In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  There is no gate on the south side of the campus, which backs onto the open field that stretches all the way to Phnom Chisor. (Phnom means mountain or hill in Khmer.) A barbed wire fence strung between cement posts seems to do the job. It also makes a dandy clothesline; the barbs take the place of clothespins and keep the laundry from blowing away. This explains the odd pattern of tiny holes in certain garments at Wat Opot.

  Finally, behind the crematorium on the east end of the campus and secured by a rusty lock and chain stands yet another wrought iron gate. But next to that a little stile, wide open, allows unhindered passage for children and cows alike. Along this side of the campus runs the road that defines the village, where we took our early-morning walks.

  When Wayne and Vandin were first searching for land, the plot of scrub that would become the Wat Opot Children’s Community was not what they had in mind. They had visited a number of villages, hoping one of them would donate land for the project, but local people feared this terrible new plague whose cause they did not understand.

  Finally, the head monk of Wat Opot offered Wayne and Vandin a plot of unimproved land that local people believed was haunted by ghosts. The temple grounds formed a natural barrier between the project and the village. On the far side lay only open fields. This desolate setting offered a quiet, discreet place for people with AIDS to live and die, out of sight of the neighbors.

  In the early days, while the clinic was being built, Wayne came down from Phnom Penh every week to take care of patients. The village and wat were in sad condition after the war years. The temple itself stood open to the weather and to wandering animals; worse, its statues and murals had been desecrated. Wayne hoped that the improvements he and Vandin were making to the land might inspire and encourage the monks and villagers and that the new clinic and hospice might benefit this poor rural community. After the partners filled the land, after they built a clinic, planted orchards and constructed a crematorium, the government improved the local road and people began fixing up their houses. Over time the monks installed a new tile roof on the temple. They hired a local artist to restore the murals that show the life of the Buddha. The artist also regilded the statues and repainted the Buddha’s compassionate smile. Today there are gardens and reflecting pools, and the temple is once again an important part of the community.

  In the beginning, the people of this tiny village told Vandin they had never heard of AIDS. That sad knowledge would come soon enough, when their neighbors began to sicken and die. By the time I arrived in 2005, fear of AIDS had begun to create barriers between the villagers and Wat Opot in spite of educational outreach by the monks and Home Care staff. Sometimes when I took the children to the local market, I would see their faces suddenly darken, their eyes drop. I could not persuade them to tell me what shadow had passed over them. Then I would become aware of a knot of people nearby and overhear them whisper the word “Opot.” It would take time to change their attitudes, to open the many gates between the village and Wat Opot, and it would happen in unexpected ways.

  Papa Steve the Giant Tasmanian was an expansive, florid man with a contagious smile, wild white hair and startlingly black eyebrows that danced like a pair of unruly toupees over his bright blue eyes. To the children he was a human jungle gym. “Tomaaaaah!” they’d say. Huge! “Same-same Meestah Wayne.” They giggled and poked, fascinated by his considerable belly. Steve hugged and teased and windmilled the big boys over his shoulder. Having few healthy men in their lives, the children thrived on his exuberance. And the little ones delighted in the shiver of fear they felt when the giant hurled them high into the air and then feigned barely catching them in his huge safe hands. But for all his buoyance, Papa Steve would also dive into intense private conversations with troubled children, dialogues that struck me as mystically empathic and reassuring, in spite of their lack of a shared language.

  I had barely settled in for my first winter at Wat Opot when Steve showed up. A teacher, businessman and computer consultant, this fifty-year-old Australian had also worked in community development. He had briefly volunteered at Wat Opot the year before, and now he was back for a longer stay. We became friends at once and went walking together most mornings. He would scratch at my door before cockcrow and we would set out by starlight, feeling our way along the rutted road. Steve would call out his hearty “G’day!” and the villagers would respond drowsily—and, truth be told, a little grumpily—their voices hoarse from sleep and the smoke of early-morning fires.

  Steve had a cell phone camera, and once daylight had come he would snap pictures of people we met along the way, especially the children. The camera was small enough not to be intimidating, and it had a screen so the children could look at themselves. They were enchanted. Steve took hundreds of pictures.

  On our next trip to Phnom Penh Steve had lots of the best photos printed and he passed them out to the village children. By watching the flow of pictures we began to discern who was related to whom in this seemingly random mass of children and grown-ups.

  After a few weeks, we found that the villagers were dressing their children up in the dark and waiting with them by the side of the road at dawn so Steve could stop and take more formal pictures. Children who would normally swarm the camera for a chance to be photographed stood awkwardly in their best clothes, clutching some prop appropriate to a studio portrait—a parasol, or a fancy hat—and their parents would slick their hair down and poke at them and pull their shoulders back and plaster their hands to their sides, creating that most unfortunate of images, the static, posed, little soldier-child. In a spirit of conspiracy with each kid, Steve obliged by taking the portraits the parents wanted, and then snapped happily away as the tiny victim escaped captivity and began behaving like a child again.

  More trips to Phnom Penh. More little prints given away.

  Several venerable yei, village grandmothers, approached Steve to make portraits of them. They asked for larger prints so their families would have something to remember them by after they died.

  People began inviting us into their courtyards, offering us a cup of water or a ripe mango. After a while they brought out sick children and older relatives whose faces were new to us, and began asking us for medical advice. Since we were foreigners from Wat Opot they assumed we were doctors, but of course we had no medical advice to give, encouraging them instead to come to the clinic with their questions. One little baby looked so puny we urged his mother to bring him to Wat Opot right away. Another woman seemed too ill to move, and we arranged for the Home Care nurse to visit her in the village. Steve sent one girl with scoliosis to a clinic in Phnom Penh, giving the child’s grandmother from his own pocket the five dollars she needed for travel and clinic fees—for a rural worker almost a week’s wages. The next time we saw the girl with the curved spine she was wearing a brace.

  People began inviting us to weddings and memorial celebrations. Steve took more photographs and gave away more prints.

  More people began to bring their injuries, illnesses and health care questions to Wat Opot. There were no crowds or lines to stand in, it was nothing dramatic, but these were people who until then had not thought to come to Wat Opot for help or, if they had, would have been too frightened of catching AIDS to have passed through any of our many gates. Their newfound trust marked a beginning, and I marveled at how naturally the shift in attitudes had progressed, from a few roadside snapshots to the opening of the gates, and a little less fear.

  Wayne and Vandin envisioned Wat Opot as an outpatient clinic for people infected with HIV/AIDS and, before antiretroviral drugs became available in Cambodia, a hospice with a dozen beds for the dying. In the first few years more than three hundred patients—adults and children and little babies—had died of AIDS there and were cremated with dignity in the pa cha. This included the parents of some of the children who now live at Wat Opot, children who are growing up taking profoundly powerful medicines that came too late for their parents, but that may offer them near-norm
al lives. To all appearances they are healthy, save for the fact that they must endure side effects from the medication, suffer recurring opportunistic infections and grow up wondering in every new social situation how being HIV positive will impact their lives.

  Wayne and Vandin began to be concerned for the future prospects of this first generation of children to grow up HIV positive. As more of the kids survived, the focus of the project began to change—from tending to the dying to preparing the children to live in the rest of the world, outside Wat Opot. For much of their education the Wat Opot children would be going to the local schools, sitting next to kids from the village whose parents might worry about their own children catching AIDS.

  Wayne hired local teachers to work with the smallest school-age children and also to offer classes especially for older kids who had not attended school before. These kids would otherwise have had to start in the village school at a first-grade level, and Wayne recognized that having to sit on tiny chairs among the littlest kids would be mortifying.

  Education in rural Cambodia is just beginning to recover from the dystopian fantasies of the Khmer Rouge years in the late 1970s, when intellectuals were routinely murdered, and being able to read, or simply wearing eyeglasses, could cost you your life. An expatriate librarian in Phnom Penh told me that when she arrived in Cambodia some years before, not a single book remained in the university library. The Khmer Rouge had burned everything. So village children are being taught by a first generation of mostly young, mostly rural teachers, some of whom are educationally only a few years ahead of the children they are teaching. These teachers are underpaid, and sometimes their paychecks are late or do not come at all, so they have to find outside work, often during school hours. Wat Opot children will go off to school in the morning only to return a few minutes later, complaining, “Teacher not come today.”

  Our own Wat Opot teachers hold classes every day after lunch to supplement the government education, but some days this is all the schooling the children receive. When the village teachers do come to school, classes are large and noisy and the children mostly learn by recitation and rote. And because their wages are low, teachers all over Cambodia, at every level of education, expect bribes from their students for grades and permission to graduate—a disaster for the many impoverished students. As Wayne observed, “The only thing worse than ignoring children with physical and mental disabilities is to give them a second chance at living but no opportunity to make a life for themselves.”

  In 2007, Mary Dunbar, a good friend of Wayne’s and of Wat Opot who has worked in Cambodia for many years, approached Wayne with the notion of starting an art program for the children. She knew a talented young Khmer artist named Rith Houeth, who had illustrated a number of pamphlets and posters for NGOs. If they could raise money for supplies and a small stipend, he would be willing to come down from Phnom Penh once a week and hold art classes for our kids. The Schmitz-Hille Foundation in Germany agreed to fund the program for an initial two years. Because this generously sponsored art program has been so fruitful, the foundation has continued to support the project to this day. Recently they donated money for full scholarships for three promising students to study art and architecture at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh.

  During my first season at Wat Opot I brought paper and supplies for the children and they spent many happy hours drawing, so I knew they had lots of creative energy. But under Mr. Houeth’s instruction their work was transformed. He taught them discipline and perseverance and close observation. They learned how to use colored pencils and oils and watercolors. Now, instead of whipping through one sheet of paper after another, they would work for hours on a single painting, and over time their art became much more developed and refined, beautiful and personal.

  As Mary Dunbar and Wayne originally intended, the art program is another way for the children of Wat Opot and the village children to become comfortable with each other. Working together, Mr. Houeth’s students have painted murals on the walls of the new schoolhouse at Wat Opot. One panel shows a family of elephants, frolicking and playing and trumpeting with joy.

  Wayne is surprised by how successfully the mural project has helped open up the relationship between the Wat Opot community and the villagers. Monks bring visitors to see the mural, and the village children proudly escort their parents through the gates to see their work.

  I was particularly moved by comments of children from the village who came to Wat Opot to help paint the mural. One little girl named Poilin, age thirteen, when asked whether she had any fear of working alongside children infected with HIV/AIDS, replied simply, “There was no problem. We achieved everything together.”

  8

  Ants-in-a-Line Village

  Sramouch He is one of several small villages on either side of the dirt road that runs between National Highway Number Two and Wat Opot. Its name translates as “Ants’ Parade,” or “Ants-in-a-Line Village,” due to the abundance of huge clay ant hills that people found when they came to settle here.

  Like the ants, the children of Wat Opot have put the finely digested clay of the ant hills to good use. (The insect workers at their feet do literally ingest, digest and excrete the soil, transforming the yellowish-white earth to a sticky clay.) The children have recently begun harvesting the ants’ clay to make sculptures. They started with masks and figures and portraits of the other children, but more often they are moved to sculpt the figure of a child held in its mother’s arms.

  On either side of Wat Opot, villages line the road, but all of them look more or less the same and I could never quite tell where one village ended and another began. Houses along the road are mostly traditional wooden structures. A few are brick or cinder block with ornamental iron window grates. The downstairs is wide open, without walls, and the single upper story, which rests on stilts and is accessed by a simple wooden ladder, forms both an enclosed living quarters and a ceiling and sunshade for the lower story. A floor made of widely spaced boards allows air from below to circulate and cool the upstairs room, but it is on the ground floor where the family spends most of its time, at least in the dry season.

  Most houses are simply built, with little ornamentation. Now and then the whole structure, or perhaps merely a window frame or banister, is painted with a color where plain wood might do. On a rough wooden door, a painting of the sun rising over a shining sea, two beams of light ascending to heaven to become a cross, marks the home of a lay pastor.

  Exterior walls may be of wood, tin or woven mats; wooden house posts two feet off the ground rest on concrete piers to keep them out of the rainy season floods. The roofs are corrugated metal, or new or old thatch. Birds, finding there a comfortable home with all the nesting material they could wish for, flutter in and out all day long, chattering and carrying food to their young.

  A few prosperous families have houses with shingled or tiled roofs, shutters of a faded blue against weathered wooden walls, concrete stairs and perhaps carved and painted bargeboards. Sometimes there are cast concrete roof ornaments of the Wheel of Dharma, or even auspicious trumpeting elephant finials such as one finds on the roofs of temples.

  By contrast, a poor family’s home might be a casual arrangement of lean-tos and roof lines—angles and materials scrounged from everywhere: woven palm fronds, corrugated tin, plastic tarps patched into place with random battens and, when there is nothing else, cardboard from flattened paper boxes.

  Until recently, electrical power lines stopped at the main highway and villagers made do with car batteries to power a single lightbulb or, now and then, a small television. Every morning a man would come by with a cart, pick up spent batteries, recharge them with a generator and drop them off at the front door, much like an old-fashioned milkman.

  Tall trees shade the road and produce edible fruit in season. Loaded carts with upward-sweeping prows groan by, pulled by white bullocks with massive humps and thick, curving horns. Their heavy heads sway back and forth to the
hollow tunk of cow-bone bells. A young girl steps daintily down a flight of stairs, holding up her flowered sarong. Her mother appears from behind the house, upon her head a bundle of firewood silhouetted against the rising sun. Its branches glow like antlers in velvet.

  In the outdoor living area beneath the raised house, all of a family’s material life is on display: rusty biscuit tins, cooking pots, calendars saved for their glimpse of the exotic (a fast car, a snowy landscape), hens, beds of slatted bamboo, hammocks, sandals, a sneaker missing its mate, buckets crowded with live catfish, plastic sleeping mats, bags of rice, plates of food. Stretched between beams are various overhead lines of thick or thin rope from which are suspended laundry, tarps, patched quilts hung as curtains against the sun. Tacked to one of the posts, a curling picture of a fat baby smiles at an unseen parent. Photographs and political broadsides: the king and his father, the prime minister and his wife, a yellow Corvette parked in front of a European palazzo, Easter bunnies.

  A boy stands on tiptoe to scoop water from a burnished concrete jar. With one cupped hand he parts a froth of buoyant green algae. Rainwater, channeled from the roof during the downpours, is saved in a row of lidded jars. In the long dry season, when rivers and ponds turn to dust, this may be the family’s sole source of drinking water.

  Animals are everywhere. Next to a fence of lashed bamboo and brambles, a squirming litter of piglets lies nursing. As I pass by, a man waves to me excitedly. His cow has just given birth. She is held steady by wide bands to the overhead beams of the upper story of the house. Proudly he shows me the neat stitching of the episiotomy he performed on the mother. The calf is already nursing. In the front yard the man’s son scrubs the flanks of an enormous white bull, like a proud American kid from the 1950s polishing his prize Chevy.