In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  During hungry times the children of Wat Opot turn to hunting to supplement their diets. From the first, I was impressed by the children’s knowledge of their environment. English and math they may know only a little, and their education in their own history may be scant, but even the youngest are expert foragers. They know everything that is edible on their five acres and beyond, where to find it and when it comes into season. Children munch on grubs from the boles of trees. Bushes provide berries. There are tamarind trees and mangoes, the latter sliced into small woody shingles and eaten green, dredged in ombeul, a mixture of salt, sugar and hot chili pepper. Tall children boost little ones into the branches of trees to pluck a certain white flower whose stamen drips sweet nectar. At night, boys hunt frogs with flashlights and bamboo cages. They cast nets for catfish and minnows in the ponds and roast them over a fire on a metal grill. Older boys are expert marksmen, bringing down small birds and plump rice rats with their slingshots. The children’s people are farmers, and fishing and foraging are part of their heritage. Their families had survived off the land whenever crops failed, and during the unspeakable hardships of the Khmer Rouge years. This know-how is still passed from parent to child and, when there are no parents, from child to child. Everyone knows that the season after next may bring hard times and hunger.

  Sometimes on the day rice is delivered Wayne has a party at Wat Opot for all the local children affected by HIV/AIDS. These can be children who are themselves HIV positive, or children whose family members are infected. While their families wait to receive their rice, the children gather at the dining hall at Wat Opot. There are greetings and snacks and Wayne gives them a few toiletries—shampoo, soap and toothpaste, and a new toothbrush. Sometimes there is a craft project, and always there are games and competitions: sack races, break dancing, singing contests and balloon blowing, with the children staring cross-eyed as their balloons puff larger and larger until they pop or tear loose and rocket around the room amid cheers and laughter. But the favorite is always the dance contest. Five children at a time onstage, with the audience voting for semifinalists and then finalists and, finally, a champion. Almost inevitably it is the littlest child who charms us all. Standing onstage like a frightened field mouse, she is trying shyly to smile through a smear of red lipstick, twisting her hips to and fro, her arms held tightly to her sides, her hands turned out, fingers curled upward and fluttering like tiny fins. She moves sometimes with the beat but more often not, but with such innocence and optimism that the children burst into applause and such hoots of delight that there is no doubt who is their beloved, and she easily carries off the grand prize of a few hundred riel.

  One night after my first Rice Day, Wayne and I were working late in the office. He had finished giving out medicines at the evening clinic and was straightening the cabinets. We had managed to connect to the Internet for the first time in days, and I was writing an email to a dear friend in Paris, Luke Powell. Luke was important to me. His photography in the minefields and refugee camps of Afghanistan had inspired me to search for a way to offer service in the world. He was my mentor and my touchstone. I wanted to impress him, to show that I was learning the ins and outs of the NGO scene. I had already sent him newsletters about AIDS and the children, and today I had written him about the party, the balloons and the dancing. But in tonight’s email perhaps some titillation … or even a whisper of scandal? While most of the rice we received was fine, now and then some of it tasted off, a little ammoniated. It might have been the rice itself, how it was stored, or perhaps the water in our own cisterns. Although this was 2006, I had noticed that the rice bags that day were dated 2001 and 2002. I wondered whether the rice retained its nutrients after four or five years in storage. The kids devoured mountains of rice without complaint. They were active and growing, ever famished. But to me the rice was sometimes inedible. I decided to play up the drama:

  The truck came today with rice rations for the community from the World Food Programme. Two hundred bags of…

  “Hey, Wayne,” I called out. Socheat had just run into the clinic with a bloody knee, and Wayne was busy cleaning and bandaging as Socheat bawled. “How much do those bags of rice weigh, anyhow?”

  “I dunno, maybe fifty kilos.”

  …Two hundred bags of fifty kilos each. People come in the morning for the distribution. I noticed the dates on the bags and asked Wayne how long rice is good for. He said about a year. The dates were from 2001 and 2002. Somewhere along the way it appears the fresh rice that is sent over is switched for old stock, and someone gets to sell the good stuff. Can’t prove it, though. Some of the rice we get is decidedly second-rate and tastes ammoniated. It’s hard to tell where the corruption starts exactly, whether it is in the purchasing or along the way. Saudi Arabia and Japan probably have good intent, but what sometimes arrives is a different story.

  Did you see anything like this in Afghanistan?

  I pushed Send and went on to other things.

  The next evening there were two emails in my box. The first was from Luke:

  I wrote to several people in the World Food Programme, in the publicity office in Rome, in WFP Japan, and the director for Cambodia; I forwarded them your letter. If nobody turns up to investigate then you can assume it to be common practice.

  “Oh shit!” I said aloud. Wayne looked up at me from across the desk.

  The second letter was from the head of the World Food Programme in Cambodia.

  Your friend … has transmitted your message about the poor quality of rice … delivered to your NGO last Thursday. We are very sensitive about possible issues of diversion and would like to know more about the problem.

  Would it be possible to have a meeting with you? Could we visit the area and meet with the beneficiaries? Would you have a sample of the rice that was delivered/distributed?

  “Wayne,” I said quietly. “I have something to tell you.”

  Wayne once told me that he had been fired from every job he ever held. Generally he was fired because he told the truth about something. He is a man of principle who perpetually holds out hope for the honesty of others, but he has frequently been disappointed. Over time, this has produced in him a tendency to hope for the best but to keep his head down, to take care of Wat Opot and to pray that the good he does will erect a shield between the children and the whims and political storms swirling around them.

  I pulled my stool up to Wayne’s, sat facing him, almost knee to knee, and confessed everything. He was very quiet. He looked like a man watching his life flash before his eyes. “Wayne,” I said, “I will write a mea culpa. Anything you need.” I felt panicked. For the third time since I had come to Wat Opot I offered to be on the next plane to America. “You can tell them you threw me out.” All I could think of was a thousand families starving, our children hungry, denied their rice because my foolish attempt to impress a friend had brought down the wrath of donor nations of the very program that was feeding us. It came home to me in that moment how incredibly fragile all this was; everything Wayne had built here, starting with five ragged acres and creating a small paradise of mango trees and ponds and children kept safe and loved. Everything could be demolished by a moment’s thoughtlessness. My thoughtlessness.

  Finally Wayne said, simply, “Well, let’s see what happens. Maybe it will work out for the best.” If I had not already loved Wayne and trusted his power of restraint before that moment, I did so now. He managed a twinkling smile and added, “I never figured you for the type who’d start an international incident.”

  I wrote to the director of the World Food Programme in Phnom Penh, backpedaling hard:

  I wrote a personal note to a friend containing speculations not based on hard fact, and certainly not meant for publication. I had some questions when I saw the dates 2001 and 2002 on some of the rice bags, and wondered whether this was normal and healthy practice, and whether Luke had run into anything similar in his extensive field experience. But I certainly did not mean to accuse anybo
dy of wrongdoing … mostly to shed light on a puzzling situation.

  I aired my fears to Luke, practically shouting through the email that I could not believe he would forward something written privately without asking permission.

  “Gail, Honey,” he wrote back. Luke had never called me anything remotely resembling “Honey” before. I could feel him patting me on the head like a foolish child.

  Nobody with any sense is ever going to criticize you for caring enough to write to me. I was the one who wrote to WFP, and I did so because I know that they want to know about such things. It is open lines of communication between the field and the main offices that keeps help flowing and corruption from taking over, as it is always THE primary threat to operations among the desperately poor. You are not going to anger WFP by writing to a friend who has worked for them about a concern, even if it turns out to be nothing. Most of the people back in the offices and positions of leadership have worked in the field too, and the purpose of their jobs is to deliver clean, fresh rice to places like Wat Opot. You are part of a huge team with WFP and a respected member, since you are the one actually serving rice to orphans in Cambodia. My short [photography] contract with them did not make me an expert, and I spent little time in the office, but when I got notes back immediately from them thanking me for passing your message along, I’m pretty sure they meant it.

  Wayne and I hoped they did.

  I had a bad night and woke up the next day with a fever. I skipped breakfast, threw up a dose of doxycycline I had taken on an empty stomach, and was hanging up my laundry on the line outside my room when an immaculate white Toyota Land Cruiser drove through the gate. It was blisteringly hot, the dry season that follows the harvest. It had not rained in weeks, and the only thing I could think of in that moment was how this World Food Programme vehicle—and nothing this large, gleaming and official could be called simply a car—had managed to make it all the way from Phnom Penh without picking up a mote of dust. The United Nations official, similarly immaculate in his pressed khaki suit, was the largest Cambodian I had ever seen. Massive. Think football lineman. Think Refrigerator Perry.

  As this tidy apparition descended from the SUV’s plush air-conditioned interior, my feverish brain was convinced I’d discovered where all the good rice had gone. Worst of all, he was smiling. The Khmer smile is famous. It graces the great stone heads of the Angkor temples, and beams from the faces of compassionate golden Buddhas. One discovers that Cambodians smile for all sorts of reasons, not all of them friendly. It is considered impolite if not deranged to strike aggressive poses. So when they are upset or embarrassed, or sometimes when they are angry, Cambodians smile.

  I made a running dive for my room. Wayne should be the one, I rationalized, to make first contact. Hadn’t I done enough damage already? He would call for me when he was ready.

  A few minutes later one of the children conveyed the summons. Wayne had taken the official not to his cramped office, but to the conference room. It seemed a wise strategy, to discuss the situation in a room decorated with photographs of all the wonderful projects Wat Opot had done for the children and the community.

  For the first twenty minutes we exchanged courtesies and tried to decipher each other’s accents. Our visitor’s English, while good, was imprecise. I kept trying to explain that it had all happened because Luke, my conscientious friend, had forwarded a bit of gossip meant for his eyes only. But our visitor seemed uninterested in this. He was mysteriously fixated, for reasons I could not fathom, on the concept of fifty-kilo bags of rice. As we talked, his voice grew tighter, the pitch perceptibly higher. He spoke rapidly, and he never stopped smiling. Finally he made us understand that our rice had been shipped in bags weighing thirty kilos, and that if the bags we received truly weighed fifty kilos, this fact alone was proof that the rice had been switched. As he himself was the shipping coordinator, his own job was on the line. Did we, he dared wonder, have any of the bags left from that shipment? After all the confusion, it came down to a simple matter of visiting the storage shed so he could tear off a few tags to show to the director in Phnom Penh confirming that we had, in fact, received the correct shipment, thus clearing himself of incompetence or complicity in any wrongdoing.

  But why, he persisted, had we written that the bags weighed fifty kilos? Trying to paint the confused scene where I had asked a preoccupied Wayne how much the bags weighed and he had answered “fifty kilos” off the top of his head almost outstripped our powers to explain and the official’s to comprehend. But finally he got it, a comedy of errors. He smiled, and this time it seemed genuine. He was so relieved he took out his wallet and showed us the photos of two plump, immaculate daughters, whose papa’s job was safe.

  For me, this was a lesson in prudence and discretion, in what could go wrong if I did not rein in my flare for the dramatic. As for Wayne, he was vindicated in his faith that my indiscretion would perhaps have positive consequences. He now knows that if there is a problem he is not alone in the field, and that the World Food Programme will probably be respectful and responsive. He found that reassuring, as his past experiences with bureaucracies is that they have not always been supportive. As for the batch of ammoniated rice, which was from a previous delivery, unfortunately we did not have any left to show the visiting official. But clearly the World Food Programme was concerned, and if it happened again we would know who to call.

  By afternoon, as the antibiotics finally took hold, I was feeling a little better. It was late February and the rice fields had been harvested and the once-fresh green rice was now mere stubble. I sat on the cool tiles in the shade out back of the crematorium, writing of the day’s events in my journal. Mister Kosal found me and slept in my lap with his arms and legs flung out wide like a rag doll. I watched him sleep, listened to him breathe, and the simple goodness of a sleeping child on my lap made me feel joyous and whole.

  25

  Pagoda Boys

  If there was one job that Wayne disliked, it was giving the children their daily allowances. Each evening before going home the teacher, Madame Sophea, handed Wayne a list of children who had attended classes that day, and those kids would receive a little spending money, the equivalent perhaps of twenty cents. While this might seem an insignificant sum, having any money at all set our kids apart from the village children. But Wayne reasoned that while a local child might be welcomed home from school with a snack prepared by his own mother, our children had to fend for themselves. For a few pennies a child could buy a colored fruit ice, and still have enough for a hard-boiled egg and a small sack of glass marbles.

  To encourage saving, Wayne set up a banking system where a child might save all or a portion of his allowance. Some kids, like Rajana, saved everything, and over time amassed a tiny fortune. Others saved to buy clothing at the market, and some kids spent every penny on sweets. It was their choice.

  Wayne would sit on a stool with a sheaf of paper money of the smallest denominations, bills worn damp and dog-eared by circulating from hand to hand to hand. Giving out spending money seems a simple task, but in the days before Wayne’s cataract surgery, reading lists written in Madame Sophea’s minuscule script strained his eyes. I offered to take over the job. It was the beginning of my time in Cambodia and I figured it would give me a way to put names and faces together. Equally important, it would give me a chance to say hello to each child at least once every day.

  The first few days were chaos. The waves of children overwhelmed me, and they knew it. Instead of queuing up politely as they did for Wayne, the children became a clamoring mob, jostling each other to get served first, then circling around behind my chair and draping themselves over my shoulders. I felt suffocated and panicked, but slowly I began to learn their names and faces. Over time I relaxed and so, therefore, did the children, and things became more enjoyable.

  Except, that is, when Madame Sophea made an error. If she noted that a child had gone to school when he had not, the entire line of children would become in
dignant and set the record straight. But if, for example, she accidentally left Mister Kosal’s name off the list, then he would draw himself up to his full height and demand his allowance. And the other kids would back him up in a way that permitted no argument. Their sense of justice was unassailable.

  Of course, the Pagoda Boys would show up at allowance time too, right on schedule. They weren’t really bad kids, but they had histories of petty theft, glue sniffing and general mischief. In the local parlance, they might eventually become “gangstas,” small-time criminals who often as not wound up in street gangs or in prison. If they became too troublesome in the community, they might even turn up dead. In a last-ditch effort to straighten them out, their parents sent them to live with the monks. They were not studying for the monkhood, or even going to school. They just cleaned floors, washed clothes and did other odd jobs around the wat. Mostly they tried to stay out of sight.

  Since Molly had left for America no one paid much attention to the Pagoda Boys. I doubt the monks gave them much beyond a place to sleep and a little food. Wayne let them line up for allowances, and they were grateful. I felt sorry for them; compared with our kids they were ragged and unloved. But in truth, a cagier and more disreputable band of little rapscallions you could never hope to meet.

  Though their numbers varied, there were three regulars: Mister Ma, Mister Pa and Mister Da. They would insert themselves here and there in the line, receive their money and then change places, circle back, all sweetness and light, and, in a surreptitious do-si-do, dance right back round again. In the confusion of my early days, when I never knew who was who, I’m sure they succeeded often enough. But after a while I caught on and would scowl at them, and they would look me right in the eye, blink innocently and run off chuckling into the evening. When I complained to Wayne, he said, “Think of what you would do if you had absolutely nothing.”