by Gail Gutradt
The Australians arrived, decent folks, living temporarily abroad. Incidents of kidnapping and baby selling had caused the Australian authorities to forbid direct adoption of Cambodian children, but Australian nationals living outside the country were permitted to adopt and then apply for a visa for the child when they moved back home.
As the mother and little boy were solidly bonded, Raksmai seized her opportunity to curl up with her new father. Within a few days they all seemed comfortable with each other, and her new parents were anxious to go on to Phnom Penh, complete their paperwork and leave for home.
The last night before they left, Miss Raksmai sat in the cane chair in my room and played peek-a-boo. She had never played this game before. Had her new parents taught her? Tomorrow she would close her eyes, put her hands in front of her face, and her world would change. And she would go off to Australia with people she had just met. Sari Yei, Wayne and all the children, all she had ever known, would be gone. Did she intuit that? In her new life, would Raksmai still imitate Mr. Wayne, walking around with hands behind her back, her belly sticking out, directing chickens, herding piglets? I wondered what new games she would play.
Did her new parents appreciate the family they were taking her away from? When she was older would they explain to her how loved she had been here, by all her brothers and sisters and the people who cared for her? During the weeks before she left I had been taking many photos of Raksmai with Sari Yei and Wayne and the children, and I assembled them into a tiny album for Raksmai to have when she grew up, so she might see herself with the people who had loved her.
The day she left for Phnom Penh all her brothers and sisters assembled to say goodbye. Pesei told me he hoped Raksmai would not be too sad. Then he showed me a drawing he had made for her the night before, carefully rolled up and tied with a ribbon. But Raksmai hopped into the car before he could even give it to her, hopped into her new father’s lap with hardly a glance in our direction. The new family waved goodbye, and suddenly they were gone in a cloud of dry-season dust. Wayne and the children stood around for a moment, a little dejected perhaps that she had not seemed in the least upset over leaving, and then the children drifted back to their games, and Wayne to his office.
Three days later the phone rang. Raksmai’s new father, calling frantically from Phnom Penh, explained that there had been a glitch in the paperwork. It seemed that there had always existed a discrepancy between what documents the Cambodian authorities required to release a child as legitimately adoptable and what the Australian immigration people wanted to see in order to issue an entry visa. In a sort of gentlemen’s agreement, lawyers would draw up two sets of papers. The fact that the contents did not precisely agree bothered no one. It was just business as usual. But a new official at the Australian consulate had balked at this discrepancy, concerned by past scandals involving the selling of babies. And now Raksmai’s new parents could not safely take her from Cambodia, because if they could not ultimately resolve the problem she might never be allowed to enter Australia, and they might all remain in limbo, unable to return home. At the moment there were dozens of other new parents abruptly caught in the same bind. The only solution was to return Raksmai to Wat Opot, leave for their offshore home and hope the lawyers could resolve the problem so they could come back for her as soon as possible. Her grim-faced father dropped her off at Wat Opot. Her new mother could not bear to come. After a week of living as a family, Raksmai was already their little girl.
Miss Raksmai waved goodbye as she watched her father’s car drive away in the dust. She seemed bewildered and sad, too young to understand anything except that her new parents were gone. She fitted back into life at Wat Opot pretty well, and the children were happy to see her, but those brand-new clothes and sneakers reminded the other kids that she was the chosen one. It would take six months before the new regulations were clarified, before the differing definitions of adoptability were brought into alignment and the paperwork finally straightened out. During those days and weeks, whenever a car arrived, Raksmai would run up expectantly to see whether her father had come back for her. Finally, one day, his taxi did pull up, and he stepped out looking happy and relieved. Then he scooped her up and whisked her off to a new and uncertain life.
How did the other children feel when Raksmai finally left? Pesei wrote to me:
This is the story about Mai Mai when she left from Wat Opot. We all miss her and it is boring too because we use to play with her every evening. She use to laugh and dance when we had music, but that is good for her future. When she left we had a party and we were all happy but then we cried when we said goodbye to her.
For a year or two her new parents stayed in touch. They sent pictures at holidays, and both children seemed to be thriving. But recently Wayne heard they were divorcing, and we have not heard any news since then.
FROM FAR AWAY: Baby Mai in the Dark Night
It’s three o’clock on a January morning in Maine. I am sitting with a hot-water bottle on my lap, trying to keep warm, writing an email to a friend in Japan. We’ve never met, and my letter is the sort one writes to a new friend whom one has found through a series of apparent errors and accidents, yet whom one feels certain one is meant to know, and not for the first time. I sense a subtle mystery, like a whiff of incense in an old wooden room. Until now our letters have been a delicate dance of storytelling, cautious revelation and occasional apologies for lapses due to busy lives. Our gestures are nuanced and kind, like feeding a deer in a forest.
A new email arrives, surfacing in my inbox with the sound of a cartoon submarine. It is from Wayne, some gossip about the new volunteers. At the end, a brief postscript reads, “By the way, Baby Mai died on Tuesday morning. She was in hospital for several days but not improving and so they brought her back on Saturday. She died very peacefully in Sida’s arms.”
Baby Mai was the youngest infant at Wat Opot, only six months old when I saw her last, and recently diagnosed HIV positive. Wayne’s note is brief, but I know him, know he’s in pain. I have watched him secretly test a few drops of a child’s blood for AIDS, blood purloined from an IV needle or a scraped knee, have seen the relief or despair on his face when the answer comes. Tonight, stricken, I add the news to my email, push Send and blurt it electronically to my new friend in Japan.
I know it will be a shock, a slap coming abruptly at the end of the affectionate letter I have been writing. Yet I need to know that someone will share this news in the middle of this frigid night, even someone I have never met on the other side of the world, where the sun is still shining. Then I write just a few words to Wayne—he will know my heart—and finally I begin to cry, and I cry from down deep in the childless, motherless part of my own being.
Alone in Maine, missing Wayne and the children and wishing I could be at the funeral, I remember the day Baby Mai came to Wat Opot. It was in late winter 2007. Her birth mother lived in one of the villages nearby, a pretty young woman with AIDS, who was trying to balance the needs of her aged parents with those of a four-month-old baby. She needed to work to support her family, and her parents were too feeble to babysit, so she made the choice of duty to parents above all and brought her child to Wat Opot. Wayne agreed to keep the little girl until her mother found a way to take care of her. It was a sad parting, the baby bawling, her mother torn, anxious about leaving her crying child with strangers, having no choice.
Wayne entrusted the baby to Sida and her husband, Ty. They are a sweet young couple who live at Wat Opot. Sida is tall and quiet and a little dreamy, with a hint of mischievous sensuality. She and her husband seemed thrilled to have a baby to care for together. For the first few days Baby Mai did not eat much, and she cried often. We all tried to play with her, tried to get her to smile, but she just looked worried and stunned by life without the familiar smell and feel of her own mother.
A week later Baby Mai’s mother returned from the village. She had worried all week, imagining her own baby distraught and alone. She told S
erain, the night nurse, that she had come to reclaim her daughter, hoping to work out a way for them to be together. But what she found was a smiling little girl, beginning to settle in with her new family. Wayne assured her that she could take Baby Mai home any time her circumstances improved, and meanwhile she was welcome to visit as often as she liked.
Every night Sida, her foster mother, brought her to the clinic at Wat Opot, and she grew fatter and healthier. We all loved her, especially Sida, who looked lighter and happier with every passing day. Over time, Sida and Baby Mai grew to look alike, to mimic each other’s expressions. And they were inseparable.
I became fascinated with the pure sensuality of the devotion between them and took dozens of photographs of them together: Sida holding the baby in a ruffled party dress on some special occasion, or nuzzling her in front of a bush exploding with pink bougainvillea. Sida resting in a hammock with Baby Mai asleep between her thighs, as though newly born. At a birthday party, both their faces smeared with icing. The two of them playing, perfectly, ecstatically bonded. And one strange image, where Sida is crouching in the dust clutching the baby with an expression of such haunted agony that I can only imagine that she had been overcome by an intimation of the future.
What more is there to say? The baby died. I was not there when it happened, could not go to her funeral or comfort her two mothers or the children, or be comforted, or sit up late that night reflecting with Wayne, as we often did. I heard only echoes from a distance, snippets of emails from volunteers or from Wayne: the baby was not feeling well, was becoming dehydrated; the baby went to the hospital in Takeo for an IV; the baby should be fine and would be home in a few days; there was nothing more they could do; and finally, Baby Mai died peacefully in Sida’s arms.
Whether Baby Mai died of complications from AIDS or from one of the many illnesses that babies can suffer from in poor countries, I don’t know. At this remove, it hardly seems an important distinction. Could more have been done for her in a hospital with better-trained doctors or more modern facilities? It’s possible. I am far away, and the questions trouble me. But I know she could not have been more loved, and that Wayne did all he could to save her with the resources and knowledge available to him. In the end, for all her illness and poverty, Baby Mai lived for one happy year, loved by two mothers and several fathers, and was doted on as the baby of the family by her many brothers and sisters.
There will be a funeral for Baby Mai at Wat Opot, and the monks will inscribe prayers on her shroud and chant over her body before it is cremated. The baby’s mother will be devastated. And Sida? I weep again to think of her. The baby was all her joy in this life.
Wayne will mourn in his quiet way. He has cremated three hundred family members already. As is his practice, he will spend a while contemplating the baby’s life as he chooses a photograph and tints it with soft pastel colors on the computer. Then he will hang her picture on the wall of the crematorium alongside her brothers and sisters who have died. Afterward, he will walk back to his office looking weary; a few of the children will walk with him, slowly, holding his hands. As Wayne mourned in his way, so I joined him and my family at Wat Opot, by writing this memorial.
The night Baby Mai died, I cried out to my unmet friend in Japan. Mercifully he was at his desk, and across time and space he wrote that the news had made his own heart ache. Nothing more. He did not try to fix anything or put things into perspective, or offer platitudes. It was enough to feel his presence, as we mourned a little girl’s death together in the dark of night.
31
Calling the Soul
Andrew was staring straight ahead when I walked into the hospice. His eyes were blue mandalas. He slumped lower in the red plastic chair, crossed his arms over his heart and hugged his shoulders. “I just saw a man die.” Andrew spoke in a precise monotone. “I never saw anyone die before. I watched his soul leave his body.”
Andrew was from Perth, Australia. He had bright red hair and a generous smile. The children called him Andaroo, like kangaroo, only they trilled the r and warbled an extra long oooh at the end. An-da-rrrroooooooo! They loved playing with the unfamiliar syllables, and they loved Andrew, who roughhoused with them like a big brother and took them on hikes and let them look at faraway scenes through his telephoto lens.
I met Andrew on a long bus ride. He was newly divorced, traveling to find himself. He worked as an electrician but liked to take pictures and wanted to see whether he could make a go of it as a traveling photojournalist. None of his friends back home could understand why he would want to leave their comfortable middle-class world to risk dysentery in poor countries with ragged children. He told me he felt he had been divorced twice, once from his wife and then from his friends. He had been traveling alone for months and was becoming weary of his self-involvement. He seemed honest and open, a seeker, or maybe just lonely for family. I invited him to stop by Wat Opot. A week later Andrew hiked in from the main road with his duffel bag over his shoulder and his camera around his neck, all dust and freckles and a big grin, totally open to whatever experience the world might offer him.
He had been here for about a month, and now the world had offered him death.
THE WELCOMING MURAL AT WAT OPOT
The face is the loving mother who looks after the children despite her sickness or death from AIDS. The little white shapes are the souls of all the children, living and dead. Pesei explains that “even though the mother has passed away, Wat Opot still can take care of the baby like the mother giving milk.” The cross and the Buddha reflect the partnering of two traditions in the founding of Wat Opot, which is nondenominational. The eye is the all-seeing Protector. The dove is Peace, of course, and the lotus is the purity that rises from the mud. The leaf is life itself. Pesei, who is currently studying at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, was a teenager when he designed and painted this mural.
Vannak was thirty-five, only five years older than Andrew, when he died of AIDS. He had been a patient for just a couple of months. His family had brought him in with a miserable skin infection, a fungus spreading all over his body. Andrew spent long hours sitting by Vannak’s bed. They could not speak each other’s language, but Andrew was there, and when he could do nothing else he would cool Vannak’s painful skin with a folded paper fan. Rebecca washed Vannak with sulfur soap, and his lesions began to heal. He fought hard, but his health deteriorated and he passed away with Andrew sitting in the chair next to his bed.
Wayne began preparing Vannak for cremation and sent for his family and the monks. Wayne bent his broad back over Vannak’s wasted body, sponging him tenderly with a flowered washcloth. He wiped his forehead and his chest and his palms gently as one would bathe a sick child, rinsing and wringing out the washcloth again and again in a small plastic basin of water. Then he dressed Vannak in fresh clothes, a plaid shirt and khaki pants, and parted and combed his hair and straightened his limbs on the bed. His feet he left bare.
Over the years, Wayne has observed that his male patients often do not do as well as the women. If, as often happens, a man becomes ill before his wife, the family will exhaust their savings on medical care and then be forced to sell their home or rice fields as well. By the time his wife becomes ill there is no money left to pay for her treatment.
Even if a man is not married, if he is too ill to work he may beg or borrow money from friends or family, loans he can never repay. In the end, desperate, he may steal. The family is angry with the man for bringing this disease home, and terrified of this plague whose means of transmission they do not understand. There may also be pressure from the village to force him to leave. So his family may refuse to care for him as his health deteriorates. Even if he receives antiretroviral drugs and his health improves his family may refuse to take him back. He may turn to alcohol if he has not already been drinking. In the end, rejected by family and community, he will feel isolated. He has no life to go back to. He simply gives up.
Mr. Kamra was another
young man who lived at Wat Opot. Like Vannak he had an excruciating skin condition. Rebecca tried the sulfur soap on him, and he felt so much better, was so encouraged about his life, that he returned to his village and told his family he was ready to move back in with them. They told him it did not matter that he felt better, he still had AIDS and they did not want him. They threw him out of their house and down the stairs. Then they threw the chair he had been sitting on after him and slammed the door. The chair clattered to the bottom of the stairs and smashed to pieces. When the family came out they found that he had hanged himself from the tree in their dooryard.
Women, by contrast, often have different social skills than men, and are used to supporting each other in the village. At Wat Opot they cook together, share child care, do each other’s hair, go to the market, weave silk, dress up for weddings and sit together in the evening chatting under the stars. They may not always get along, and there may be dramas, but women create around themselves a sense of normalcy, of people living together in community. Most important, their children need them, and this gives them something to live for. Even when a mother is very ill with AIDS and possibly TB, even when she feels overwhelmed and hopeless, she may not give up until she can see her children safely settled in at Wat Opot with food and medicine, friends to play with and other mothers to care for them. If she is very ill and the road back is just too hard, she may begin wasting away for no apparent reason. After she dies Wayne may find a neat cache of pills hidden under her mattress, the medicines she stopped taking some time before. He will never tell her children about the pills.