by Gail Gutradt
Before the new dorm was built the children slept in the old hospice, on porches, anywhere they could roll out a mat. Some of the older boys had hung hammocks in the dining room. Now they slept together, Cambodian family style, several children under each mosquito net. Once, long ago, Wayne had purchased little bedside tables to alternate with the bamboo beds in the old dorm. He arranged the room carefully so that there were drawers for each child’s belongings. It all looked very neat and Wayne was feeling pleased with himself, but by the time he came back that evening the children had dragged all the tables to the other side of the room, pushed the beds back together and were sleeping in their usual puppy piles.
The new dorm stood in the northwestern corner of the campus, safely away from the road. Years ago, when Wayne and Vandin first opened the clinic, the farmer next door had offered one of his fields for sale. He wanted fifty dollars. It was a lot of money back then and Wayne had not wanted to divert funds from patient care to buy a piece of land he might never need. They had five acres already, and with only a clinic and crematorium there was still plenty of room to grow.
When I came back in 2007 there were more buildings, and even more were needed. The land was for sale again, only this time the price had risen to three hundred dollars, nearly a year’s wage for a worker in the provinces. Life in Cambodia was improving, and land near Phnom Penh was becoming expensive. The city was beginning to sprawl southward, and it was only a matter of time before the sprawl reached us. Wat Opot needed a new dorm, and the neighbor could see that his land was the only possible direction for the campus to grow. I saw this too, and urged Wayne to buy the land before the price went up yet again. Wayne thought about it, but money was still tight.
We discussed it several times over the next few months, but there was always something more pressing. Wayne complained that the neighbor was being greedy. “I just don’t like feeling like I’m over a barrel.”
“Damn it, Wayne!” I said finally, in frustration. And then I added, embarrassed at swearing because Wayne tries to avoid it, “In my humble opinion, sir, if you do not buy that land now you will just wind up paying more for it in the end.” And to prove I meant it I handed him three hundred dollars.
The new dorm stood partly on that field. I noticed also that the farmer had put some of his windfall into improving his own house and livestock. It seemed a good outcome all around.
Another major change at Wat Opot was twenty-four-hour electricity, wired in from a central generator in town, and there were plans for even cheaper power once the lines were connected to a Vietnamese power plant. Wayne and I had sometimes wondered what Wat Opot would be like if our severely rationed two hours a day of electricity gave way to a taken-for-granted power on demand. Both of us figured that, all in all, it would be a mixed blessing. There would be more light pollution and noise, but power would be cheaper and a lot less bother. Wayne would not have to fetch expensive petrol every day for the grumbly old generator, or depend on an equally stubborn assistant who, being the only one who could prod the behemoth into life, safeguarded his job by refusing to teach anyone else to do it. With full-time power the older kids would not have to do their homework by candlelight, and Wayne could complete more tasks on his computer. But now there were more kids sprawled in front of the TV, soap operas in the afternoon, music videos in the evening. And late at night a single blazing floodlight was enough to blot out the Milky Way. Unlike Wayne and me, the children didn’t seem to notice or care. But being from Maine, where our sequined velvet night skies have degraded dramatically, I felt sad.
I missed the twilight hour after dinner when the whole community used to gather in front of the clinic to play and wait for the generator to cough itself to life. Now, many of the children went off to the dorm and played indoors or watched television. And there seemed to be fewer of those wonderful games the children used to play after lights out, like hunting for orbs or catching frogs with flashlights and bamboo traps, or roasting taro in little pit fires, or just wilding on a full-moon night. And the stone bench tucked in among the bougainvillea, where you could sit in the moonlight with a child and talk about the concerns of his heart, seemed less sheltered now.
After Baby Mai died, her foster mother, Sida, seemed inconsolable. She had been a joyous mother and she longed for a child of her own. It was risky; she and her husband are both HIV positive; but they followed the doctor’s instructions carefully. Sida is already on medication, and when the baby was born he was immediately given a dose of antiretrovirals. The combination cuts the chance of mother-to-child transmission from around 30 percent to only 2 percent. It worked, and now there is a healthy new baby at Wat Opot with the wonderful name of Savan Tanta, which, I am told, means “More Precious Than Gold.” He has fat cheeks and dimples and his mother’s playful black eyes. The kids missed Miss Raksmai and, of course, Baby Mai. I asked Wayne whether he worried about Sida and her husband becoming ill and not being able to look after the baby, but he seemed optimistic. And in the worst case Savan Tanta could still be raised by his large and loving family. At Wat Opot everyone loves babies.
After dinner my first night back, Wayne and I walked to the crematorium for the evening service. At first it was just the two of us. Wayne lit a white candle and offered three sticks of incense, and we meditated together in the smoke and dim candlelight under the photographs of family members who had died of AIDS. How many times in the past three years had I ached to be in just this place, doing this simple peaceful observance?
There was a commotion. It was Sokun. He banged the door open and came skidding into the pa cha and plopped down in Wayne’s lap and began improvising a tuneless version of the Buddhist invocation at the top of his lungs, punching out each syllable, even the ones he didn’t know. Wayne and I shrugged and joined in, and the three of us followed that up with the customary song, “Thank you, thank you, Jesus.” Sokun was there for the company, and the noise; he could not sit still for meditation but ran outside and skittered around the pa cha several times, still bellowing, “Tank you! Tank you! Saa-ma! Sam poot! Sa-tout! Jeeeesus!”
At six years old, Sokun would probably be called hyperactive in the States and put on drugs. Wayne does not know the details of his background, but he seems to be an expert at rooting out fresh trouble and then finding his way to the middle of it. But he also wants to be helpful, to be noticed and praised like any of us. So we try to give him little jobs, which he usually does well for a while. Wayne says he is coming around, and is much better than when he arrived, when Wayne would sometimes have to hold him to keep him from flailing around and hurting someone.
I asked Wayne why there were no other kids at the evening service, and he said that although they still came sometimes, there were fewer regulars than before. It never was compulsory, so he just let it happen as it would.
Wat Opot has matured. It is calmer; the older kids are busy with schoolwork, with art and play. They are more independent, more like teenagers anywhere. The youngest still flock to us by day, and they are the ones who come to the pa cha at night, singing loudly, offering their resounding “Satout!” at the end. They are still living close to the trauma of losing their families. And they are little kids, and like walking together in the dark to the pa cha, clumping along wearing Wayne’s huge black Crocs as we circle the crematorium three times after the service. They love holding hands or riding on Wayne’s shoulders as we walk slowly back to the clinic for evening meds.
This new calmness, could it be that most of the kids are just further from the essential trauma? When I first came, many had been recently orphaned and there was death all around them—adults and other children sick and dying of AIDS and being cremated. These kids sorted the bones, wondering if they would be next to die, but most of them survived and now, as younger kids arrive, even though they may have recently lost their parents, they enter into a more settled environment. There is no hospice and almost nobody dies. Some of the boys are at the university in Phnom Penh, and with them a
s examples it is not so outrageous for the others to imagine that they too might go to college one day. Their trauma is no less profound, but the culture they enter here is far more calm, and to my eye they adjust more quickly and settle down into life here. At Wat Opot the focus is on school and art and community, and on the future.
It truly is a change of generations. Mister Phirun, who at fifteen is our oldest boy living with AIDS, straddles the past and present. He has not forgotten the horror days before antiretroviral medication, when he struggled for his own life and watched his friends dying all around him. His body is still scarred from the skin lesions that afflicted him before he went on ARVs. It has taken years for him to begin to believe he may grow up, and to see the point in going to school or thinking about the future.
Maybe this is why many of the children do not come to the pa cha for evening services very often now, or search for spirit orbs in the dark. Life has become more normal for them, and the dead are not as present.
Early one evening I took a photograph. The village kids were arriving for their English lessons. They came by foot and by bicycle, a stream of kids from as far away as Phnom Chisor. A crowd of children was playing by the school under the mural of the laughing dinosaur kangaroo that was painted by our kids and the village kids, working together. Wayne looked over from the gazebo, where we were all having our dinner, and smiled. “That’s a photo that could never have been taken before,” he said. “Village kids playing with AIDS kids, and not being afraid.”
Wayne spoke to me about the future. “It’s 2009 and I’m sixty-four years old and I feel like I’ve still got one more project in me, something more I can give in this lifetime. It’s not like I want to go sit on the top of a mountain, or find a guru. Anyway, enlightenment is nothing without good works. What’s the use of being enlightened if you’re not doing something for the world?”
34
The Cries of Children
Mothers, and some fathers as well, have told me that even in a crowded place they can recognize the cry of their own child. Having not had babies of my own, it took me a little time, but with so many children at Wat Opot there was frequently somebody crying, and after a time I began to be able to guess who was crying and why. I knew when Mister Kosal had constructed one of his elegant towers of playing cards and one of the bigger boys had run by and knocked it over just to savor Kosal’s howl of frustration. I recognized Miss Punlok’s shrieks of terror whenever anyone looked at her in the long weeks when she was sitting at the foot of her mother’s deathbed. I heard Miss Punthea cry out when Mister Leak poked her in the eye and knew hers to be a cry of genuine physical pain. And I could tell when little Rith was caterwauling just to get his older brother to fight his battles so he could be sure he had not forsaken him.
There were other cries, and on this night I learned the cry of abandonment, the sound a small child makes when everything and everyone she ever knew has suddenly been taken away and she is facing her first night among strangers. It is the sort of cry that would make a parent offer his soul to God or to the Devil if only he could take on that child’s pain himself, the kind of cry some of us make when we fall into our deepest despair.
A new child arrived today. She is about three years old and only yesterday her mother died of AIDS. There were three siblings, and immediately after the funeral her uncle had them all tested. The older children, a boy and girl, were negative, but when the youngest tested HIV positive her uncle did not take her to his house or even bother to collect her clothes. He just drove her straight to Wat Opot and left her. We do not even know her name yet. Today is Friday and her name is in the paperwork somewhere in the office, and Wayne’s secretary has gone home for the weekend.
Wayne asks Madame Neath, one of the “mothers,” to look after her. She is a pretty woman in spite of the deep scars that tuberculosis has carved into her face and neck, and she is kind and good with children.
Earlier this evening the little girl was sitting on Neath’s hip, clinging to her and looking stunned. But tonight as she bedded down under the mosquito net she began to cry. Neath was moving from bed to bed, settling her brood for the night, and this nameless child just sat there keening, in that same state of fixated shock I remembered with Miss Punlok when her mother was dying. It was—is—a soul-shredding cry, and my only comfort comes from watching Miss Punlok growing up with lots of friends and a wicked sense of humor.
Punlok was there tonight with some of the others. They were doing massage, a complex routine involving finger cracking and step-over toe holds right out of TV wrestling. It’s a common family activity, with the young ones massaging the older kids, and switching off, and everybody having a cozy time of it. And I think, maybe in time life will be easier for this new little one too as she starts to find her place. I think it is ultimately the children who heal each other. But for now she is inconsolable, and I need to learn her name.
Some children do not cry. Kids who have lived so long with disappointment and abandonment that they pull themselves away from the world into a kind of shadow, where they accept reality with stoic resignation. Like Miss Srey Mom.
I sat with the kids tonight after dinner, watching TV, and Srey Mom curled up with me and went to sleep. She is taller and prettier than when I saw her three years ago, and she seems to have grown into her face and forehead, which always seemed large for her body. But she is still the hurt little girl I knew, and still needy, though she will shut down at the hint of a slight.
When she does interact with other children she seems to take on more adult roles. Wayne says she is a natural leader. She learned a lot about business from Madame Ketmoni, her first mother at Wat Opot, and I watch her buying up the evening treats from some of the younger kids and reselling them later at a profit. She also seems to be the local bookie, holding the bets while the kids play at cards and marbles. At these times she looks uncannily like the shrewd Ketmoni.
She lay on my lap tonight, took my hand and placed it on her heart, just as she did when she was younger. She has a cough. She had a second round of TB treatment last year, and with her incessant ear infections I wonder whether she is so often in pain that she doesn’t even bother to tell us anymore.
She felt feverish, but Wayne had locked himself in his office, squinting at his computer, trying to finish the annual accounting while nursing a bad cold, and I hated to disturb him. Perhaps I should have called him anyway, but Srey Mom was ready for bed and I figured she might do better just going to sleep. Standing in the twilight of the dormitory, surrounded by the breathing of sleeping children, I watched Srey Mom make up her bed with that same tragic self-sufficiency that I remembered from the night she first arrived. I stepped forward and helped her string up the mosquito net, defining and enclosing her own small space on the sleeping platform. Unlike the other children, Srey Mom sleeps alone. She rolled out her mat. She took two pillows and placed them at right angles. Then she piled up a nest of no less than six folded blankets, these more for comfort than for warmth. Then she lay down and pulled a single blanket up over her shoulders and closed her eyes. Needing to do something, I pulled the blanket up and tucked her in, but she had already turned inward, and was gone.
Once, Papa Steve saw Srey Mom sitting by the crematorium. Srey Mom was examining her arms, he told me, touching the scars left by the rashes and sores that have afflicted her over the years. Srey Mom stared at them in disbelief, and Steve told me he could almost hear the little girl thinking, “Whose arms are these? Could they really be mine?”
Wayne tells me he has to watch Srey Mom carefully. A few times he has caught her palming her ARVs, or spitting them out when she leaves the clinic. The children know how crucial it is to take their medicine consistently so they won’t become resistant. Srey Mom is already on second-line drugs. Is she giving up?
Srey Mom receives a phone call from her sisters. There is a family event, and they want her to come home for a visit. Someone has arrived to pick her up. She gathers her clothes quickly
and asks Wayne for her medicine. He asks how long she will be away and she just shrugs, but then she smiles a nervous, excited smile I have not seen on her face before. Maybe this time her sisters have finally decided to let her live with them. Perhaps sharing her fantasy, Wayne gives her an entire month’s ration of pills. Srey Mom says goodbye; her face is happy and open. In a moment of hope, her walls come down.
35
Rice in Your Ear
Yesterday two villagers came to see Wayne at the clinic, a boy of about twelve named Samphy and his older sister. They stood to one side, patient and shy, waiting for Wayne to finish his breakfast. Samphy had put on his dress shirt to come to the clinic, green with gold elephants woven through the fabric. Our Ouen has the same shirt, which he reserves for weddings and other special occasions.
Samphy’s sister explained that he had rice stuck in his ear. For an hour Wayne tried every trick he knew to dislodge it. First, he used peroxide to bubble the rice out, and then he tried a water flush. He peered through an otoscope and explored gently with long tweezers, and tried to snag it on a fluffed-up Q-tip, without success. The boy’s sister stood by, holding the flashlight and looking serious. It appeared that Samphy or his family must have tried to dig out the rice, as his ear canal was already scratched and bleeding. The boy winced and was becoming fidgety, and the blood in the canal obscured Wayne’s view. Finally he sent Samphy home with some antibiotics and told him to come back in three days for another try.