by Gail Gutradt
Another time, Rebecca proclaimed military discipline and echai (garbage) patrols. There would be no more allowances if children did not pick up the trash that blew around the compound. Wayne’s approach? If he saw candy wrappers or other litter he would simply grab a large bag and begin picking it up himself, and before he knew it a couple dozen kids of all sizes would be laughing and playing and tumbling down the banks of the canal to fetch every last scrap. In the end, Wayne would hoist the littlest child and give him the thrill of emptying the big bag of trash into the fire pit. Wayne knew how to turn even housekeeping into a game, and the kids joined in because it was fun to do it together, and because they loved Wayne.
I began to examine whatever Rebecca told me very carefully, and to double-check everything with Wayne. Sometimes it was a story about one of the children, usually one promising older boy, someone I knew to be bright and diligent, searching for a way to get an education so he might take care of his younger sibling and have a good life. In Rebecca’s stories he would be transformed into a little con artist, exploiting the sympathies of volunteers. Similarly, one of the mothers who went off to the city to try to open her own business was clearly leaving to work in a den of prostitution. Wayne explained that these were poor people, only a few years removed from one of the greatest of human catastrophes, and totally dependent on strangers for food and shelter. If a mother hoarded soap it was because there might not be any soap tomorrow. Or if she sold her rations in the village, maybe she was saving money toward a day when she might start a small business of her own and move back to an independent life. And if there were another national disaster and the NGO closed tomorrow, surely she would need a little money tucked away to feed her children.
Rebecca opened a small shop and began charging the residents for necessities like soap and toothpaste, dispensed from a padlocked cabinet. Rather than pay from the allowances they saved for snacks, some of the children stopped brushing their teeth. The patient in charge of the shop had trouble keeping track of the money and was accused of stealing. The little business sputtered soon enough, but not before there were lots of hard feelings.
When our youngest baby became very ill, Rebecca announced that the child was going to die and accused her caretakers of shaking her. This gave rise to bewilderment and doubt between the two sisters who watched over her, each knowing full well it was not she who had done anything wrong. In fact no one had, and the little girl was fine again after receiving an IV drip. As babies do, she had become dehydrated from persistent diarrhea.
When I questioned her dark scenarios, Rebecca insisted she knew something because she had prayed about it and God had answered; there was no leeway for discussion. The door slammed shut.
Still, we shared some light moments. After a small New Year’s Eve gathering at her apartment I stayed behind to help wash the dishes. Electrical storms had treated us all that evening to a magnificent light show. Approaching slowly from all sides, they unleashed at last a massive, thunderous rain. Three storm fronts collided right over our heads. Lightning burst everywhere at once.
Rebecca and I hunkered down, waiting for the barrage to end. She poured us two glasses of warm lychee juice and we sat on the floor playing Old Testament Bible Dominoes. Every time Rebecca won she would shout, “Yay, Christians!” and pump the air like a cheerleader. And whenever I beat her I would call out, “Jews win!” and we’d both laugh. It was so dumb and funny. I just wish we could have been the friends we both needed.
Things came to a head between us one night over the issue of sex education. Several of the Wat Opot girls had clearly come of age, and a few of the older boys had begun prettying themselves up and staying out late at dances in the village. Molly and I brought up the subject at lunch and Rebecca said she would ask one of the Khmer mothers to talk with the girls. That was good as far as it went, but we were concerned about the larger issues. I worried that the orphaned girls might be especially vulnerable to offers of intimacy. We needed to talk with all the children about self-image, disease and pregnancy, and Molly and I also thought we should talk about the happier aspects of healthy sex and relationships.
Most of the adults the children knew had been impacted by HIV/AIDS. Wayne’s lifelong celibacy complicated things, and we sensed it was difficult for him to accept that these children he still saw as babies were growing up. The children needed healthy role models, people who spoke Khmer.
Rebecca had said she would look for someone suitable to counsel the kids, but for a long time nothing happened. One evening, as Rebecca sat in her room playing computer solitaire, I asked her whether there had been any progress on a sex education program. She replied that she thought the children had too much on their plates at the moment, and she had found a Christian Khmer group whom she would invite when she thought the time was right.
“What will have to happen for the time to be right?” I asked, surprised that she wanted to put it off.
“It will happen when I say it will,” she spat back.
“It’s just that I’m worried that if we delay too long it will put some of the kids in jeopardy,” I told her.
“They ought to know right from wrong by now,” she stated, and flipped another card.
I felt a chill; it seemed as if she were waiting for a disaster to befall one of the children to help her make a point about sin, punishment and damnation. “Which of these children are you willing to sacrifice to make that point?” I demanded. She did not reply. We glared at each other for a moment, and Rebecca turned another card. I was shaking as I left her room. Through the air vent between our rooms I heard the gospel music begin. It grew louder and louder and played for the rest of the night and Rebecca sang along with it in her shrill vibrato.
In Cambodia millions of land mines lie partially buried. Decades after the war people still trigger the shocking loss of their own limbs, or lives, nearly every day. The Khmer Rouge had controlled the area around Wat Opot so it was never mined, though now and then the children unearthed a stray bullet. Hyperbole aside, sometimes living and working with Rebecca felt nearly as scary as knowingly walking through a minefield.
Maybe it was my fault for not understanding that faith does not like questions, and that my badgering signaled to Rebecca that I did not respect her beliefs. But it was not her beliefs I objected to; it was her hiding behind what she claimed God had whispered to her personally to avoid having to explain her opinions and actions to anyone else. After all, why should she have to justify anything at all to someone like me, someone with no commitment to Wat Opot and so little to offer? On the other hand, maybe she was just now realizing that Wat Opot was changing, and she would never again know the clarity of mission and intimacy she and Wayne had shared in the early days.
I’m sure Rebecca was disappointed that I couldn’t be the friend she needed, and that I didn’t respond to her witnessing, didn’t accept Jesus as my Savior. If I could have made her understand how deeply I did respect the work she had done, things might have been different between us. She had worked exhausting hours, been mother and grandmother to hundreds of children, only to lose many of them to this terrible disease, to suffer through their dying and still to care for the ones who survived, to love and to touch those whom family and society had abandoned.
Reading over my journal from that first winter at Wat Opot, I find the story of Rebecca woven through my impressions of this new world of AIDS and children and Cambodia. Many times I recorded some puzzling event, trying to understand what I was seeing. I wondered why Wayne allowed someone who undermined him and caused ill will to remain at Wat Opot, but as I grew to know him better I began to understand that his reasons were both deeply compassionate and quite human.
The evening after Rebecca and I argued about the sex ed course, I asked Wayne whether my staying at Wat Opot was causing problems. Might it be better if I returned to America? I had hoped he might try to dissuade me, but his response was frank and practical. He explained calmly that except for himself, Rebecca
was the only other fixed point at Wat Opot. Whatever their issues, he knew she would get out of bed at three in the morning to care for a dying patient, and once every few weeks, when he went off to Phnom Penh for an uninterrupted night’s sleep, he knew he could leave the children in her care. She was a capable nurse, and there was no one else willing to make the commitment.
Rebecca was also a determined fund-raiser, and Wayne was responsible for feeding a hundred people every day. Rebecca wrote glowing newsletters that she sent to her congregation back home, and through them she raised about half the budget of Wat Opot. But Wayne told me that she kept the money from her supporters in a separate fund under her own control, and if she disagreed with him about a project, or if he did not consult her, she withheld the money. Wayne worried about how he would feed the children if Rebecca left. His own supporters, who up until that time had mostly been Evangelical Christians, had begun labeling him a heretic, and many had withdrawn their support.
Wayne also worried about Rebecca, as a friend about a friend. He was concerned about her state of mind and what would happen to her if she left Wat Opot. Wayne and Rebecca had worked side by side for years. They shared a rich history, and I am sure they had many unspoken understandings, as old friends always do. Wayne hoped that sooner or later Rebecca would become less riveted to the idea that only Christians can enter Heaven.
As an outsider I was troubled by the incredible amount of energy we all spent worrying about Rebecca, complaining about or ignoring her unpredictable reactions, apologizing to Buddhist visitors when she refused to leave her apartment to greet them. All this took a palpable toll on Wayne’s energy, and her control over the purse strings made him feel vulnerable and angry. And that anger, unexpressed, mutated into depression. I observed to Wayne that even if Rebecca left, even if he lost her help and her funding as well, the amount of energy that would be released would more than make up for whatever she was providing, and he would find new and creative ways to take care of the needs of the community. This was to prove true, though it would take a little time and precipitate a major shift in the mission of Wat Opot.
Rebecca began to go away frequently to work with her missionary organization. A weekend would turn into a week, and she would return, only to leave again in a week or two. Clearly she was feeling called in a new direction. Finally she decided to leave. The first months were hard on Wayne. Rebecca sent a newsletter to her congregation decrying Wayne’s lack of commitment to taking the children to church on Sundays. She said that although her decision to leave Wat Opot was painful, she would still be supporting the children through a “secret fund,” given to one of the employees behind Wayne’s back, to buy gas for the truck so the children could go to church. I received a copy of this email when I was back in the States. It seemed to me a profound betrayal of Wayne and the children, a way of telling the people who had been feeding them for many years to abandon them. I did not want Wayne to be hurt, so I kept the email to myself. Instead I set about doing my own fund-raising, at least until Wayne found some new resources.
After Rebecca left, Wayne took on the grueling job of tending to the needs of the entire community. For the first few months he hardly slept. Often he would spend the entire night in the hospice with a sick patient, followed by a full day of taking care of the children. There was the twice-daily regimen of medication, the administrative duties and the moment-to-moment injuries, illnesses and personal crises of so many people.
The situation came to a head when Wayne received a call from Médecins Sans Frontières asking him to take on yet another very ill adult patient who would need intensive care. Already exhausted, Wayne felt himself nearing collapse. He prayed late into the night, asking God why He was giving him more than he felt he could handle.
The next morning, Wayne announced to the long-term patients that he was closing the hospice. The hospital in Takeo had recently opened an AIDS unit, and anyone who wished to be taken care of would be transported there. For the rest, he offered an option: get out of bed, take your meals in the kitchen with everyone else, begin participating in the community, and you can stay. To a person, they got out of bed and stopped living the lives of the ill. When I returned to Wat Opot the second winter I was amazed to see the same people who had been languishing on hospital cots now up taking care of children and looking much happier than I had seen them before. Wayne and the children seemed far more relaxed. A new chapter had begun.
24
Hunting Frogs, Hunting Rats
Viewed from the ruins of the ancient stone temple atop Phnom Chisor, the rice fields fan out to the horizon. At the first rain, even before the fields are planted, ripe grain fallen from last season’s harvest takes root and begins to sprout. It grows up through the water, and for a week or so the little fields shine in a dozen shades of new green. The fields are separated by narrow paths of sun-baked clay that run like mullions through a stained glass window. Here and there a line of bushes or scrub or palm trees forms a windbreak.
Soon white humpbacked cattle, who have foraged hungrily for months in the dry, dun-colored paddies, will go to work turning the soil, and rice planting will begin. Months later, if the gods be kind, the golden harvest will be piled in mounds higher than your head, and people will labor all day at threshing and winnowing.
In spite of the exhausting work—sowing seeds, transplanting seedlings and bringing in the harvest—many people in Cambodia do not have enough to eat. In our region, with its fickle rainfall, fields rarely yield more than one rice crop per year, and with the changing climate even that single crop may be unreliable. During the war years the Khmer Rouge force-marched much of the population to slave labor camps, and long-held land titles were lost. As a result it has become difficult, often impossible, for many farmers to reestablish their legitimate claims to family land. Many who owned their own land before the war must now toil in other people’s fields for a pittance, and even the strong are often undernourished. To make life even more difficult, open land, where people once foraged for edible wild plants or small game, is becoming privatized, cultivated or fenced, blocking access to vital food sources. For people with AIDS or tuberculosis, who may be too ill to work in the fields, there is never enough to eat.
Once a month a big white van from the United Nations World Food Programme delivers rice for the Wat Opot family and for families affected by tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in the neighboring villages. Early in the morning workmen begin offloading sacks of rice. Villagers arrive by bicycle and motorbike, then wait for the Home Care staff to check their papers and give them their monthly ration. They chat and visit, or sit patiently on the ground or on piles of rice bags. Women come with plastic market baskets, their heads wrapped in checkered kramah. An elderly layman from the temple wearing a coarse white shirt greets me courteously, speaking the French of Indochine. Little girls, all dressed up for the occasion with red lipstick and painted fingernails, accompany their yei.
Soon vendors arrive, drawn by the crowd. One man sells steamed Chinese buns from a glass case on wheels. Another makes ice cream sandwiches—tutti-frutti cut into triangles and served on the Khmer version of French bread. Brightly colored fruit ices frozen into the bottoms of recycled plastic juice bottles sell for a penny. The children pick at them with tiny spoons.
A distinguished older man from the village opens one of the sacks, removes a palm full of rice and separates the grains with his thumb. He examines them myopically, sinks his face into his palm, inhales deeply and nods his approval. The rice smells fresh.
In addition to rice, people receive rations of cooking oil and salt. Once, I was told, there was canned fish as well, but it became too expensive, or perhaps the donor country stopped sending it. Palm oil—the flag on the white tins tells us it is a gift from the people of Japan—is poured into small plastic bags or soda bottles through a funnel improvised from a rolled banana leaf. Moto drivers with their trademark baseball caps lounge about smoking cigarettes, waiting to sling the heavy sacks of ric
e over the back of their bikes. By noon, each groaning motorbike will carry two or three extra people with all their provisions home to the village.
On Rice Day, food was distributed to hundreds of local families. In other scenes like this all over Cambodia, thousands of people received food from the World Food Programme.
In 2006 and 2007, a massive shortfall forced the World Food Programme to reduce and then suspend food deliveries to more than a million Cambodians. For the Wat Opot family alone, this meant diverting scarce funds to buy rice to feed a hundred people a day. But our local problem barely scratches the surface. Some village children who had been drawn to attend school by the promise of nutritious meals stopped coming. People receiving drug therapy for AIDS or TB lost the extra nutrition they needed to grow strong. More insidiously, some patients with TB, no longer lured by the incentive of free food, did not come for medicine to complete their arduous six-month course of therapy, and thus began developing drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. Treating multiple-drug-resistant TB is enormously expensive, and its spread threatens public health worldwide.
Except for a few such pauses, the World Food Programme delivered rice to Wat Opot and its neighbors for ten years. But in December of 2012 the program was suspended. At that time, the Wat Opot Children’s Community decided to dedicate $250 a month of its own money to buy food for ten of the poorest families in the village.