In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  “When I opened Wat Opot I had exactly fifty dollars in my pocket, and there was nothing here. Nothing. No buildings, no clinic, no fishponds. Just some rice fields that everybody thought were haunted. Now, seven years later, look around you. All these children, the hospice, the dormitories, the school and all the programs we’ve had, and the food we’ve eaten for seven years, and these mango trees. And you know what? I still only have fifty dollars in my pocket. You already speak English better than many of the people working for NGOs in Phnom Penh. You are smart and good-looking. You will have no problem finding work. You could walk in and get a job right now, and with a few years more English you’ll be even better. You have the tools to do this now. You don’t have to worry about who will help you. Just study hard, and trust, and don’t worry about the money. It’s not about money, I promise you. Work hard, and you will be given what you need.”

  In less than a week, events are to prove Wayne right.

  The story begins with the arrival of a delightful German artist named Alfred Banze. Alfred has been touring the world with a multimedia art program called the Banyan Project, demonstrating the sacred interconnectedness of people, community and nature in lands where banyan trees grow. He spends a few days with children in each country in a free-form mix of creative activities, leading them in painting, drawing, dance and performance. The children’s paintings are cut into abstract shapes and spliced into strings of paintings by children in other countries, mimicking the aerial roots of the banyan tree. Alfred carries these strings, some of them twenty or thirty feet long, wadded into a little backpack, and he extracts them with a flourish, as in some wonderful magic trick performed with vivid scarves floating in air. We watch, mesmerized.

  Traveling with Alfred is a young Norwegian filmmaker. He has come along to document Alfred’s playful explorations with the children. I tell him about Pesei, and ask whether he could use an assistant, someone to help carry his gear in exchange for a few tips on filmmaking. He can do better than that, he tells me. He has an extra video camera, and he will gladly teach Pesei to use it. They will film the workshop together.

  I corral Pesei and tell him about the plan. He is excited but scared. He has been playing tag with the little kids and is covered with dust. I suggest he wash his face and put on a clean shirt.

  “You are going to your first job,” I tell him.

  That afternoon the children gather with Alfred in the dining room for the first day’s workshop. The filmmaker is getting his gear together, but Pesei is playing with the little kids again.

  I fetch him aside and tell him, “This is not a time for play. This is the time to learn.” He looks at his feet.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he says. I realize how intimidated even the most confident of our children become when faced with strangers from the world outside Wat Opot.

  “Come on,” I say. “I’ll introduce you.”

  By afternoon, Pesei is operating the camera without supervision. And by the end of the third day he has directed and shot his first film, a story about a boy growing up in a village in Cambodia whose parents are dying of AIDS. Children in the village tease this boy; he is very lonely. The children of Wat Opot are the actors. For many of them it is their story, too.

  As the workshop ends and the visitors are packing their car to leave, Pesei hangs back.

  “Maybe you should thank your teacher before he goes,” I suggest.

  He looks confused. I explain to him that when someone does something special for you, it makes them feel good if you thank them. It’s a gift you can give them. And perhaps they will remember you in a nice way.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  I suggest some phrases, and he asks me to write them down so he can practice them. We role-play for a few minutes, and then he walks to the car to say goodbye. I watch him chatting comfortably with the young filmmaker.

  All at once I notice I am smiling. I feel very much like a parent.

  We who grow up with attentive and sensible parents take the most basic skills of living for granted. If you walk down the road in any village in Cambodia, a mother carrying her infant will place the baby’s palms together to greet you properly as you pass. When Miss Punlok’s mother, Vanny, finally died in the hospice, Thida, one of our mothers at Wat Opot, looked after Punlok at the cremation. I watched as she held the little girl on her lap and, reaching around her from behind, gently held Punlok’s palms together and showed her how to offer incense to honor her mother. Thida’s eyes were soft and sad. She has four children. Perhaps she was wondering who will show her youngest son what to do at her own funeral.

  11

  Chaos Theory Dominoes

  We are all on the porch outside the office. I have brought several large sets of dominoes from the United States, and this afternoon I’ve shown the kids a simple version of the game. They play with panache, snapping the tiles down on the tin tabletop. Pop! Pop! Pop!

  Dominoes turns out to be the great equalizer. Girls compete with boys and little ones trounce their elders. After a few games, a couple of the older boys get tired of Miss Srey Aun beating them. She is perched on a stool, surveying her prey, undulating like a cobra.

  Wayne’s secretary has gone to lunch and the coast is clear. Mister Ouen and Mister Vuth slip inside the office to explore and, moments later, emerge with their prize—two large yellow plastic bananas. For reasons I have not yet understood, the children find these plastic fruits hysterically funny. With a flourish, Ouen and Vuth whip off the banana scabbards revealing two robust pink plastic penises used for condom demonstrations, and begin a swashbuckling fencing match.

  The boys quickly tire of that game, and there is a scrimmage of kids trying to gain possession. Miss Jorani, who at thirteen is usually reserved and modest, makes a dive, manages to beat out the little kids, grabs both penises, holds them up to her head like horns and starts running around the yard bellowing like a bull. Then it is a free-for-all, kids running after her, dominoes flying everywhere, until we all collapse in laughter.

  Later that afternoon, Miss Jorani informs me that she will never marry a Khmer man. After all, it was her father who had affairs and brought home the virus that killed both him and her mother.

  12

  Mister Ouen

  Chewing. Loud and persistent and closer to my head than one might wish such a sound to be. I turn toward the source and open my eyes. A white cow, all hunger and bones, is stripping philodendron leaves from the grille that runs around the porch. Every day Serain threads the vines back and forth and through the bars to weave a translucent green arbor to shade the bamboo couch where I come to nap, or try to nap, on hot afternoons.

  One placid brown eye stares back at me. I close my eyes again. “Wayne will have a cow,” I think foolishly, still dull with sleep and heat.

  Someone has left the front gate open again, and the neighborhood cows wander in and out, scavenging anything green. It is the dry season, late April, and there has been no rain since New Year’s Eve. No, there was one day when a few drops fell. The sky darkened and a wind came up; I ran outside and stood with my face to the sky, but it was over in a minute, leaving only a few pockmarks in the earth here and there to release the faint, yearning scent of damp clay. And then it passed. Most days it is like a photograph from the 1930s, and Wayne and I are tenant farmers, shading our eyes with our hands and peering into the sky, discussing that one tiny cloud near the mountain, way over there, willing it to come our way and bring rain or a patch of shade or a little variety to the endless blue sky. But it never does.

  Local custom and simple kindness dictate that at times like this your neighbor’s cattle may forage freely. But already they have topped all the young mango trees and decimated the squash, and now this one is eating my shade.

  Ouen is walking by. “Mister Ouen!” I call. “Goa!” Cow! Ouen grabs a switch and gives the cow a whack across her skinny flank. She is blasé, goes right on chomping, and Ouen flails at her until finally she tu
rns to face him. Ouen puts his face right up to the cow’s face, his one weak, nearsighted eye close to her brown eye. He curls his lip and mutters something in Khmer, and then whacks her smartly across the shoulder. I fear for a moment that she is going to charge him—she is strong and she has large horns. He hits her again, and then he keeps hitting her. But the white cow is inured to such treatment at the hands of rice farmers and small boys. Finally she trots off toward the gate, disdainful of Ouen’s shouts of “Hoi!” Once outside, she will jog around the perimeter until she finds another vulnerable spot, or she will simply leap the fence and make a meal of the bougainvillea. Wat Opot is a merry-go-round, encircled by cows, jumping up and down and over the fence and back again. And I’m still half dreaming.

  Wayne never met Ouen’s father, who infected Ouen’s mother with HIV and then grew sick himself. After he died, Ouen’s mother turned to prostitution to feed her child. Ouen is HIV negative, but he has a congenital deformity. The external tissues of his right eye are slightly misshapen, and the eyeball itself is pure white with neither iris nor pupil. His left eye, though normal to look at, is exceedingly weak. Deformities of this sort are common in Cambodia and Vietnam; it is possible that Ouen’s mother, who was Vietnamese, was exposed to Agent Orange during the war. If so, Ouen’s deformity is relatively minor compared with the many horrendous images I have seen: children born without eye openings or features, their faces as flat and unmarked as tortillas.

  Ouen and his mother lived in a small house in Takeo, the provincial capital, about an hour away from Wat Opot. Ouen did not go to school. When his mother was first sick a man in town took them in, but when she became too ill for Ouen to take care of her they were brought to the hospice at Wat Opot.

  Late one night, sitting in the office, Wayne told me the story of Ouen’s first year at Wat Opot.

  “Ouen was only nine or ten at the time, and he did a good job of caring for his mother. But he did not get along well with the other children because they often teased him about his eye. His mother improved after coming here, but in time she began slipping again and her joints became very painful. She wouldn’t let anyone massage her except Ouen, but she would often scream out in pain when he did. One night the children came running to get me because Ouen, helpless, frustrated and in tears, was hitting his mother with a stick. I took it away from him and he went running out of the room and started pounding the wall with his fist. He refused to go back into the room and sleep with her like he usually did. I checked on her in the morning. I could see that she was failing fast. I told Ouen to go in to see her, but he refused. I then said, ‘Ouen, your mother is dying.’

  “Ouen stared at me to see if I was telling the truth and then walked in to where his mother was lying. Because he does not see well he got close to her face and looked his mother straight in the eye and with tears flowing he kissed her on the forehead as she took her final breath.”

  That was in 2003, before I came to Wat Opot. After his mother died, Ouen began to go to school, but the children still teased him and called him One Eye. When I first came to Wat Opot two years later I noticed that whenever there was a fracas it seemed like Ouen was right there in the middle of it. He had a bad temper and was always getting into trouble, and I admit I found his demeanor menacing. But mostly he ignored me, and I avoided him. One night, as I watched him walk across the compound with his usual scowl, carrying a large butcher’s cleaver, I had the fleeting thought that this was a kid I would not want to meet in a dark alley. The words “apprentice ax murderer” came to mind. But I also realized that my anxiety was in part simply a reaction to his appearance, that it came from a down-deep fear, a primal instinct to cull the herd of the weak or deformed. It was the sort of aversion that forms reflexively before you even think about it and then has to be noticed, defined and consciously unraveled. “He’s just a little boy,” I told myself, and I became determined to change how I responded to Ouen.

  I began talking with him whenever we met, asking about his day, smiling, making him feel welcome rather than steeling myself against whatever mischief he might get into. The change in his behavior was immediate. Within days he was smiling back at me, and once, when I greeted him by taking his face in my hands and saying, “And how is my beautiful Ouen?” I saw for the first time his sweet, vulnerable smile.

  Wayne’s own eye trouble began when he was a medic in Vietnam. One day, on a battlefield near Da Nang, he was helping a wounded soldier when an explosion sent shrapnel into his eye. He was airlifted in a helicopter that then crashed en route, and the next thing he knew he was in a hospital. A cornea transplant failed, and when a doctor explained that they had run out of options, Wayne settled into life with one eye. But over the years a cataract had formed in his one good eye, and when I met him he had been almost blind for a long time. He had tried to arrange for cataract surgery through the Veterans Administration, but he was never in the States long enough to get through all the appointments and paperwork and bureaucracy. And he never had enough money to get it done privately.

  It was a problem that needed handling, but Wayne thinks about everyone but himself. After all, this is a man who once told me that if he accidentally became infected with HIV he might decide not to take antiretroviral medicines because they are not available to many other people who are poor and ill.

  As his eyesight dimmed, Wayne turned inward; depressed and remote, he seemed resigned to blindness.

  One afternoon, as I watched Wayne once again struggling to find a tiny vein to insert an IV in a sick baby’s arm, I saw that something needed to be done soon, not only for Wayne’s sake but for the well-being of the children. I spoke with him about it and encouraged him to investigate local options, but I could feel him resisting. Finally, Wayne admitted he was afraid that yet another doctor would tell him there was nothing to be done, that it would just continue to get worse and that he would soon be totally blind.

  As Ouen approached adolescence and the children continued to tease him, he grew angrier and ever more alienated. One day Wayne decided to take Ouen to the eye hospital in Takeo to see whether anything could be done. The clinic is run by the Catholic organization Caritas, and makes eye care available at little or no cost to all who need it.

  The doctors told Wayne that with a little cosmetic surgery Ouen’s eyelid could be corrected, and they could fit him with a prosthesis that would give him the appearance of a normal eye. It was all very simple. Almost as an afterthought, Wayne asked the doctor whether they ever performed cataract surgery, and the doctor answered, “What are you doing this afternoon?”

  Two days later Wayne and Ouen returned from Takeo. The children swarmed about and welcomed them home like heroes. Wayne was wearing his black cowboy hat, and they both had snazzy black sunglasses. They lazed under a welcoming tamarind tree in the center of the compound, telling tales of their adventure and copping an attitude of bluesy cool. They were happy and amazed. After a few days Wayne began to see better and, with a few ups and downs and adjustments over the next year, his vision in one eye is approaching 20/20. He marvels at leaves on trees, chain-link fences, the colors of flowers, the faces of children.

  Even though Ouen’s vision could not be helped, his sightless eye now appeared normal. He was thirteen years old and quite handsome, and the other children, excited by his transformation, no longer teased him.

  About a month after his surgery, Ouen was due back at the eye hospital for his follow-up appointment. Wayne was in Phnom Penh for a few days and Ouen asked me to go down to Takeo with him. Ouen could have managed on his own; he had already traveled alone on the bus when he visited relatives in the provinces on Khmer New Year. But I could see he wanted company and moral support, and he seemed relieved when I offered to go with him. So the next morning we walked to the main road and flagged down a bus.

  We reached the hospital at about 8:30 a.m. Under a thatched canopy a crowd of patients sat close together on wooden benches, avoiding the glaring sun. They were a mixture of old and
young, sightless and seeing, some with obvious injuries or cataracts, others with deformities that in the West might have been corrected when they were children. I was the only Westerner, and everyone looked up curiously when we entered. They had been waiting for hours with nothing to do, and here we were—the floor show.

  Ouen needed to stand in a long line with his identity card to retrieve his medical records, but when I tried to join him he put his arm around me and led me back to the bench. Although it was early, the day was already hot. He searched out a place for me to sit, negotiated with the neighbors to slide over and make a space, made a great show of dusting it off first and then, holding me by my upper arms, backed me up to the bench and gently settled me into my seat.

  The people watched us, clearly amused, and pleased to see him treating me with the respect due to a yei of my advanced age and graying hair. It was the proper Khmer thing to do, but so different from his casual behavior at Wat Opot that I had to struggle to keep a straight face and mop my neck with my kramah—the traditional Cambodian checkered scarf—and act appropriately decrepit. Knowing himself to be the center of attention, Ouen played his role to the hilt, and in that moment I loved him as I have rarely loved anyone in this world.

  At about this time I became friends with Rinin, a young girl who lives with her mother in a tailor’s shop in the public market a few kilometers down the road from Wat Opot. By day, Rinin’s family living space is open to the busy fish and vegetable market outside their door. Her mother’s sewing machine sits at the threshold to advertise her trade. There is a clouded glass case with buttons and lace trim, fancy bras and spools of thread, and inside the room in a larger showcase hang the dresses that Mama sews for her customers, shimmering confections of Khmer silk that turn even the humblest rice farmer into a stunning lady of fashion. The family’s belongings sit on high shelves, carefully wrapped in plastic to protect them from the grit of the marketplace.