by Gail Gutradt
Behind the pa cha is a small memorial stupa called the chaet dai. It is painted the saffron of monks’ robes, brilliantly brushed over with gold paint. Any ashes that are not put into urns are added to the remains of hundreds of other souls in this communal crypt.
The children love to climb on the chaet dai, and even mourners at a funeral do not mind their noisy play. People say that it comforts the spirits of the dead to hear the children’s laughter.
During the service my new friend Mister Sampeah snuggled close to me. Several other children climbed in and out of my lap, their hair smelling of the incense we had just offered to the souls of the dead. Afterward, Sampeah took his mother’s urn from the glass case. With both hands he held it out so I could see her picture and said simply, “Mama.” He knew just where to find her. He could visit her and hold her and introduce her to his new friend, and it comforted him.
A year later, when I returned to Wat Opot, I watched as Sampeah introduced his mother to another new volunteer. I had my camera with me that night and asked him whether I might take his picture. The memory of that first evening had remained vivid in my mind, but there had never been a moment when it seemed anything but greedy to ask him to pose with the urn. He was delighted, and I was able to give him a large print of himself holding his mother’s ashes. You can see her face on the tag tied with string to the lid. Sampeah is smiling his vast, guileless smile. His second teeth are starting to grow in.
Mister Veha and his little sister Miss Kolab, whose mother had died earlier that week, were there that day and asked me to take a photo for them as well. So Veha fetched their mother’s photograph down from the wall and they sat together on the cool tiles outside the crematorium. Veha put his hand under Kolab’s chin and lifted her head to pose her just so.
For Sampeah and Veha, and for Kolab, who is too young to remember, these photographs of themselves with their mothers are the only ones they will ever have.
Two years later, in an elementary school in Northeast Harbor, Maine, I was talking with a group of fifth graders about the children of Wat Opot. Unlike most adult audiences, who want to know whether I had a bathroom or bottled water, or what kind of camera I use, or where the funding comes from, these kids identified powerfully with the children in the photographs, and their questions were different: “You say these kids are poor. How come they don’t look poor?” and “If they know they are going to die, how come they look so happy?”
I was touched—awestruck really—at how their questions seemed to find the heart of the matter.
4
Exit, with Cookie
Miss Chan Tevy [chan teh-VEE] stands in the open doorway, her head held a little to one side. She walks toward me smiling, part eight-year-old, part diva, and altogether winning. She thrusts out an open palm and demands, “Saboo!” It is the eighth time tonight. “I gave you shampoo,” I tell her. “I gave you shampoo for tonight and shampoo for tomorrow and shampoo for next week. What do you do with it all?” She considers this question seriously for a moment. She is wearing a white T-shirt with the word “ANGEL” in rhinestone studs. Then she tips her head to the other side, once again puts out her hand, smiles her most appealing smile, and says, “Cookie!”
I bring the biscuit tin from my room and give her one of the big ones with the chalky strawberry filling. She scowls. “Bpee!” she insists. “Two!”
It’s a warm evening and the air feels perfect after a hot day. There’s still a soft glow in the sky and we are waiting for Mr. Sary to fire up the generator. This is my favorite time of day, when everybody gathers after dinner just to play and touch and be together.
Wayne and I sit on the bench in the yard, and the kids pile on. Everybody wants to cuddle. Miss Srey Mao, who is four years old, climbs up on Wayne’s knee and busies herself plucking hairs from his arm. Little Socheat leans back and relaxes into Wayne’s lap. Wayne tickles him and he doubles over, laughing. Mister Poi runs up and blows on the whistle he has made, a blade of grass held between his thumbs. The sound is wispy and Poi looks disappointed, so Wayne shows him how to adjust the grass until it makes a satisfying squeak. Mister Vantha plucks a fresh blade of grass and the two boys run off together, chirping happily in the darkness. Mister Kosal muscles Socheat out of the way, scrambles up Wayne’s outstretched legs and slides giddily down again. Socheat runs off to play with Miss Malis, who grabs his hands and swings him round and round in the air.
Pesei [pe-SIGH] snuggles up to me. He has just tucked a sprig of bright orange bougainvillea behind each of Baby Mai’s ears. Baby Mai is beaming, basking in the attention. A few inches away, not quite touching anyone, sits Pesei’s sister, Miss Jorani. Needy but aloof, she is very much the young teenager. Other kids jump rope and play volleyball. Mister Ratha, somewhere between twelve and sixteen, strikes a cool pose on a big red motorcycle. Little kids play and squabble and cry and come for comfort and run back out to play again. Older boys turn cartwheels. Bicycles careen by in the dark. It is on evenings like this, all of us together at the end of the day, that Wat Opot feels most like a family.
The generator coughs and the lights splutter on. Wayne peels the children from his lap and walks slowly toward the office to prepare for the evening clinic. Miss Srey Mom and Miss Ve Not have strung a piece of green twine across the path between the bougainvillea tree and the fence. Ve Not is five years old, tiny, and the string is just high enough that she must stand on tiptoe to reach it. The little girls are having fun pinching blossoms from the flowering trees and balancing them over the green string to make a flower garland. A simple and charming game. They hold the flowers daintily between thumbs and index fingers. The blooms tip back and forth in the breeze like bells, or miniature Chinese lanterns. Lavender, scarlet, white.
I wander over to admire their work.
Miss Chan Tevy drops her jump rope and runs over to play with Miss Srey Mom. They laugh together. Yet out of the corner of my eye I detect an odd movement, something not quite natural. It is only for a moment, a tiny jerking of Chan Tevy’s body; she goes on chattering as if nothing has happened. Then it happens again. A little spasm. She does not seem to notice, but I watch carefully as she adds a hot pink flower to Srey Mom’s garland. Over the next few minutes the spasm repeats several times. Thoughts race through my mind: seizures? I have heard that over time AIDS can attack the brain—but…
“Chan Tevy?”
I hear alarm in my voice. I hadn’t meant it to be there. She looks straight at me, but her eyes don’t seem to focus, and this time her spasm is stronger, more dramatic. I gather her up and carry her into the clinic. She is light like a baby bird and she feels so vulnerable, shuddering in my arms.
“Wayne! Something’s happening with Chan Tevy.”
I set her down and she drops to the floor and begins to convulse, arms and legs jerking wildly, eyes rolled back.
Wayne glances up from his computer and goes on typing.
“Wayne!”
“She’s faking it,” he says, trying hard not to grin. “That one gets a reaction every time. Run along, Sarah Bernhardt.”
Miss Chan Tevy allows herself a quick, satisfied glance at me and disappears out the door. I sink onto a stool, exhausted.
It’s time for their meds. The children gather outside the clinic doorway. Serain urges them into something resembling a line, little ones in front. She monitors the doorway, directing the children with a bamboo rod, but her ferocity is all show. Along with Wayne and Rebecca, Serain is the backbone of Wat Opot. Every morning she arrives on her moto—gold jewelry and platform shoes, her hair just so, sometimes dyed black, sometimes red. Washerwoman, night nurse, tender of the dying, cleaner of god-awful messes, she is cheerful, industrious and, in my mind, superhuman. When there is nothing more pressing she collects old candle ends, softens them on a hot stone bench in the sun, and kneads and rerolls the wax to make new candles. Or she manicures the edges of the lawn with tiny scissors. She takes care of me like a mother and I love her. She is also fiercely prote
ctive of Wayne and brings him enormous bedtime bowls of sesame noodles. He groans loudly that she is trying to kill him, but he never refuses.
Every day Serain studies English from a tattered phrase book. “Madame, speak English?” she asks me. We each call the other “Madame.” She points to an arcane circumlocution in this antique primer and together we pronounce a phrase, something on the order of “When does the parade of the matadors commence?” Then she will try to teach me something in Khmer, which always ends with the children laughing uncontrollably as Serain struggles to keep a straight face. I am convinced she keeps changing the pronunciation. The sessions end when she pats me on the cheek affectionately and says, “Madame speak Khmer very good!” Her English never seems to improve—but then neither does my Khmer.
One by one the children come into the office to take their medicines, the youngest first, Little Run, with his astonished eyes and enormous, translucent ears. As usual his nose is running. He is carrying a liter water bottle that seems much too big for him and he is wearing only a faded T-shirt that covers him to his knees. He is four, but already he can find his pills in the basket marked with his name. Mr. Sary checks the pillbox to make sure Run is taking the right dose, and then Run swallows his medicine, drinking deeply from his bottle. Mr. Sary gives him a cookie, and he runs off to play. I watch Run go through this procedure, morning and night every day, and each time I have the same thought: “He is so small.”
Large and small they come, first the children infected with HIV, who must take their medicines punctually, twice every day, lest the virus develop resistance. All of them take pills except Mister Vibol, who is nine years old. Before he came to Wat Opot he was living with his grandparents in the village. To these elderly farmers, as to many villagers, HIV was a death sentence, so they didn’t send the boy to school or give him his medicines regularly. Vibol developed resistance to the first-line antiretroviral drugs, and now he must take the second-line medication, a foul-tasting liquid that must be stored on ice.
He takes a deep breath. Mr. Sary reaches across the desk with a fat plastic syringe and squirts a measure of medicine into his mouth. Vibol takes a big gulp of water. He is trying not to gag. Wayne is still unsure how he is responding to these new drugs—so many skin infections, such frequent fevers too. We just can’t know how much organ damage he has sustained, and Wayne worries about him, worries whether he will even survive. Sometimes Vibol seems withdrawn and frail and comes by for a moment just to rest with my arm around him, or he sits alone, out by the crematorium, softly playing his harmonica. But when he is well he is all boy, joyous and gangly, running with the others like a yearling colt. So for now all we can do is hope, and send him to school, and love him.
He painted his mother bathing him “because she loves me very much.” The young artist passed away not long after painting this picture.
After the clinic, after the generator has stopped grinding and the children have settled down and the world is quiet again, Wayne and I sit in the darkened office, talking into the night with only a small candle for light. He begins to reflect on Miss Chan Tevy, and how he and Rebecca first discovered her at her aunt and uncle’s house in a nearby village. Chan Tevy was the first child to live at Wat Opot.
“She was stitched into a hammock on the front porch. She was ill, only skin and bones. The aunt had put her there so that she could go out into the field to plant rice.”
Seeing my expression change, he adds, “I know it sounds like abuse, but really it isn’t. It’s a necessity here. Chan Tevy lived with her uncle and aunt until she was two years old, and though we had no ARVs in those days she responded well to the vitamins and antibiotics we brought for her. Then testing became available and we had them bring her into the clinic, and when she turned up positive for HIV the uncle said he didn’t want her in his house anymore. They had an argument right here in the office, but her aunt took her home anyway. About three weeks later the aunt brought her back. She said her husband had not come home and would not give her money for food until Chan Tevy was out of the house. Now and then she’ll visit the aunt and uncle, but she’s been living here ever since.
“Rebecca spent more time with her than with the other kids, and I believe much of Chan Tevy’s acting ability comes as a result of her learning to manipulate Rebecca. I recall one time when Rebecca was going to give her a cookie but pulled it away just as Chan Tevy reached for it. This continued a couple of times. Finally, Rebecca gave her the cookie. Chan Tevy took it and then, looking straight at Rebecca, she threw it down on the ground. I don’t think their relationship ever really developed beyond that point.”
Miss Chan Tevy stands in the doorway to my room, her head a little to one side.
“Cookie!” she says.
“Bpee?” I reply. “Two?”
For a split second she looks surprised. Then she grins and holds out both hands. “Bai!” “Three!”
Now I’m grinning too. “Chan Tevy, you know I’m really happy to see you. Did you come to give me a hug?”
She climbs into my lap and throws her arms around my neck. We sit together for a little while, both of us, I imagine, wanting nothing in the world so much as this moment.
Then she runs off, a cookie in each hand.
5
Miss Srey Mom: Those We Are Given to Love
Miss Srey Mom was new to Wat Opot, and she stood in the twilight of her first evening with the children playing games all around her, knowing no one, seeing no one. She was only six years old, and alone. Behind her on the white stucco wall was a giant red AIDS ribbon and the words
I approached her, put my hand gently on her shoulder, but she had turned deep inside. Blinded and deafened by grief she did not respond, though I thought I felt her body shudder when I touched her.
“I need to wait,” I thought.
The car brought her and the car left without her. Two older sisters were in the car. Srey Mom’s parents had both died of AIDS, and her sisters were supposed to take care of her. But they were pretty and young, and anxious to marry. In Cambodia the quality of a woman’s life is still largely determined by the man she marries, and it was not long before these young women realized that a promising young man, a good prospect, would have no interest in marrying a woman with a sickly young sister infected with AIDS. So they brought Srey Mom to Wat Opot.
Her sisters gave Wayne a plastic hamper with hair ribbons and bright new clothes. Srey Mom refused to look at them or say goodbye when they left. She just stood there, very still and very small. But after the car drove through the gate and down the road past the Buddhist temple, after it disappeared down the village road toward the highway, Srey Mom began to cry. She cried for hours, cried for her mother, her father and for everything that had been lost and taken from her. She was perhaps too young to know the words for what she was feeling. She just cried.
I had only been at Wat Opot a few weeks myself when Srey Mom arrived. She was the first new child to come while I was there. I was still adjusting to the loud all-night music from the wat that lacerated my sleep, and to the constant demands of so many children with unfamiliar Khmer names. It would take me months to learn their stories, who was related to whom, which adult was responsible for which child. And that was just the beginning, the bare facts, the illusion of knowing. To begin to know these children, to meet them as people, would take much longer. In the dance of personalities there are some I will never know.
Perhaps because I was new myself I understood a little of how overwhelming it can be for a child to arrive at Wat Opot, this trauma heaped on top of all the other abandonment, the death of their parents and loss upon loss of anything familiar or loving in their lives. So I made a special effort to befriend the new ones, to sit with them on their first evenings, to check in with them until they made friends and began to fit in. Like them, I felt far from home. I too needed to be close to someone. And as my heart began to open, I started to contemplate what it is to love a child who might die.
&nbs
p; A few evenings later, I was sitting with the women and children in the dormitory watching Korean soap operas on television. It’s a quiet time of settling in for bed before the generator goes off. The villain made his entrance, greeted by a chorus from the children.
“Ot la-or!”
“Baaaad!”
Over in the far end of the room Miss Srey Mom was getting ready for bed. Like all the kids, she took out her own pajamas, showered by herself, combed her own hair. She went about this quietly, competently. In a normal life a mother would be doing all these things for her, and she would not be going to bed surrounded by strangers, but held warm and safe in the arms of a loving family.
She stood on tiptoes on her sleeping mat and pulled down the mosquito net and lay down, but after a while she slipped out of bed and walked over to where I was sitting. She looked up at me for a moment, and I smiled and said, “Hi, Srey Mom.” Then she found her way into my lap, wrapped her arms tightly round my neck and clung to me just like that, slipping in and out of sleep. Her hair was still damp from her shower and she smelled sweet and clean in her new pajamas.
Over the next few days, Srey Mom was my shadow. She needed to play or be held endlessly. When another child tried to climb into my lap she fought them off. “I have two knees,” I would laugh, “and lots of love.” But she needed all I had, both arms, both knees, all my love.