by Gail Gutradt
How, I wondered, does a bright and sober twelve-year-old boy get rice in his ear? I remembered an old folk song warning kids not to put beans in their nose. Nah. He seemed too smart for that. It was a mystery to me.
It was late December, a few days before the New Year, and the singing kites were flying to celebrate the harvest. Months earlier, the Wat Opot children had planted a field of rice on the eastern end of campus, out near the crematorium. It is good for the land to be cultivated. Wayne had hired a local man to plow the field. All day the great humpbacked bulls struggled back and forth, turning up heavy clods of clay.
It took a whole day for our children to plant the rice, and now it would take two days for the harvest. In the end their small paddy yielded ten fifty-kilo bags of rice, enough to feed everyone at Wat Opot for about two weeks. Wayne can buy rice in the market for about fifteen dollars a bag, and this rice the children grow will cost him twenty, but it is their culture and tradition, and he does not want them to lose touch with that. The older boys will do the threshing, and in the end there will be a special meal of new rice, and everyone will share a sense of accomplishment and thanksgiving.
I watched the children in the field, working in the rice and water and mud, wading through the golden landscape as Brueghel might have painted it, with Phnom Chisor rising misty in the background. Everyone worked together. The bigger boys cut the rice. They twirled the sheaves like pinwheels in the air, and knotted them into bundles with straw. Even the smallest children helped carry in the harvest, stepping high like egrets through the shallow water, climbing the banks and passing sheaves to others to lay out in the sun to dry. Each carried a bundle of rice on one shoulder. The heavy grains slapped against their cheeks and necks as they labored through the mud.
As they carried the bundles of rice on their shoulders to the threshing floors, they tilted their heads away at the perfect angle for a few grains of rice to shake loose and fall.
And that is how a little boy gets rice in his ear.
36
Fund-Raising
A yoga teacher came to visit one day to lead a class, and to choose some of our kids for a teacher training program. Yoga and meditation are beneficial for children with AIDS, and yoga instructors in Phnom Penh can earn a living doing meaningful work in a healthy environment. Our kids take naturally to yoga. They are agile and light and most of them are physically fearless, never having had parents to warn them about climbing trees or balancing atop barbed wire fences.
Accompanying the teacher, who was Khmer, was a lady from Australia who asked me for a tour of the campus. I walked her through the main attractions: the fishponds, the clinic, the new dormitory and school, the crematorium, the flowers and rice field, and I told her the story of Wat Opot. She was quiet, until finally she said, “Well, you certainly don’t need my help. I was thinking of leaving a donation, but you are too successful. I want to give money to the truly needy.”
I thought of our dwindling bank balance, and cringed.
By now we had come to the gazebo, and were cooling ourselves in the papasan chairs. Wayne happened by and joined us. Our visitor began telling Wayne about a place she had visited in Phnom Penh, an orphanage way more in need of her donation than Wat Opot.
“How did you find it?” Wayne asked.
“I saw a brochure at the hotel, and my tuk-tuk driver said it is a good place. The driver knew all about it. It is run by an old monk who is building a dorm and school for the orphans.”
“An elderly monk, with no teeth?” asked Wayne.
“Yes, that’s the one,” she said, excited. “All he needs is five hundred dollars and he can finish the whole thing. When I go back to Australia I want to raise the money with my church committee and send it to him. We can make it our special project.”
Wayne leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and sighed. Finally he sat up and began to tell the visitor about a time, many years before, when he met the same toothless old monk. Actually he was not a monk, and the school and dorm, they were almost done back then too. All it would take was five hundred dollars to finish the job. Wayne was touched, and he dug deep into his own pocket and gave the monk the money. But the buildings remained unfinished. Later, Wayne learned that the children he had been shown were kids from the community, not even orphans, but hired to deceive visitors.
Unfortunately, this sort of fraud is all too common, with hotel desk clerks and tuk-tuk drivers getting a commission for herding tourists to “orphanages.” In some cases there are indeed orphans in residence, but they are kept out of school and trained to put on a show for guests with little songs and dances. Sometimes children whose families cannot afford to feed or educate them will go to live at an orphanage. This is true even for a few of the children at Wat Opot, and points to the need for aid to poor families to help them keep their children at home. There are some good organizations working in Cambodia, but others exist mostly to funnel money to the owners. Still others, with good intentions, simply do not work efficiently. Some are frauds, pure and simple. It’s a mixed bag, and recently the Cambodian government has begun evaluating and licensing orphanages and other NGOs.
For some people, running an orphanage is a career move. Find a generous congregation back in the States to support you. Begin by building a nice house for yourself and your family. Buy a Toyota Land Cruiser. Find a few orphans—not hard to do—and build them a small house, and—voilà!—a comfortable living.
One young man whom Wayne knows asked him to be on the board of directors of a new orphanage he was hoping to open. “Why do you want to do this work?” Wayne asked him. “I grew up in an orphanage,” the young man told him. “I learned the job from the director. I want to get married. It is the only business I know.” Wayne said he did not want to be on the board. As a rule Wayne objects to these business ventures because although a few children may benefit, a disproportionate amount of the money collected goes to support the lifestyle of the director, and the well-being of the children is not the primary focus.
Wayne paused, examined the calluses on his hands, embarrassed to go on. Mister Sokun ran into the gazebo and climbed onto Wayne’s lap. “When someone does not donate to Wat Opot because we seem too well-off,” Wayne explained, “I feel like we are being penalized for having a place that runs well and actually does something for the children. People fall for the desperate places, but many of these places have been operating for years and have a stake in remaining that way. That ‘kindly old monk’ was once charged with fraud, but he bribed his way out and now he is up to his old tricks.”
Our visitor was pensive, and admitted that she had felt a little uneasy about the old monk’s operation. A few weeks after she left we received a generous donation from her church in Australia.
In 2012 the operating expenses for Wat Opot averaged around $7,000 a month, with the majority of money going to education, food and staff wages. The budget for March that year included the following categories:
Education $1,767
Kitchen and food $1,694
Staff wages $1,357
Transportation $43
Office $59
Supplies $150
Buildings and furnishings $399
Medical and dental $151
Grounds and gardens $61
Children $489
Community service $62
Electric $255
Arts-and-crafts supplies $261
PayPal and other bank fees $102
TOTAL EXPENDITURES $6,850
In March 2012, this money supported fifty-nine resident children and six in university in Phnom Penh, plus approximately twenty-five adult residents. Now that Wat Opot has passed the government licensing inspection, Wayne says he expects the authorities will begin sending many more children to live here, some of them from NGOs that have been closed because of substandard care. The figures include the cost of feeding and housing volunteers (who pay a nominal fee for room and board and often donate additional money or raise funds whe
n they get home). Figuring an average of a hundred people, this comes to $60 to $70 per person per month. Most medical care is supplied by outside agencies at no cost to Wat Opot.
Staff wages include local people who work at Wat Opot: Wayne’s secretary, an assistant, a cook and her helpers who prepare three meals a day, and a stipend for Vandin San, Wayne’s codirector. Wayne himself does not receive a salary.
Transportation includes gas and maintenance for an aging van (also donated), and shuttling the children and other patients to see the doctor in Takeo, about an hour away. There are also a couple of motos used for food shopping in the market, and bicycles for older kids to ride to high school. With gas growing ever more expensive, Wayne recently purchased a tuk-tuk.
The cost of utilities has improved since round-the-clock power became available. Formerly Wat Opot relied on a gas-fired generator. Wayne was able to sell the old generator for nearly what it had cost him many years before.
Child care includes wages for the “mothers.” Then there are schoolbooks, uniforms, village school fees, and wages for teachers at Wat Opot’s own school; these all cost more as the children grow older, as do the “gratuities” paid to public school teachers to assure that kids graduate. As more children go on to university, the cost of lodging, food, tuition and books will also rise.
While Wat Opot’s primary expenses remain relatively steady from month to month, income does not. Donations from individuals constitute more than two-thirds of what comes in, and can vary widely. Most individual donations come from volunteers and their families, friends and communities, visitors, or friends of Wayne’s. The rest comes primarily from small grants received from assorted organizations. Cash flow is always unpredictable, which makes managing Wat Opot’s finances a challenge. Sometimes, when money is tight, Wayne will put out an email appeal to friends and past volunteers who have been generous with their support even during economic downturns in their own countries. Every three months Wayne posts a financial report on the Wat Opot website.
From time to time Wayne is visited by fund-raisers who encourage him to set up a sponsorship program, where people send money to benefit a specific child and in turn receive their child’s photo and the occasional letter and progress report. He has always refused, especially when they insisted, “These children are so beautiful, you could get each of them sponsored a dozen times!”
Some years ago a group of Maine volunteers established the Wat Opot Children’s Fund, an official 501(c)(3) fund-raising organization, to enable U.S.-based supporters to make tax-deductible donations.
However the money comes, the intention is always the same: feeding these young bodies to keep them strong, and nurturing their young minds and spirits to keep them flexible, generous and compassionate. Sometimes it is necessary for a donor to be flexible as well, to understand that needs may change, that Wayne may need to make an abrupt about-face as situations reveal themselves. But in the end the money is scrupulously managed and well spent.
37
“Sometimes I Hope It Not Rain”
I will fly in an airplane,” Ouen was saying. “I am afraid. Maybe it will fall out of the sky.”
“It’s very safe,” I assured him. “I flew to Cambodia three times, all the way from Amérique. You will fly high up over the earth and the ocean, and you can look out the window and see little houses and pagodas and fields, and the people look so tiny. Then you fly right up through the white clouds and the sky is bright blue. It’s beautiful!”
He seemed to relax a little. “Can you open your window?”
I am sitting on the stone bench near the volunteers’ dorm. The air is comfortable and warm and a three-day moon smiles down through a froth of stars. A flowering bougainvillea screens out the single watery bulb that lights a sign welcoming visitors to Wat Opot. Here in the shadows the bench feels sheltered and private.
Mister Ouen, the boy I accompanied to the eye clinic on my first visit, five years earlier, is telling me about his plans for the future. Ouen is fifteen years old now. He has dyed a blond streak in the top of his hair and has a new prosthesis for his eye. It’s a bit large still, giving him a slightly pop-eyed appearance, but the doctors tell him he will soon grow into it. And he’s growing fast; his limbs are long and he has a little acne and the light fuzz of his first mustache.
Wayne tells me Ouen has not been going to school. His weak eyesight makes it difficult for him to study.
“I will go to Malaysia,” Ouen says. “I will work in a paper factory.”
A growing number of Cambodians travel each year to Malaysia as domestics and factory workers. It is said that employers in Malaysia like to hire Cambodian workers because they are patient and tractable, and because Cambodians are Buddhists, and unlike Muslims, they do not have to stop work to pray five times a day.
“My big brother is there now. He wrote a letter. It is hard work, but he make loy j’rarn, money a lot of. Better than in Cambodia. He says if I come we can save loy. Stay two, maybe three years. We can start a business when we come home. Maybe buy a tuk-tuk.”
My guts congeal at the thought of Ouen driving anything in Cambodian traffic. Once, only once, I allowed him to carry me to the market on the back of a moto. But the idea of the brothers pooling their earnings to start their own business makes sense. Without much education their prospects are limited to rice farming, construction or menial labor.
Boys like Ouen who get a late start in school often do not do well. They are embarrassed to be sitting with the little kids, and they’re bored, and the cycle of defeat only gets worse when they begin cutting classes and cannot keep up. Often as not, they just stop going to school entirely.
For a time Ouen took classes at a Chinese language institute. It was formal and strict, and after a few months he stopped going. Then there was music. He studied with a master in Takeo. But after selling Wayne an expensive instrument the master turned Ouen over to his son, an indifferent teacher, and Ouen lost interest.
“My uncle will help me go to Malaysia.”
The man whom Ouen calls “my uncle” or “my teacher” lives in Takeo. Though not a relative, he has been a family friend for many years. Ouen and his mother lived in the man’s house when she was ill, and it was he who brought them to Wat Opot when she was dying. Now he is arranging for passports and travel documents as he did for Ouen’s brother. He is also helping Vuth, another Wat Opot boy, to go with him. They are only fourteen and fifteen years old, and the man had to swear they were both eighteen to apply for papers. Vuth, who has no family, is listed as Ouen’s brother so that both boys can claim to have a relative working in Malaysia. Ouen admits to me that he has not told his uncle about his poor eyesight.
In spite of the irregularities Wayne is allowing them to go. He says they are both good kids and that this trip will allow them to get work experience and see something of the world. With Ouen’s older brother already in Malaysia, Wayne is less concerned that the boys will get into any serious trouble.
Still, Ouen worries about leaving Wat Opot. He has lived here since he was seven years old, when he lost both of his parents to AIDS. Since then Wayne has been Ouen’s father, and Wat Opot his family.
We sit on the bench for a while, watching the stars, not saying anything. Then Ouen begins to tell me about his father. He has never spoken to me about his family before.
“My father traveled for his work. He went to Thailand sometimes. Then he got sick and we took care of him. He was dying of AIDS, but we didn’t know. Then the doctor told him he had AIDS, and my mother was sick too. Then my father felt very sad. He told me he went to a party in Thailand and got drunk and caught AIDS and gave it to my mother. He said he was a very bad man. He told me he was sorry he brought AIDS home to his family.
“When I was a little boy before my father was sick, we used to sleep together, my whole family. When it rained we all stayed in bed and played in the morning. I was very happy. Now when it rains I remember my family … and I cry.”
&nb
sp; He is quiet for a moment, and then he adds, “Sometimes I hope it not rain.”
Ouen continues, “One morning I woke up and my father was sleeping next to me. I tried to wake him up to play with me, but he was dead. When Wayne told us you were sick in Amérique, I used to ask him every day if you were okay. Wayne asked me how come I asked so often. I told him it was because of the time you went to the eye clinic in Takeo with me.”
We reminisce about our trip to the clinic, and I tell Ouen how proud I had been because of the way he took care of me that day, how he treated me like his yei. He says he had been worried about going alone and it made him feel good that I went with him. His words move me deeply. With all the plans we make about what we will do as volunteers, it is what we offer each other as human beings that endures; it is the simple and mutual acts of kindness that remain.
The day came when Ouen and Vuth were to leave Wat Opot. Impatient for their new adventure to begin, they had decided to move to Takeo and live with Ouen’s uncle while they waited for the arrangements to be finalized for their journey to Malaysia.
We all stood around Wayne’s office, trying not to look worried. Wayne and I were there and a few of the children who happened to be home from school. Ouen and Vuth grinned nervously and teased each other. First there were papers to sign, officially mustering them out of Wat Opot. Each boy signed his name and made a thumbprint in red ink. Under the heading “Discharge Summary,” Wayne had written as their reason for leaving “Grown Up” and “I am ready to take life on by myself.”