In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  Rebecca was still at Wat Opot in those days, and not surprisingly she disapproved of giving money to the Pagoda Boys. They were not “our” children, and when Wayne went to Phnom Penh she counted out precisely enough money for the Wat Opot kids, but not a penny extra for the three hustlers.

  I’m not sure how it came about, but one night Rebecca got the notion that the Pagoda Boys might be a fertile field for her proselytizing. She gave each boy an enormous bottle of shampoo, much bigger than our kids ever got, and instructed them to tell the monks, “This is a gift from Jesus.”

  We were all having dinner the next night when the Pagoda Boys showed up, Mister Ma, Mister Pa and Mister Da. They were completely bald. They grinned mischievously at Rebecca, put their hands together and bowed respectfully so she could inspect their freshly shaven heads, and announced, “Monks say to tell you, this is a gift from Buddha.”

  26

  The Dance

  In the 1960s, I spent a summer in Liberia, West Africa. This was twenty years before generations of child soldiers would be consumed by two tragic civil wars, and the capital, Monrovia, was still a sleepy town.

  One afternoon as I was trying to glean a little content from the oscillating sibilance of the shortwave broadcast of the BBC News, the announcement came that Robert Kennedy had been gunned down. They didn’t use his first name, and for a few surreal moments my brain could not grasp what I was hearing. I had been a freshman in college the day President John F. Kennedy died, and my first thought was that I was hearing some odd temporal aberration, a radio signal that had become lost in space, bounced off a distant star, a round-trip of four and a half years, and had just now been picked up by a funky shortwave radio in a little cinder-block house on a beach in Monrovia, Liberia.

  This was only two months after the stunning assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I had been at the University of Michigan on that awful day. The black students had drawn together in a huge circle on the campus quadrangle. They stood, holding hands, heads bowed, mute, inconsolable, while the world held its breath.

  Now Bobby was dead, another senseless loss. Later that day, coming home from buying groceries in the market, my Liberian taxi driver asked me, accusingly, “Why do all Americans carry guns and shoot each other?”

  The next month, July 1968, was the anniversary of the Nigerian Civil War, the Biafran War. I was staying with a friend who had served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria. He was close to a number of Biafran expatriates, Igbo people from the tribe that was fighting to break away from the rest of Nigeria and form an independent state. Some of these expats, who were living in Monrovia, invited my friend and me to a celebration of the first anniversary of Biafran independence. We sat on a little dais watching the proud and poignant observance, knowing what no one would admit that night, that the war was beginning to go badly for the breakaway Igbos, and that this giddy moment might well mark their last anniversary as well as their first. We feasted from huge communal bowls of country rice and goat meat, but I cringed when I was presented with the dish of honor, a dark rich monkey stew. In the center of the broad cauldron protruded a tiny clenched fist, like the hand of the Lady of the Lake, but also too much like a human child’s hand for my sensibilities. All night men in their embroidered finery danced and shouted, sang and drank Guinness Stout mixed with Orange Fanta, but it is the image of that little dark hand that haunts my memory, so evocative of the swollen-bellied, emaciated children who would starve to death before the killing was over.

  When the Biafran War began, my Peace Corps friend was evacuated and reassigned to teach English in Liberia. We lived on South Beach, an area of Monrovia occupied mostly by squatters, a mix of local people and immigrants from Ghana, Senegal and the Gambia. One bad road ran the length of the beach, so rutted that after a rainstorm taxis sank up to their axles and people had to trudge home lugging their bundles through ankle-deep mud.

  Several Peace Corps volunteers who lived down South Beach way approached their local program officer to see about paving the road. This supervisor had been in the country for years and knew a thing or two about how things worked. The volunteers told him they had arranged with army officers in the barracks at the end of South Beach to supply men and machinery for grading the road, provided the volunteers could scrounge up enough blacktop to pave it. The program officer let them know that he could make it happen, but he cautioned strongly against it. Many influential people lived in the sweltering downtown center of Monrovia. Some of them owned beachfront property, but they didn’t pay much attention to what happened on unimproved land. Fix the road, however, and the rich and powerful would descend, evict the squatters and erect fine homes, cooled by the ocean breezes.

  This was my introduction to the concept of unintended consequences. Years later in Cambodia I would listen as Wayne mulled over the possible ramifications of each new project, always wary of the unpredictable. Some volunteers at Wat Opot would become frustrated with his caution, but my experience in Liberia had taught me that when you charge blindly into something new you may do more harm than good, despite your honorable intentions.

  So we left well enough alone on South Beach, and the little woven mat houses continued to flood in the rain, and the rutted road continued to devour taxis, and rain pelted the bam-bam roofs, and we all lived peaceably together. Children played with kites made from sticks and newspaper. Small girls carried younger children on their backs and walked their swaybacked rhythms with full buckets of water on their heads, strengthening their sinews for the elegant carriage they would have as women. Ladies wore their brightly patterned sarongs and made small market, and the air smelled of smoke from plantain fried in red palm oil; we all ate country rice and fiery soups simmered with greens and fish heads, and young men played volleyball on the beach at sunset, while old gentlemen palavered and drank palm wine.

  Replace the red laterite soil with white clay, the scent of palm oil with the tang of lemongrass and fish sauce, and you have evening in Cambodia. No wonder Wat Opot felt like home when I arrived.

  I spent my last afternoon on South Beach knocking on my neighbors’ doors to say goodbye. One after another they welcomed me in and offered tea or Fanta and invited me to sit awhile. We had some memorable conversations, and on that day I felt as never before that I might have been a part of this gracious community. Each person I visited asked me why I had not come before. I had lived a whole summer on South Beach. Neighborhood children had run in and out of our house all day long. Why had I never made the effort to get to know my neighbors? I was very young and it was my first time out of the United States, so I forgive myself my shyness. But I regret the lost opportunity to have made friends with my neighbors. They never called on me, so I imagined they weren’t interested and kept to myself. I suppose they saw me as standoffish at best, or perhaps indifferent. I was a city girl and unaccustomed to the ways of villages. I never understood that it was me who should have played hostess and invited them all for tea. It was a great waste not to have made friends with these marvelous West African ladies. How often do we go hungry in the midst of a feast?

  Forty years later at Wat Opot I would recall this lesson. But not right away.

  My first visit to Wat Opot lasted five months, and much of the time I felt overwhelmed. I stayed close to Wayne, reassured by his calm and compassion and looking to him as my role model. So for those first few months I rarely interacted with the other adults at Wat Opot.

  Wayne pretty much allows people to find their own level, and though I am sure he noticed that I avoided the hospice, he didn’t mention it. Like many people, I didn’t know how to be with the very ill and dying. Where Papa Steve with his expansive personality might offer a vast smile and hold someone’s hand or spend a few minutes cooling a patient with a small plastic fan, I simply wished I could sit by their bed and be present. Instead I always hurried past the hospice, and felt a numbing fear. It wasn’t that I thought I would catch AIDS; I had no problem cuddling with the children. It was more
visceral than that. Not long before I went to Cambodia I had helped care for my own mother for a year as she lay dying of cancer. Paralyzed from the waist down, hers had been an excruciating, attenuated death. Her body was so much my body, so close in form and texture, that there were some days when it seemed it was my own death I was watching play out before my eyes.

  When I came back to Wat Opot the second winter I found the place transformed. Wayne had closed the hospice, and most of the patients had gotten up from their beds and were again involved in the life of the community. Wat Opot had become more like a small village. The children seemed encouraged by the adults’ return to the world of the living. Deaths were rare now, and the children were beginning to believe that they might indeed have a chance to grow up. With the hospice closed, Wayne was getting more sleep and could concentrate on the needs of the children and on developing programs to enrich their lives. A new mood of ease and hope permeated Wat Opot.

  Whenever Wayne was away, his assistant Mr. Sary was in charge and the energy at Wat Opot would subtly shift. Suddenly it would feel like a small Khmer village. I would notice this shift late at night, in glimpses of a world that Wayne and I were not a part of. In the dry season, for instance, Khmer people nap during the oppressive heat of the day and stay up late enjoying the evening. With Wayne away, there were little card games and clusters of people chatting on the swings outside the clinic. Children would slip outside and spread their sleeping mats on the cool earth. The weavers would gather on the bamboo beds outside their quarters, and tease each other and look up at the stars, and sometimes late at night they would bake taro root in the coals of little campfires.

  One night, when Wayne had gone to Phnom Penh, everyone decided it was high time they had a dance. The first I heard of it was when Mr. Sary began to construct the Tower of Power. A brigade of kids passed one loudspeaker after another from the dining hall to the pounded dirt courtyard right outside my window. As Sary built the wall, several speakers wide, he climbed atop each new level and one of the bigger boys would pass the next row of speakers up to him. In this way the tower grew to a height of twelve feet.

  Any time I went to a Khmer wedding in the village I found a tower that reached the ceiling of the tent. The equalizer’s sliders would be precisely adjusted to a maximum of excruciation, and the music itself, distorted beyond recognition, would resemble the bellowing of the primordial OM at the creation of the universe. As representatives of Wat Opot, Wayne and I were always offered the table of honor, right in front of the Tower of Power. We would politely demur, insisting that we were not worthy of such regard, and that we should surely sit way over there, with the children and poor relations. Wayne, characteristically insightful, countered my complaints about impending deafness by explaining that the noise was in fact a manifestation of generosity. If one is having a happy occasion, wouldn’t one wish to share the joy with one’s neighbors? “Even one’s neighbors in Phnom Penh?” I grumbled, wondering whether wearing earmuffs would constitute a breach of etiquette at a Khmer wedding.

  So when I saw what was taking shape in the courtyard outside my room, I fled, ready to bury my head under a pillow for the duration. I was not at all comforted by the knowledge that dry-season parties often last until three in the morning.

  For about an hour I sulked. I tried to read or write in my journal, but nothing could exist in my brain in the same space as that noise. I was about to go bonkers when the thought came to me of that last day in Liberia, saying goodbye to the women of South Beach, and all the missed opportunities. “What are you doing here?” I asked myself. “Trying not to go deaf,” I replied, abashed. “Well, deary, you make your own Heaven and Hell. You can either sit in here and complain and have a miserable night, or risk a little deafness and join the fun.” So I took a shower, wrapped myself in my prettiest sarong and ventured out into the cacophonous pandemonium.

  The claxon struck me full force when I stepped outside, and I almost lost heart, but then Sampeah spotted me, and soon a whooping mob of kids was running over and grabbing my hands and escorting me to the edge of the crowd. I lingered for a few moments, watching the circle of women perform their lovely line dance. They advanced with stately steps, swaying their hips and sculpting the air with their hands, the minimalist symmetry highlighting the pure grace of their movements.

  Ouen took my arm, as he had that day at the eye clinic, gallantly playing the dutiful grandson, and guided me into the circle. The women took me up and began to teach me the steps and gestures, laughing at my awkwardness, but welcoming me all the same. Intoxicated with their open hearts, I danced with them late into the night, and for a few days after the party, whenever I ran into one of these women in the hall or on a path, they might begin moving their hands in dance gestures, and I would join them, and we would dance around and past each other, bumping hips and laughing.

  As in long-ago Liberia, acceptance had been there for me all along, and once I began to offer myself, the friendships blossomed. Most of the women spoke little English, and my Khmer was likewise dreadful, but there was abundant goodwill.

  I dreamed that night that I was by myself in my room. I was enjoying the peace and quiet when a Cambodian man entered with a transistor radio. He smiled at me and then turned on the radio, and played his music very loud. I looked at him, smiling sweetly, of course, as one does in Cambodia, not wishing to give offense, and said, “Shhhhhh.” He smiled back and nodded, and cranked the sound even louder. Suddenly I realized with that logic peculiar to dreams that “Shhhh” in Khmer means “Please turn it up louder.” (Incidentally, the Khmer language lacks a “shhhh” sound, but dreams have their own rules, even their own linguistics.)

  Some nights after evening clinic I would sit outside with the women, eight or ten of us crowded onto a bamboo bed, giggling and joking, poking at each other’s breasts like a party of old bawds. They never tire of telling me mine were tomaaaah!, holding their hands apart like an old fisherman bragging about the biggest catch of his life. Clearly, they saw my melons as a marvel of nature, the Cyrano’s nose of tits. We laughed for hours. The children came and went, leaning in for a quick hug before going back to play. Older boys wandered by with flashlights and bamboo traps, hunting for frogs. Insects sang and the moon rose in the clear dry-season heavens, and we all relaxed and enjoyed the evening until finally we hugged each other and drifted off to bed.

  27

  A Seventy-Two-Year-Old Grandmother

  A seventy-two-year-old yei with AIDS came to the clinic. She told Wayne she had caught the disease from her husband. “He was playing around and I threw him out several times,” she said.

  “Well then, what happened?”

  “I took him back … once too often.”

  28

  A House with High Walls

  Between trips to Cambodia I sometimes speak to groups about Wat Opot. Now and then someone in the audience feels moved to volunteer, and I help them prepare for their trip. After they return I am anxious to hear about their experience. I ask many questions, but short-term visitors, jet-lagged, inundated by a flood of children, can hardly give me the news I crave. Frustrated by their generalities, I have to remind myself how long it took me to learn scores of unfamiliar Khmer names. But if I listen carefully, I can begin to tease out news about specific children. As with adults, certain kids stand out in a crowd: Little Run with his huge ears and overwhelming need to be held, Pesei who is so personable and makes such an effort to interact with foreigners, serious Rajana, Ouen, Chan Tevy.

  Sometimes two souls connect quickly and deeply, and the returning volunteer will tell a story of one child who has become a true loved one and how painful it was to leave her or him behind. But in the end these glimpses mostly set me to wandering through my own memories, and more often than not these are memories of Miss Srey Mom.

  Most of the children do well at Wat Opot, even if they have come from dire situations. But children have some needs that cannot be met very well in a large, unruly communi
ty. For those who have grown up on the street or in abusive situations, Wat Opot can be a haven. But for a few children like Srey Mom, raised in comfortable, loving families, for whom the doors of Paradise have abruptly swung shut, life at Wat Opot can seem devastatingly lonely.

  Hoping to marry after their parents died, Srey Mom’s sisters abandoned her at Wat Opot. Yet underneath her trauma I sensed a little girl from a middle-class family who had been her parents’ darling. She was personable and confident, even funny, but she had profound needs for the intimate, bonded relationship she must have had with her own father and mother.

  To make matters worse, Srey Mom had tuberculosis as well as AIDS when she came to us, and she had to undergo six months of antibiotics before she could begin to receive antiretroviral drugs. The underlying disease weakened her, and she had frequent fevers and a recurring ear infection with a strong odor that made other children avoid her. Older girls, the pretty girls who might have been big sisters to her, shunned her.

  Like other new arrivals, Srey Mom was assigned a “mother,” one of the women patients who are paid a small stipend to look after the younger children. Wayne cannot afford to hire outside caregivers, and many women from the village would be afraid to care for children with AIDS. Most of the so-called mothers do a good job, but for a few it is primarily just a way to earn money. Many of them have children of their own, and all the women are patients, and are living with their own sadness.