the children I want you to know about.

  I arrived at Wat Opot at a time when antiretroviral medicines (ARVs) had only recently become available to treat the first generation of children with HIV/AIDS. In those days, Cambodia had one of the highest infection rates in Asia and many children were being born HIV positive. But things had begun to change. Médecins Sans Frontières—Doctors Without Borders—had arrived in Takeo Province in 2003, bringing the first ARV program to a simple clinic in the provincial capital, also called Takeo. It’s a small city, about an hour south of Wat Opot, with a current population of approximately 39,000 people. Very sick children who formerly would have perished in the AIDS epidemic were for the first time on medication, and they were clearly beginning to grow stronger. The problem now was how to nurture these traumatized children who had watched their parents and friends sicken and die, who might themselves have been close to death. How to convince them that with care they might grow up, go to school, live near-normal lives? This was a time when widespread attention turned to the epidemic in the developing world, before the economic downturn and relentless military spending spilled the seed of the largest donor nations, a time before people with AIDS would once again begin leaving the hospitals to die at home because there were no services or medicines for them. This was a hopeful time.

  And I would like you to see how a good man with fifty dollars in his pocket and very little backing walks into the chaos of a post-apocalyptic country and wrests from the devastation a small island of compassion and comity. Those of us who yearn to “do something” in the world need such models, need to study real people who are not stopped cold by a lack of funds or support from international institutions or by the sheer enormity of the problem, people who are far from perfect but who can live in the reality of the moment and perceive what is needed and how to meet those needs with the materials at hand.

  Wayne does not regard the Wat Opot community as existing only for the benefit of the children, although that is assuredly its primary purpose. Rather, he opens the gates to anyone on a journey who stumbles upon this place and feels called to linger with the children. Asked one afternoon whether there is any thread that unites the volunteers who have passed through Wat Opot, Wayne replied simply, “Loneliness and the need for touch.” Even if people show up not realizing what is lacking in their lives, when the first child comes to hug them something changes, opening them in a way they likely could not have named before, answering a hunger that many of us in the West do not even know we have. Still, for all our hungers and traumas and our need to love and be loved, our compulsion to see ourselves as kind and useful in the world, maybe in the end we are only another passing caravan, a footnote in a long history. For us it is a brief visit, and then we leave and again we are alone. We come and go. But the children, in a sense, are eternal.

  What Wayne did not mention on that occasion was the opening of the heart to compassion, which happens to many people who visit. After I had finished writing the first chapter of this book, I sent it to Andrew, a young Australian volunteer on whom Sita had developed a crush. Sita used to come to Andrew’s room late at night and he would have to ask her to leave—very politely and kindly, because he was a sweet man—but it was difficult for him. And he would complain to me that she was putting him in the painful position of having to reject her night after night. But after he read the story he told me it helped him to appreciate and love Sita. This made me realize the power stories can have to transform the way people feel and love. I began to understand that Wat Opot was—is—a workshop for souls.

  3

  Family Pictures

  Mister Sampeah [sam-PEE-ah], the first child to greet me when I arrived at Wat Opot, was all elbows and knees, mischievous eyes and a wide toothless grin. There I stood, apprehensive and exhausted after a thirty-hour flight, and it was Sampeah who ran out from a huddle of momentarily shy children to throw his arms around my knees. I felt my heart burst open, and from then on nothing was ever the same.

  Sampeah’s story is a mystery. Wayne guesses he was about four years old when he came to live at Wat Opot. Late one night an ambulance pulled into the clinic to drop off a woman patient. She had been beaten unconscious and her wrists showed rope marks where they had been bound together. The ambulance attendants were riding in the front seat, and when they opened the back door out jumped a skinny little boy with no front teeth. No one had seen him climb in and hide behind his mother’s stretcher. Before Wayne could ask any questions the ambulance and its attendants disappeared into the darkness. Wayne wondered whether Sampeah had lost his teeth defending his mother from her attackers, but like many questions about Sampeah this one will never be answered. His mother died that night without ever having regained consciousness.

  No one knew where Sampeah came from or whether he had family who might have been looking for him, but one day, when he was playing with the other children, one of the Khmer staff overheard him say the name of a village. Wayne asked him whether this was his home, and would he perhaps like to visit to se
e whether they could find his family. Sampeah’s reply was a stifled “No!” and a face so fraught with anxiety that Wayne would never ask him again.

  After dinner my first night I walked with Wayne to the crematorium for the brief memorial service that is held there each evening. The children chant a prayer invoking the name of the Buddha and sing a Christian hymn of thanks for the lives of their loved ones.

  An unruly group of kids fell in behind us on the dirt path, calling out, “Meestah Wayne go pa cha!” They shouted and sang and jostled each other, hanging in clusters from our arms and hands. I wished I had more fingers.

  The crematorium—pa cha in Khmer—stands on the far eastern edge of Wat Opot’s slender strip of land. It is an austere white structure, square, with seven levels tapering toward a pointed top. Chimneys in the upper levels allow the smoke of burning bodies to rise and blossom, pure white against a blue blue sky.

  On the western face of the pa cha are three doors. The door on the left opens to a small chapel with a simple white sarcophagus where the dead can rest until family and monks arrive for the funeral. A painting on the wall shows a beam of light ascending from the ocean to the clouds. In the center, behind steel doors, is the furnace itself. As a body is consumed by flames, bones and ashes sift down through a grate onto a ragged sheet of corrugated tin and are collected through a low door on the rear of the building.

  To the right of the furnace is a tiny chapel called the family room. Inside, we crowded onto floor mats across from a wall of pictures of parents and friends who had perished of AIDS. On that first night, Wayne explained that after each cremation the children help to wash and select the bones for the little brass urns that sit in a glass case underneath the photographs. Each urn is carefully tied with a web of string and bears a tag with a name and a tiny portrait.