by Gail Gutradt
But I’m still upset. Later that night I’m in my room talking with Papa Steve the Giant Tasmanian. Steve has a joyful, easy way with the kids, and he always seems to know the right thing to do. He’s a compassionate listener and I just need to talk and try to figure out what happened. I’m still shaken by my anger. Suddenly, a tentative little tap; someone’s at the door, and I open it. It’s Dara. He looks so shy and timid—looks sort of how I’m feeling myself. And I know he’s come to see if we’re still friends.
“Pencil?” he says. He’s always asking Wayne or me for something, a pencil, a comb, a Band-Aid. He comes to the office twenty times a night. Just to get some attention, just to be with us, just to be sure. And I open my arms and hold him, and he holds me back. And then I give him a pencil and a big stack of paper. And there’s not enough of the same language between us to say what we’re feeling, but I tell him anyway that I love him, and I know he’s a wonderful artist, and I promise to pay more attention to him because I know he needs it, and to please, please bring me all his drawings to look at. And I give him an extra box of crayons, and he hugs me again and he runs off to draw pictures.
We who volunteer must constantly be aware of the enormous and unearned power we take on simply because we are part of an aid organization. This power can be very subtle, so subtle that we may not be aware of it unless someone points it out to us. When I told an American Buddhist friend in Phnom Penh about what had happened between myself and Dara, she pointed out that when Dara came to my room that night he really had no choice. He was a little boy who lived at the kindness of strangers. We housed and fed him, and he was dependent on us for sustenance and for love. He had behaved badly, but only because he was needy in a way he did not know how to express, and I had reacted in anger partly because of what he did, but also because of my own ego attachment to having things a certain way. But in our equation of power and need, a breakdown of relationship was so dire that it was he who had to come to me to mend fences.
We have this power from the moment we arrive, because we immediately join the hierarchy at a certain level, even though we have no clue what we are doing. Simply because we are Westerners we are treated differently, and with such power comes the responsibility to at least try to be conscious. We each bring emotional baggage to whatever we are doing, and the children are forgiving of our bumbling, in part because they have suffered greatly and are compassionate and have seen others like us and have probably survived much worse, and in part because they must be tolerant to stay in the good graces of strangers.
Still, even aware of these complications, we feel called to volunteer. We arrive, and when the first child looks into our eyes we fall in love from the center of our being. Then we must do everything we can not to betray this small human being, to be aware of our contradictions and attempt the impossible, in all humility, to humbly love with pure compassion, in a way that allows the child and our self both the bewildering complexity of our natures, and our simple need to love and be loved in return.
22
“We Did Not Know You”
Some of the most important things that happen for me at Wat Opot come from stillness. When I am not busy doing, I have time to notice the child who needs a friend and I am free to focus my attention completely. I cherish the moments when just sitting still creates the occasion for a child to approach me for companionship or simply for comfort, the sort of comfort they might have sought from their own parents.
It’s a hot afternoon. Once again I am trying to nap on the porch outside my bedroom. For three days and nights, pleng ka, traditional wedding songs, have been blaring from speakers in the village, speakers mounted high on poles and aimed in the four directions. Cambodians make a gift of their nuptial happiness—a gift of music to their neighbors. They scatter it broadly like seeds in a field. That is all well and good, but I haven’t slept for days now, and I’m feeling poleaxed.
Miss Jorani approaches, softly. Usually she is remote and primped, in the manner of pretty thirteen-year-old girls the world over. But today she has a fever, and her illness makes her vulnerable. Her long brown hair falls uncombed in tangles about her face. She snuggles in beside me, but the relentless music and the intense heat of the Cambodian afternoon make it hard to sleep. After a while she rolls over and whispers, “I miss my parents.”
Miss Jorani came here a few years ago with her older brother Pesei and their mother, who was dying. Their father had already died of AIDS. For a year the children took care of their mother. They washed her, fed her, massaged her as she wasted away. When I told Pesei I admired how they had cared for their dying mother, he stiffened. “I took care. Jorani played.” He had been eleven then, Jorani only nine.
Jorani and I talk for a while. I tell her that my parents have also died, and that I miss them too. This is not a dramatic moment, unless you consider that a young girl who has never spoken to me about her life or her emotions decides it is safe to open herself, just a little.
She leaves for a moment and returns with a small collection of photographs—one of those paper folders with plastic sleeves for snapshots given away free by the photo-processing houses in Phnom Penh.
In one image, Jorani’s father stands bare-chested before the stone ruins of Angkor Wat. He is slim and handsome, a man at ease, on vacation with his family. In another picture he wears a jacket and tie and checkered pants and stands beside her mother. He looks young and self-conscious, a country boy in city clothes. Her mother is smiling, pretty. She wears a red party dress. The field of tulips behind them is only a painted backdrop but they seem happy, secure, living a middle-class dream. Finally, there is a photo of Jorani with her brother, taken before the same unlikely landscape. Pesei’s hand is draped about his little sister’s shoulder, and they are dressed alike in immaculately pressed white shorts and flowered tops, and red-and-white candy-cane socks. Jorani looks about four years old. I remember an almost identical photo of myself with my own older brother, taken around the same age.
Her final picture shows her father standing next to his truck. Did he contract AIDS from one of the many prostitutes who cater to men on the road? Was he infected even then? Had he carried the virus home to his wife?
The photos are faded and cracked, and already dark stains from the tape holding them together have begun to seep through the paper. In a few years these pictures too will be only memories.
We talk a little about our lives. Finally, I remark to Jorani that her English is much better than I remember from my first visit. “Have you been studying,” I ask her, “or were you perhaps just a little shy before?” She answers, “We did not know you.”
Rajana is eleven years old. He has two younger sisters. About a year ago his mother left Wat Opot with one of the male patients, leaving her three children behind. Recently she gave birth to another baby. Rajana rarely hears from her, and mostly it is only when she needs money and tries to pressure her children to give her what they have saved from their allowances. In my two seasons at Wat Opot, Rajana has rarely spoken to me. It is not that he doesn’t like me; he is simply aloof. Wayne thinks he is missing his mother, and holding out hope that she will come back for him. To allow another mother figure to get close would be to admit he has given up hope.
Wayne tells me that Rajana asked him once whether we grow up to be like our fathers. Wayne asked him why he wanted to know. “Because my mother had three husbands, and none of them was any good.” Wayne assures him that if he can ask such a question, he will not grow up to be a bad man.
One day, shortly before I am to leave for America the second time, I am having lunch with Wayne and a group of children. I mention that I hope to come back again, perhaps next year, and Rajana looks over at me and then remarks to Wayne, “I think Gail really loves children.”
Later he presents me with a hundred-riel note, his ice cream money for the day. “Here,” he says, handing it to me with both hands in the polite Khmer manner. “So you have loy when you go Amérique.” In this small
ceremony, I can see that Rajana has taken on the role of provider and protector. This boy has decided what kind of man he wants to be.
What is our real work here? We say we hope the children will bond with us, but what are we actually offering them, we who come and go between worlds? More than anything I have done, or tried to teach them, or carried from America to give them, it is the mere act of returning here that has made a difference, that has let them know that I care enough about them to come back. The more times I return, the more the children will understand that they have truly become part of my life, that these quiet moments we share are the things we go through together, the things that make us a family.
23
“Go, and See!”
Before I arrived in Cambodia most of my contact with Wayne had been through Wat Opot’s nurse, Rebecca. She was now in the States for a few months, fund-raising and visiting family, and in several long phone conversations she tried to prepare me for life at Wat Opot.
Rebecca clearly loved the children, but her stories of their going to church on Sundays and praying nightly on their knees before bed seemed strikingly at odds with Wayne’s description of Wat Opot as nonsectarian. I wondered how they could see their world so differently, but figured all would become clear in time.
Rebecca told me what clothes to bring—nothing sleeveless, out of deference to local sensibilities—and to be sure to bring as many bras as weeks I was planning to stay, because hers were always being stolen from the clothesline. Had I not lived in Africa and India and traveled for years in developing countries, her stories might have intimidated me. Illness and theft figured large in her accounts of life in Cambodia: heat, bad water, the risk of contracting malaria or rabies, of catching tuberculosis, which was more prevalent than AIDS. Even walking in the village could be perilous. Gangs of boys roamed the roads, ready to rob you—or worse! But when she spoke of being born again her voice changed. As she recounted her oft-told story, she would slip into a mesmerizing, rhythmic whisper, as if she were speaking to Someone Else, and you were only eavesdropping.
Over time, Rebecca told me about her life—going from darkness and sin to the light of her religious salvation. For her there was only one choice, between a loving Savior and “the one who walks the earth.” I was fascinated. In my own world the choice between good and evil has never been so clearly drawn, but I listened and did not argue. I reasoned that Rebecca and Wayne must share the same basic beliefs, and I wanted to understand them both as well as I could before I arrived. After much wondering and second-guessing I recalled some simple advice applicable to situations like this: “Go, and see!” And then I went ahead with my plan for five months in Cambodia.
Rebecca was a brave woman who had also been a frontline nurse in the Vietnam War. She was short and compact and still wore her hair in a military razor cut. After the war she had worked in a pediatric ward in the States, so by the time she moved to Cambodia she was well trained to care for the growing number of children who would come to Wat Opot.
For six years Rebecca had helped Wayne build Wat Opot from a simple hospice to a home and community for a hundred people. She told me she missed the early days, when it was just the two of them and a handful of patients. There had been long talks at night after work, and a sense of companionship and mission. They brought children back from the villages, many of them orphaned, wasting away with the same new and terrifying disease that had killed their parents. I have already told you about Miss Chan Tevy, found sewn into a hammock while her aunt worked in the fields. Other children lived in boxes in the open ground floor, barred from the upstairs living quarters, feared, fed minimally and left to waste away. Wayne and Rebecca took these children to Wat Opot and nursed them. Many died, but a few survived long enough for the antiretroviral medicines that reached Cambodia to turn skeletal, hopeless pariahs back into children.
The first week at Wat Opot I stayed with Rebecca in the apartment she had built for herself. It was an L-shaped warren of beds and wardrobes, mementos and Bibles, and the still air inside was scented with mothballs and mildew.
I soon discovered that Rebecca and Wayne had serious differences over the mission of Wat Opot. Although they shared a deep love for the children, over time it became more difficult for Rebecca to accept Wayne’s refusal to proselytize. For Rebecca, bringing souls to Jesus was of overwhelming urgency, and their differences became more and more pronounced. Late into the night, sometimes for hours, Rebecca would tell me about Wayne’s shortcomings, and how the children, who knew nothing of God, only Buddha, would lose all chance at Heaven. She was especially indignant about the tinsel-backed glass painting of the Buddha that hung in the hospice, right alongside a Renaissance-style image of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.
“Jesus should be above,” she insisted. “He is so much more.”
Whenever Wayne went to Phnom Penh, Rebecca would move the picture of Jesus to a nail higher on the wall, above the Buddha, and when he returned Wayne would move it back. So it went.
One day I watched Rebecca caring for a woman on her deathbed. She held her and rocked her and sang her hymns. She implored her to be saved by uttering the name of Jesus before she died so she would be welcomed into Heaven. Rebecca sat astride her patient, gripped the dying woman’s face in her hands and keened, “Jesus, Jeeesus!” But the next day, Rebecca chose not to attend the woman’s funeral. As the monks prayed and chanted the Buddhist funeral service, there arose in the distance the sound of Rebecca’s stereo, turned up to full volume, broadcasting Christian hymns over the entire campus, a wail of protest, a dirge for the soul of a woman she had failed to convert.
A few years later I would be reminded of Rebecca beseeching the dying woman. As a breast cancer patient, I encountered a radiation technician who lectured me about how my soul would be lost forever if I died without accepting Jesus Christ. I had just described my time in Cambodia, and she asked if I worked for a mission organization. Wat Opot, I had explained, was nondenominational and honored the Buddhist traditions of its residents.
“I could never support that,” she snapped, and began a harangue that dismissed both Buddhism and my own Jewish heritage. Here I was, bald and weakened from months of chemo, my thoughts turning daily to my own mortality. Lying naked, exposed and furious, beneath the vast technology that this zealot commanded, I simply could not summon the strength to confront her. Staring upward, I remembered that woman dying of AIDS with Rebecca straddling her chest as she struggled for her final breaths, and thought, how desperate she must have been, and I felt terribly close to her.
Wayne explained that he and Rebecca had spent years disagreeing about how best to raise the children, whether they should go to church, what the proper attitude toward Buddhism should be and whether they should try to convert them to Christianity. But lately they both seemed exhausted by their endless debates. Although Wayne told me they had never been romantically involved, he and Rebecca sometimes seemed like an old married couple, fighting the same battle year after year until it ground them down into indifference. Wayne said he hoped that he and Rebecca could find a way to work well together again, but in the end she decided to leave Wat Opot to start her own health care project for women in the provinces.
In the beginning I was afraid to venture into the village. I had been subtly influenced by Rebecca’s account of being threatened by a gang of bad boys and only saved by the little children who formed a phalanx, prepared to “fight to the death to protect” her. Her message was clear: Don’t walk alone! I knew there had been some problems between Wat Opot and the villagers. Peering through the gates at the Wat Opot grounds, our poor neighbors might well feel envious. Ducks and chickens disappeared, and once somebody tried to butcher a mother pig, an audacious crime that was foiled when the sow herself sounded the alarm. But these were rare, stealthy acts, carried out on moonless nights. Wayne believed they were mostly the work of one small group of teenage troublemakers.
Gradually, as I became more confide
nt, I began to explore the several nearby villages. I’ll never know what happened to Rebecca and the children that day on the road, but whenever I walked outside the gates of Wat Opot I found only smiles and a warm welcome. As with so many other experiences in Cambodia, it is the graciousness of the people that is their offering to you—their pure, welcoming humanity.
But Rebecca’s story made me wary at first, as did her insistence that I bring along a huge supply of brassieres. One look at the relative size of our endowments compared with those of the slender Khmer women convinced me that if anyone was stealing our bras it would not be for the usual purpose. I brought the matter up with Wayne and we speculated wildly about other possible uses for D-cups, but in all my time in Cambodia the only things that ever disappeared from my room were a small pocketknife and a large partially eaten cookie.
For months I lived happily at Wat Opot, sharing the children’s lives but unsettled by the dissonance between Rebecca’s stories and what my own eyes told me. From time to time she would issue an edict. Once, she attempted to ban children from visiting the hospice, which was mostly filled with adult patients, some of them their parents. Rebecca believed that the kids were catching illnesses there. Wayne thought this simplistic. Everywhere they went, he reasoned, the children were exposed to germs and viruses: at the village school, in the marketplace and even in their own dormitory, where they liked to sleep several to a bed. Wayne’s own office was in the hospice, and he loved having the children run in and out freely. He felt it also did the patients’ hearts good to have the children near them. Sometimes when Wayne sat with a patient, the smallest of the kids would hang on his chair or crawl up on his lap for a hug. Meanwhile, in Wayne’s office, the older boys would be slicking down their hair and strutting before the mirror and dousing themselves liberally from his bottle of Chaps.