In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  But for Wayne, who is there always, departures for whatever reason, sad or hopeful, are difficult, like the loss of a child he has loved. Here are five stories of children who left Wat Opot, each under different circumstances, each for a different reason.

  MISTER VANTHA: A Human Annuity

  Every morning before breakfast the children come to the clinic for their medicines. Anything else may change, but not this. AIDS medicines must be taken on an exact schedule, and the twice-daily dosing is the metronome of our lives.

  After morning clinic, Wayne takes his breakfast in the little round gazebo that sits on an island, accessible by a narrow log bridge—or, for an agile child, broad-jumping from the opposite bank. To the right is the main dining hall, with its dramatic conical roof, and to the left the new three-room schoolhouse, which the children have made beautiful with murals. Behind this a little pond separates the campus from the wat next door. The soil, predominantly clay, makes of the water a whitish slurry. A young monk comes to the pond every morning to fetch water for the garden. He carries two old paint buckets, suspended from a shoulder yoke, back up the mossy steps. Pigs wander by, indifferent to an elderly monk washing himself under his saffron robe; he scoops his bathwater from a concrete cistern. Chickens peck at water splashes in the dust. A raft of ducks pours over the banks and proceeds to feed, quack and engage in frequent and astonishing feats of submerged fornication. After being grasped by the neck and pinned underwater by the mounting males, the female ducks finally shake them off and bob to the surface with squawking, ruffled indignation. There is something altogether mesmerizing about watching this spectacle after one has been living for many months in a celibate community. The ducks leave their eggs here and there along the banks of the pond, where children search for them. A tiny blue kingfisher, iridescent as a hummingbird, hovers and dives, snatching up a dragonfly with a body the crimson of Chinese cinnabar.

  From where he sits Wayne can see most everything that goes on: sleepy children leaving for school in their white shirts; the ice man delivering shrinking blocks swathed in burlap in the back of his dripping wagon; the cook leaving for market to fetch the day’s vegetables. Lovely Madame Sophea, the teacher, arrives on her moto, perfectly groomed in an outfit she has tailored herself. She parks her bike and picks her way elegantly along the stony path. Three tiny girls, exactly matched in height and proportion, run to meet her. Miss Raksmai, still too young for school, is herding muddy piglets with a slender branch. Now and then you’ll see her, the little boss of Wat Opot, following a few yards behind Wayne, her tummy thrust out, hands clasped behind her back, peering to right and to left, inspecting everything in exact mimicry of Wayne’s gait and posture.

  Breakfast is usually the same from one day to the next: tea, fried duck eggs, Khmer French bread, packs of instant ramen. We make the noodles with hot water and soy sauce, but the children run around waving bricks of noodles and eating them dry. They are salty and taste like potato chips. Now and then we have sardines canned in tomato sauce. I buy instant oatmeal in Phnom Penh, made in China. To the children oatmeal is a suspicious alien substance, even when I try to explain that it is like their bobor, rice porridge. No, this is not rice. Rice is food, but this stuff … who can say? I understand completely this need for familiar food. I avoid such Khmer delicacies as duck eggs that are prepared just before the ducklings are about to hatch, so the little ducks are steamed fully formed in their shells, beaks and feet and feathers and all. And the flat baskets of scorpions and great black water bugs laid out for sale on the streets of Phnom Penh. Still, eaten dry, oatmeal has possibilities, and I spend most of my breakfast dispensing pinches of dry oatmeal into little licked palms.

  About the time we sit down for breakfast, or for any meal, we see in the distance a determined little boy, Mister Vantha [VanTAH], making his way across the campus. Vantha’s progress from any one point to any other point is remarkable. He does not so much walk as wheel through his world with an easy economy of motion. His bare feet are strong and broad, his steps light and sure. Confronted with any obstacle he will scale, swim, climb or tunnel, rather than circumambulate. A tree in his path is an opportunity to forage for a tart green mango, a pile of sand a place to proclaim himself King of the Hill. A fence is a tightrope and a table a diving board. A white humpbacked bull breakfasting on Wayne’s bougainvillea invites a David and Goliath face-off, with Vantha vanquishing the great beast with a volley of gravel and valiant shouts of “Hoi! Hoi!”

  He is wearing a red striped T-shirt, which disappears somewhere between the clinic and the gazebo, leaving only his green-and-white jersey shorts, which ride long and precariously low on his hips. Sometimes he loses them, too. He does not notice. Vantha marches to a different dinner bell. For he knows when and where there will be food, and materializes unfailingly, as if summoned. Then he will fix you with an expression, not of supplication but of delighted, confident entitlement, as if to say, “I am cute. Feed me.” And he is. And you do.

  Then he will climb into your lap, or into Wayne’s. He is a stocky little boy, with a broad chest, but when you lift him up you are surprised. It is as if he has pushed off from the earth to assist you, and countered the force of gravity, and he is as light as a windblown seed. And when you hold him you feel the unguardedness of his musculature. No armoring, just the generous, supple ease of a being supremely confident, totally at home in his world.

  Mister Vantha was born in a nearby village. His mother was a prostitute. When he was born a couple without children offered to buy him. There are no social programs for the aged here, and the elderly count on having children to take care of them, so Vantha was sold to the neighbors. They would raise him, and he would do his duty when the couple grew too old to take care of themselves: a human annuity.

  Shortly after he was adopted, Vantha’s birth mother was diagnosed HIV positive. The people who bought him, fearing he might be infected, took him to Wayne to be tested. Wayne explained that a young baby who tested positive might just be carrying his mother’s antibodies and eventually test negative. They insisted on a test and, sure enough, Vantha was positive. Wayne recommended that the couple take him home and bring him back when he was a year old. But no, they did not want him if there was any chance at all he might be infected. They had paid for a child to take care of them, and they could not afford to raise a little boy who would eat their rice and become a burden, and who might never grow up to repay their investment. They insisted that Wayne keep him, retest him when he was a year old and let them know.

  In the end, Vantha tested negative, and Wayne contacted his new parents. They said they would be along for him. When I arrived at Wat Opot, Vantha was five years old. They had never come, had never even called to check on how he was. Wayne said he expected they would let him raise Vantha, feed and educate him, and then claim him when he was old enough to be useful. I thought Wayne was being cynical.

  One afternoon, when Vantha was six years old, the people who had bought him arrived at Wat Opot. They told Wayne they were just looking in on him, to see how he was doing. Of course, Vantha did not know them. Wayne asked if they intended to take Vantha home permanently at some point, and they said they did, one of these days. Wayne thought about it for a moment. Vantha was thriving. He was about to start school. He was one of the happiest kids at Wat Opot and everyone loved him. Wayne loved him. He was hoping the people would let Vantha grow up and go to school at Wat Opot with his brothers and sisters, so he decided to force the point. Maybe they would change their minds, or even relinquish their claim.

  “It is not fair to take him after he has started school,” Wayne insisted. “I do not want him to meet you and then always be worrying about when it will happen. Take him now or leave him.” When they said they would take him, Wayne was stunned. He had no legal right to Vantha. Suddenly there was no turning back.

  The entire exchange had taken ten minutes. The people gathered Vantha and his few belongings and left. He did not even have a chance to
say goodbye to the other children, the only family he had ever known. The few children who were home from school when Vantha left were speechless. Vantha, who hardly ever cries, stared in uncomprehending shock at the world he was about to lose. His new father carried him off in his arms. Vantha’s powerful little body was limp, the life force drained out of him. His hand wrapped unconsciously around one of his new father’s fingers. He needed something to hold on to … anything.

  Like seeds in the wind, these children who leave are blown here and there, sometimes to thrive, sometimes to perish. Growing up at Wat Opot with Wayne and a mob of siblings, Vantha might have been educated, given opportunities he will never receive. Now he will grow up in a village, to do the duty of a traditional Khmer boy, working in the fields, taking care of aging parents. Will he wilt, or will he set down roots deep in his own culture, and grow strong?

  It was about a year after they took him. Vantha had been ill, and the people who purchased him brought him back to see Wayne. They wanted to know if it would be expensive to cure him—in which case, they did not want to keep him. Wayne admits to having been tempted to tell them it would be complicated and very expensive, but it was not in him to lie, and he said that if they took Vantha to the doctor he would be okay and it would not cost them very much. Wayne had not gone to see the boy in the year since he had left Wat Opot because he didn’t want to make it more difficult for Vantha to make the transition to his new life. He told me that Vantha looked confused and unhappy. It broke Wayne’s heart to see him, and mine to hear about it.

  MISS CHAN TEVY: Going Home

  The very dramatic Miss Chan Tevy (whom Wayne had dubbed Miss Sarah Bernhardt), the little girl who always demanded shampoo and cookies, and more of whatever you had just given her, came to Wat Opot when she was an infant. Her parents had died of AIDS and she too was failing, although the aunt who had taken her in loved her and did her best to care for her. Her uncle, frightened by the illness, did not want her in his house. Finally, to keep peace at home, her aunt allowed Wayne and Rebecca to take her to Wat Opot, the first child to live there. This was in 2001.

  With treatment, Chan Tevy’s health improved. Her aunt visited now and then, and when the little girl was old enough she would return to her family for holidays. Perhaps her uncle began to understand that she was not a danger to him. Perhaps she had reached an age when she could be useful around the house. Certainly her aunt had never stopped caring about her. Whatever the reasons, her visits home grew longer and more frequent, and one day it was decided that she would move back to the village to live with her people. Chan Tevy was eight years old.

  With support from the Home Care team, she still sees the doctors for her medicine. Sometimes on Rice Day she visits her brothers and sisters at Wat Opot. It is surely a sign of progress that people with AIDS are beginning to be accepted in some of the villages, although Wayne still hears of children isolated out of fear, or of mothers who, too poor to take care of them, abandon their babies in a ditch or in the bush.

  BABY LEET: Abandoned and Reclaimed

  Some of these abandoned babies come to live at Wat Opot. Wayne writes of a little boy named Leet [LEE-it], whose mother was a sex worker. She could not care for the baby and left him with an old woman in the village. She promised to send money for food, as the old woman could scarcely feed herself, but the money never arrived and the baby grew weak. Finally the old woman brought him to Wat Opot, and although he was so ill and malnourished that Wayne feared he would grow up brain damaged if he survived, still Wayne could not allow him to die. Over time Leet recovered, and as the baby of the family he became everyone’s darling.

  One day a young woman appeared. She told Wayne she was “just checking” on the baby on behalf of the old woman in the village, but Wayne saw at once that she was Leet’s mother. Some months later she returned, and this time she wanted to take her little boy with her. Her life was more stable now, she said, and she hoped she could take care of him.

  It was a difficult decision for Wayne. Leet was thriving at Wat Opot. Still, she was his mother, and her original abandonment had come about because of poverty and fear, and because she could no longer bear to listen to him crying from hunger. Wayne could see that she loved him and that she would do her best to take care of him, so he agreed, and the entire community turned out to wave goodbye as Leet and his mother rode off on a moto into an uncertain future.

  MISS RAKSMAI: Adoption

  Wayne does not envision Wat Opot as an orphanage, so his focus has never been on finding adoptive parents for the children. To introduce that sense of transience would undermine the feeling of stability, and change the focus of Wat Opot. Some children are more adoptable than others because they are younger or HIV negative—or, for the bald truth, they are just cuter or less emotionally damaged or more socially skilled. Wayne wishes to protect the feelings of the children who would be left behind, lest they feel less precious, more like discards. Already in their brief lives they have endured too much rejection. Why add to their trauma the disappointment of being passed over again and again as their siblings are adopted? Why make adoption the focus of their aspiration, the measure of their worth?

  But occasionally a situation arises where there seems to be a match between a child and prospective parents who come recommended by someone Wayne knows personally, a case where he judges that adoption may improve the child’s chance for a good life. This is especially true with little girls. A girl growing up in Cambodia without parents still has scant chance of making a good marriage. How would an orphaned child fare if it were known that her parents died of AIDS? Although conditions may be changing, and educated girls may someday have better opportunities, our kids still face many obstacles. So when Wayne heard from a trusted friend that she knew of a couple from Australia who had already adopted a Cambodian boy and were looking for a daughter to complete their family, he thought of Miss Raksmai.

  Miss Raksmai was two years old. She was quirky and funny and loved to dance. She had been raised here from infancy, after her mother died of AIDS and her biological father abandoned the family. She was cared for by Sari Yei, a grandmother from the village who had lost a child of her own to AIDS. She is a warm, loving woman with many grandchildren. She took our babies at night to her tiny house in the village, and they were raised as her own.

  Miss Raksmai grew up protected and loved and indulged by Sari Yei and by all her brothers and sisters at Wat Opot. She was nurtured, played with, teased and passed from hand to hand to hand dozens of times every day. She was a delightful baby, and with so much attention she grew into a formidable toddler, a climber of window grates and table legs, comfortable with strangers, piglets and large white cows, and happy with all sorts of people. She was strongly independent. She smiled easily, rarely cried and could hold her own with bullies. At Wat Opot, children are safe to wander about by themselves, discovering sand piles and bricks, chasing chickens and climbing mango trees. Once she even jumped in the pond and thought it was hilarious when Mr. Sary, who could not swim, had to dive in after her.

  Only once did she cause us worry, and that was the night we almost lost her: a terrible night when she was about a year old. She had been ill with diarrhea for several days and was becoming dehydrated. Wayne tried to give her an IV, but her veins were tiny and elusive. It was late, and there would be no doctors available at Takeo Hospital until morning. Sari Yei was holding her, trying to give her a bottle, but she was not sucking. We were all sitting together in the common area outside the clinic watching soap operas before going to bed. I walked by and looked at Raksmai lying in Sari Yei’s lap and stopped short.

  Back home in the States I used to collect daguerreotypes and tintypes, the earliest kinds of photographs. In the mid-1800s only professional photographers owned cameras, and when a baby died, mourning parents would sometimes hire a photographer to make one image, likely the only one they would ever have of the child they had lost. I learned to recognize these images—even though the children
were often propped up in natural-looking poses—by a characteristic shadowy hollowness about the child’s eyes, perhaps caused by the same dehydration that was plaguing Raksmai that night. At least that is what shocked me when I looked at her, lying very still in Sari Yei’s lap.

  I yelled for Wayne and Rebecca, and they whisked her into the office and began working frantically to rouse her. They examined her eyes with a penlight; her pupils barely responded. Her fontanel, the membrane at the crown of her head, was deeply recessed, confirming that she was seriously dehydrated. Finally, Rebecca sunk her fingernails into the soles of Raksmai’s foot, and she stirred a little bit, and Wayne and Rebecca began feeding her fluids with a syringe. At first she sucked weakly, but Rebecca stayed up all night with her, giving her a few drops at a time, and when the hospital opened the next day Rebecca rode with her to Takeo, where the doctors managed to insert an IV. Within a few days Miss Raksmai had recovered.

  About a year later Wayne heard from his friend about that young couple from Australia with the Cambodian son. Although Wayne was worried, not having met these prospective parents, he agreed to the adoption. In our conversations, Wayne wondered whether Raksmai would truly be better off leaving all the people who loved her to go to live with these strangers in a more materialistic society. It was not as if she had chosen these people for her parents, he said, not like bringing home the boy you want to marry. She had no choice. It had all been settled before they even met. Reasonable concerns aside, Wayne was a father who had lost many children to death and circumstance, and I could see that it was terribly painful for him to say goodbye to yet another of his babies.