by Gail Gutradt
Madame Ketmoni, who became Srey Mom’s caretaker, is a shrewd market woman, a survivor. She set up a small business on the grounds of Wat Opot, selling snacks to the children after school. From the daily market in Chambok she brought fruit and sweets and cans of juice and soda and spread them out under the huge tamarind tree near the dining hall. Sometimes she boiled eggs, or cooked fish with green mango chutney. She hung her string hammock from a strong limb of the tree and there she spent her afternoons, suspended like a resourceful spider. From where she sat, she managed to intercept the major portion of the children’s allowances before they spent them on the little colored ices sold by vendors from the village.
Ketmoni took care of Srey Mom when she was ill and looked after her, but she was not the nurturing mother Srey Mom needed. After a time Srey Mom went to live with Thida, a woman with four children of her own. Thida’s two daughters, both teenagers, avoided the little girl, who had by then become depressed and had begun to neglect her body. Now and then her sisters would bring her a pretty new outfit, but these stayed in her basket, unworn. Instead, she wore the same soiled pajamas day and night for days at a time and resisted our urging to wash her hair or put on clean clothes. She began to have hair lice. AIDS made her vulnerable to skin infections, and now and then the women shaved her head to get rid of the lice and to better treat the fungus. Bald, her head smeared with white powder, she was mortified and became even more withdrawn.
First Wayne tried to treat the ear infections. Then an ear specialist in Phnom Penh gave her a stronger antibiotic, but the problem came back. Fevers came and went, sometimes lasting for days. One night I went to Thida’s apartment to check on Srey Mom and found her asleep on the cool tiles. All the children sleep on mats, often with no padding, but when I saw her on the floor, wrapped in a thin blanket, feverish, with all life going on around her in a brightly lighted room, she looked as alone as anyone could be in this world. I wanted to pick her up and take her home with me and love her, and I knew that was impossible. I asked myself whether I should take her into my own room and take care of her for the rest of my stay at Wat Opot. But I was afraid of her great need, and perhaps of my own, and what the parting would be like when, in a few weeks, I left for America. In the end, would the promise of a caring parent turn out to be only another abandonment?
Wayne tells me that Srey Mom’s AIDS has become resistant to first-line antiretrovirals. The doctors have put her on second-line drugs, and she is doing better, but Wayne worries about whether she will survive. In the end, we fear, it may not be the disease that takes her, but the sadness.
After lunch, fifteen or twenty children come to my porch to play with the Legos I brought from the States. Some play in groups, building fanciful constructs. Pesei works alone, often in my room, where it is quiet. His creations are intricate and cerebral: a building with an interior circular staircase that can only be glimpsed through a tiny door in the roof, flying machines with hinged, prehensile elements and unlikely functions. His conceptual abilities amaze me. He is the only one who has attempted to build any of the objects in the instruction books, but like the others he mostly has no use for the manuals and prefers to build from his imagination. In contrast to the complexity of Pesei’s vision, Mister Vantha flies to the moon on a craft of two or three crossed pieces of plastic. For him it is enough to stretch this tiny suggestion of a spaceship toward the sky and he is off, careening through the stratosphere, buzzing and spluttering as he inhabits the aircraft of his imagination.
Off to the side sits Miss Srey Mom, all alone, quietly building a house out of Legos. It is, with slight variations, the same house she built yesterday and the day before. Sometimes there is a pretty garden in front, with a symmetrical avenue of flowers and plastic palm trees. Other times there is no garden, but the house is still the same. She lays the first course of bricks around the periphery of the house and then installs the door. She opens the door, and then she closes it firmly, and builds the walls of the house. Atop each wall, which varies in height from day to day depending on how many blocks she has managed to commandeer in the initial free-for-all with the other children, she places a plastic dinosaur or pterodactyl. These gargoyles face outward to the four directions, fiercely protecting the inhabitants inside; there are always three.
“You?” I ask, pointing to the tiny figure she has placed in a small bed. She looks up and nods. “And?” I point to the other two.
“Mama. Papa.”
Then she drops her head and continues building walls, higher and ever higher.
29
And Yet…
One day I was telling a friend a story from Wat Opot about a girl and a boy who got into trouble together and were both expelled from the community. Wayne had been adamant that this expulsion was necessary; I was not so sure. My friend, who always listened well and took the long view on such matters, pointed out that the conflict between Wayne’s viewpoint and my own was fundamental and even archetypal. Whereas I was acting the part of the mother, determined that no single child should fall by the wayside and be lost, Wayne was forced to make all decisions from a different perspective: What is best for the health of the entire community?
With my friend’s insight to guide me, I grew more sensitive to the complexity of the demands Wayne faces every day. His decisions directly affect the lives of more than a hundred people, and sometimes there is no “right” decision but only what seems like a better choice, one with fewer potentially harmful side effects. I may at times still disagree with him, but never again will I do so without a profound respect for the agonizing choices he is forced to make.
What prepares a person to make these kinds of decisions? Wayne’s whole life has trained him to ponder the meaning and consequences of his actions. His early religious training stressed stringent self-examination as a spiritual practice. He tells me that every year—and I reckon it is far more frequently than that—he has made a formal examination of conscience.
Wayne also carries with him scars of regret for some of his past decisions. When he tells the story of how, while on a patrol as a medic during the Vietnam War, he failed twice on the same day to intervene and prevent the deaths of two Vietnamese children, the listener feels compelled to forgive by reminding him of all the good he has done in the world since that time. Had Wayne directly disobeyed orders in the field he might have faced a court-martial. Wayne refuses to accept the listener’s absolution, which in truth the listener has no right to offer. One has only to think of the excuses served up by Nazi war criminals to understand the full implications. Wayne’s failure to save those children, even at risk to his own life, forces him forever to continually redefine the meaning of his life. When he states clearly that his work at Wat Opot has been and remains his atonement, this is not hyperbole, but his true and genuine soul offering: to spend the rest of his life making up for that one day.
And so whenever Wayne is faced with a decision that will profoundly affect the lives of other people, or even whether they will be given the antiretroviral medicines that will allow them to live, his moment of decision must be examined against the backdrop of a man seeking to probe and redefine the meaning of his own life and how he sees himself as a human being.
The following episodes may shed light on some of the excruciating moral dilemmas that confront Wayne every day.
HONDURAS
One night Wayne told me the story of a poor man who came to see him in Yocón, the little village in Honduras where he worked as a barefoot doctor from 1984 until 1996. This hamlet, hours away from any hospital, was as violent as the Wild West, and much of Wayne’s work involved removing bullets or sewing up machete wounds after bar fights. But on this night a man from the countryside walked into Wayne’s office carrying his daughter in his arms. She was about five, very ill, too sick for Wayne to treat. He urged the man to take his little girl to the hospital at once, but the father had no money, so Wayne gave him twenty dollars for fees and transport and sent him off.
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sp; A few weeks later the man returned with another child.
“How is your daughter?” Wayne asked.
It turned out that the man had not taken his daughter to the hospital that night. He had taken her home, where she had died.
Wayne was incensed. “So now you are bringing me another child, and I am supposed to help you? Or do you just want me to give you more money?”
The man sat meekly with downcast eyes and waited for Wayne to finish. Then, quietly, he explained that as he waited for transport to carry his daughter and himself to the hospital he had begun to think. His little girl was gravely ill, and he knew that if she saw the doctor she might possibly recover. And yet … there was a better chance she would die anyway. The man had ten hungry children at home, and with twenty dollars he could feed them all for weeks. So after agonizing over his choices, the man had made the terrible decision and taken his daughter home.
MISS MALIS
Miss Malis [MaLEE] was new to Wat Opot, but she was clearly not settling in very well. Wayne told me Malis had no social skills. That was an understatement. Her clothes were dirty, her hair unwashed. She slumped around with her head hung down and her shoulders hunched up. The other children clearly disliked her and treated her as an outcast; boys ran up and whispered things in her ear, things that made her cry. When she wasn’t sobbing she mostly sulked or stayed far away from the rest of the kids. The kids said she was ch’goo-ut—crazy.
Miss Malis had been living with her aunt and uncle in the village and was ten years old when her aunt brought her to Wat Opot. The aunt told Wayne that Malis was retarded and crazy and she could no longer have her in her house. By the time I arrived, Wayne had concluded that Malis was not crazy and she was definitely not retarded. True, she didn’t get along with the others, but he suspected that her behavior, like her posture, had been devised to protect herself.
But from what? The most likely scenario was that someone had been trying to abuse her, and she had kept him away by making herself as repulsive as possible. Wayne supposed that her aunt was afraid her husband would beat her or leave if she confronted him, so she did the only thing she could think of to protect her niece. She moved her to Wat Opot.
When Miss Malis slouched across campus I sometimes caught up with her. I would put my hands on her shoulders and gently straighten her posture. “Srey sa-aat,” I’d tell her. “Pretty miss, don’t walk like a s’waa.” (S’waa means monkey.) Then we’d laugh and do monkey imitations and I’d launch into a routine that Papa Steve had, about monkeys eating mangoes, “S’waa hoap s’wai.” Then reverse it to “S’wai hoap s’waa,” mango eats monkey. It was silly, but Miss Malis would laugh and straighten up, and I’d give her a few packets of soap and shampoo so she could wash the lice out of her hair. Over time she started taking care of herself, and she began to do well in school.
The older pretty girls, the three who might have been prom queens or cheerleaders in the States, did not approve of my paying attention to Miss Malis. Once, when she had a bad cold, I took her into my room and fed her some ginger tea. For a week the three girls refused to talk to me. I was livid. I had had my fill of girls like that in junior high school.
But one night I heard a commotion and ran outside to see Malis cowering on the ground, with the three alpha chicks hitting her, chanting, “Ch’goo-ut! Ch’goo-ut!” I broke up the fight and took the girls aside and gave them each a talking-to. They made a show of ignoring me, but I never saw them hit her again.
I spoke to Wayne about the incident. He said that he mostly tries to stay out of such things unless they get violent. He figures that with so many children there will be inevitable jockeying to establish a pecking order, and the sooner everyone knows where they stand the easier things will go for the newcomers. In his experience, interfering only prolongs the agony.
Wayne recalled being low man on the totem poll himself. He said it had strengthened his character and made him more resilient.
Maybe. But I wasn’t satisfied.
I slumped in my chair remembering how low I had been in the pecking order when I was in grade school. It amazed me to see the same sort of behavior here in a Cambodian orphanage that I had experienced in a middle-class New York City public school in the 1950s. Amid all this misery and loss, to add the animal urge to cull the herd…
“I really hate this,” I told Wayne.
“We gotta love ’em all.” Wayne shrugged. “But we don’t always have to like ’em.”
During my first winter at Wat Opot the children mostly slept together in a small tin-roofed stucco building. The oldest boys hung hammocks and spread their sleeping mats on tables in the dining room on the other side of campus, but the younger boys and all the girls slept in the dorm. There was a ruckus one day, and it turned out that some of the boys had been bullying Miss Malis, had threatened to come after her in the night. Wayne called a meeting of all the children. He was solemn. First he promised that no one would be punished. He only wanted to be clear about what had happened. Then he asked those kids who were not directly involved and those who had not witnessed the events firsthand to leave. Then he locked the door and settled himself on a high stool.
“We have a decision to make,” Wayne began. “We must decide whether we want to live our lives as human beings or as animals.” Then Wayne asked the kids what was going on, and they told him, because they felt safe and trusted Wayne to keep his word that no one would be punished. In the end Wayne told the kids that they were getting to an age where it was better for boys and girls to sleep separately. It was all very calm, very quiet, but the kids got the message, and that was the end of that. For now.
When I returned to Wat Opot the second winter, Miss Malis seemed to be doing better. She had moved to the other side of campus, away from the older girls, and was living with one of the families. She seemed at ease; she had grown taller and stood straighter and she was near the top of her class in school. She had her own circle of friends. One evening, watching her dance at a party, I remarked to Wayne that she was growing into a lovely young woman.
Five months later I went back to the States, but kept in close touch with the doings at Wat Opot. One night just after Cambodian New Year I received an email from Wayne telling me that they’d had their “first sex episode.” It had happened between Miss Malis and Samrang, one of the older boys; they are both HIV negative. With so many kids growing up together we had all been wondering when something like that might happen. Wayne’s response was to have both of them leave Wat Opot.
Samrang, a big strong youth, was old enough to look for work in the outside world. He had not been applying himself in school and lately had not been getting along with anyone. Wayne felt “he wanted to fly, but he was needing a push.” Samrang asked Wayne to allow Malis to stay. He argued that it was his fault because he had come home drunk from a New Year’s celebration. But Wayne decided that since Miss Malis had approached Samrang she should be held equally responsible.
When the young woman’s family in the village learned of the incident they wanted the kids to marry at once. Their marriage would, in effect, have made Wayne her father-in-law, because Wayne is Samrang’s legal guardian. Then, regardless of what happened between the two kids, Wayne would have been responsible for Miss Malis and for any children she might bear.
Meanwhile, Wayne had discovered that this was not Malis’s first sexual encounter. It was common knowledge—to everyone but Wayne—that she had been sexually active for some time. With so many boys coming of age, Wayne decided it would not be wise to allow her to remain as a full-time resident of Wat Opot. Wayne told me that even the younger children were aware of what had happened, and took it as a lesson. To have allowed Malis to stay would have set a bad example for all of the children.
Samrang went to Battambang to work in a gas station. Before long he realized how limited his options were without an education, so he asked Wayne about coming back to school. Wayne told him that if he studied and did well in his exams he would recei
ve help with his school fees, but Wayne would not allow him to move back to Wat Opot. Samrang, Wayne decided, must live with the monks next door.
As I read Wayne’s email in my study in Maine, I was troubled by his decision to force Miss Malis to leave Wat Opot. I wondered whether she was being punished for things that had happened to her when she was a child. Had Wat Opot somehow failed her? She had entered as a traumatized, very possibly sexually abused little girl. She had been ostracized and further brutalized at Wat Opot by a clique of older girls. If someone had asked me which of our girls might turn to sex as a way of gaining a sense of acceptance and love, I would have guessed Miss Malis.
I told Wayne that I worried that sending Malis to her uncle’s house would expose her to abuse. Couldn’t he make an exception? Here I was speaking as a mother, concerned only for the welfare of one child. And yet I could see that Wayne might need to make a different and far more difficult decision, one that he felt was best for the entire community.
Part of the problem lies in how few adults there are to look after all these children. I think Malis needed someone to care about her all the time, someone to shepherd her through her teenage years. At Wat Opot, volunteers come and go, and even if we are there for months it is never long enough to give the continuity the children need. We can grow close to a child for a little while and see them again if we return, but most children, like Malis, need more consistent guidance than that. Even if Wayne had the money to hire more help, it is hard to find adults in the village who are willing to be foster parents, especially to children with HIV/AIDS.