In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  “Sampeah doesn’t have a grandmother, doesn’t have anything, but he’s still happy. He doesn’t have any family. I very pity Sampeah. One day if I have money, I’ll bring Sampeah to a town, play some games. He lost everything. He never goes home, doesn’t have any family come to visit. I share with him if my yei brings me some potato, and with the other girls.

  “Srey Mom is my best friend, and the little girls. Punlok only had one underwear when she came. Red underwear. Nothing else, no shoes, only red underwear, and her hair was very curly.”

  Miss Jorani is thinking about going into medicine. She sees getting an education as one way she can be an example to the younger children.

  “Pesei tells me I have to work hard. When I get sad or angry, he says, ‘Do you want to go back to the rice fields? If not you have to study hard. Be strong!’ He never hits me, but he worries because my mother never went to school.

  “I don’t want to marry anybody before I finish my education. That way, if the man leaves, I can take care of myself.

  “I always think about my parents before I go to bed, but I never dream about them. I keep their picture next to my bed. I always hope my mother will come back, but I never see my mother again.

  “I need to work hard to take back what I had before.”

  Pesei has been teaching English at Wat Opot. He is curious about words and shades of meaning, and he thinks in stories and parables. Like Jorani he looks for ways his own story can inspire the younger children.

  A few years ago he painted a picture of a glowing ball flying on wings of light. He showed it emerging from a dark cloud into the sunshine. At the time he told me he had made a choice to turn away from his dark memories and live a good life.

  “When I teach the children, I tell them stories. ‘You have a choice. Do you want to go back?’ That’s the way I teach. I also believe in the Spirit. Something always protects me. If you do good things, the good Spirit will stay with you and always protect you.

  “The kids are different from me. Some of them, they don’t listen anymore. I want to help them by showing them my painting of the ball and wings. The ball is like the world. And you have the wings. If you do not fly, you will never see the world is beautiful. People helping you at Wat Opot are the wings. So use the wings to fly up and see you are beautiful. Use your wings to fly from darkness to light.”

  “At Wat Opot they call me Pesei. At school they call me Rathanak. But my family, they call me Geewa, and in Phnom Penh, my new friends also call me Geewa. Back to my family. Back to Geewa.”

  39

  Kangho’s Brother Does Not Believe in Yoga

  Kangho is a tall, handsome boy with a winning personality. Like Pesei he makes friends easily and is a favorite of volunteers. He has a great sense of humor and flirts outrageously, but harmlessly. At heart he is serious and responsible. The youngest son of a colonel in the military who died of AIDS before antiretroviral drugs were available, Kangho is too young to remember his father clearly, but his oldest brother, Sovann, has become father to the family.

  After their mother died, Sovann took care of their father. He learned from watching Wayne how to give his father an IV, and stayed with him after he moved back home to the village to die. His father was a respected and dignified man who valued status and education. When he was dying he charged Sovann to take care of his sister and three younger brothers and to make sure they all receive an education.

  When his father died Sovann drove his father’s car to Wat Opot and informed Wayne that he was going to live there, and that Wayne was going to put him through school. He was about fourteen at the time. This was in 2003, and there were only half a dozen kids living at Wat Opot. Sovann did not ask Wayne; he simply walked in, as upright and dignified as his father had been, and announced that this would happen, and Wayne agreed. After that, as each of his siblings came of age, Sovann would announce that it was time for that one to leave their grandmother’s house in the village and come to live at Wat Opot so they could learn English and go to high school, and then Wayne could pay to send them to college.

  Sovann went to medical school, but after the first year he found he could not afford to pay the bribes necessary to advance to second year and he transferred to nursing school instead. He has graduated and has begun working in Phnom Penh. During a recent flu outbreak, Sovann returned to Wat Opot to help Wayne take care of the children.

  To date, one younger brother has entered law school, and another has a scholarship to study architecture. Kangho is about to graduate from high school, and the youngest, a sister, has recently moved to Wat Opot and may go into nursing.

  Even though he is in school in Phnom Penh, Sovann remains a stern taskmaster to his siblings. He calls Kangho at midnight and he will berate him if he is not studying. When other children are asleep or watching television, I will see lights at the school and find Kangho pacing back and forth, drilling his little sister in English in an empty classroom. Kangho worries that when he leaves Wat Opot his sister will not apply herself, and that she will spend time with the boys from the village. He knows how easily a girl can ruin her reputation.

  When a kundalini yoga teacher from Phnom Penh came to teach classes at Wat Opot, Kangho became interested in yoga and was invited to take a teacher training course. The yoga studio was in need of male teachers, and Kangho could earn some money while going to the university. Now, every Sunday, Kangho teaches yoga to the children at Wat Opot. Sovann does not approve. He does not regard yoga as a suitable profession for a member of his family. He does not see spirituality as something Kangho needs, only education. For his part, Kangho is intrigued by yoga, and feels its subtle, balancing effect, yet he seems to be pulled between a longing for social standing and material success, and the benefit he intuits from his practice of yoga. One night he informs Wayne that when he is a rich man he will have bodyguards, a sign of wealth and status. Other times, he seems to understand that flaunting wealth creates the need for protection from the envy of the world.

  Wayne tells Kangho a story from his days as a barefoot doctor in Honduras. The area where he lived had a lot of gangs. They robbed stores and delivery trucks, and many people were beaten and killed. Once a month Wayne would go to the city to get money for supplies. He would return with a thousand dollars. Everybody knew he went for money, but he was never robbed. Years later, Wayne visited some of the boys he took care of in the village. Wayne had taken them in and helped them through school, and they have remained friends. One of the boys said that after Wayne left he had asked a gang member why they never robbed Wayne. “Are you kidding?” the young hoodlum replied. “With those two huge bodyguards who were always with him? Not a chance!” Wayne tells Kangho that he never had any bodyguards.

  Wayne respects Sovann, respects his efforts to reclaim the life his family had before their father died. If he succeeds, Sovann will have accomplished the impossible, something out of reach for most adults. He will have put four orphaned siblings through college.

  Sovann still has friends from the old days, when his father was important and respected. Even though he grew up at Wat Opot he keeps his connections in the village. His siblings feel comfortable associating with the upper class, but only up to a point. Kangho is frequently invited for dinner at the home of the village chief. The chief has a pretty daughter, and one day I teased Kangho about whether the chief was trying to make a match. After all, Kangho is a fine young man with a lot of ambition. Kangho laughed it off and then, abashed, he told me that no, he would not be a suitable match for the chief’s daughter. He was serious. “I have no money, no land, no parents.”

  40

  Turning Points

  Wayne does not often tell visitors about Toon Hang, and when he first mentioned him to me I sensed that I should not press him for details. The death of any child is tragic, but it was clear that this little boy had been special to Wayne, and that there were unsettling mysteries surrounding his death. Late one night, as we sat watching fireflies dart over
the pond, Wayne finally told me the story, and it spilled out as full of emotion as if it had happened yesterday.

  Hang was only four years old when his mother died of AIDS. They lived near Wat Opot, and Prak Vutha used to bring Hang regularly to the clinic for medicine and rice. But this week they had failed to appear, so Wayne walked through the dusty rice fields for a home visit.

  He found Prak Vutha lying on an open-weave bamboo bed under a tree outside her hut. Little Hang came running down a path through the dry grass to greet Wayne. His mother, hearing him shout Wayne’s name, tried to rise in welcome, but she was unsteady and weak. Walking toward her and meeting her eyes, Wayne held his palms together before his face in the respectful sampeah greeting and urged Prak Vutha not to get up. He offered to start her usual IV, but she told him it would not be necessary. Wayne was worried about her, and as he examined Hang, he noticed the little boy glancing over at his mother again and again. To check Hang’s ears and look down his throat, and to feel his neck to see whether his glands were swollen, Wayne kept having to turn the boy’s tiny face back toward him with his large gentle hand.

  “I prepared to leave, and I went back to the bed of Vutha and raised my hands in farewell, but to my surprise she took hold of my hands and held them tightly, and with tears in her eyes, she whispered, ‘Please take good care of my son.’ On the walk back to the pickup I wanted to cry, but like the rice fields around me, my eyes were too dry to produce tears.”

  Prak Vutha died a few days later and Hang came to live at Wat Opot. It wasn’t long before he became Wayne’s buddy, his caboose.

  Sitting on Wayne’s lap at meals, playing on the clinic floor while he took care of patients, curling up next to him under the mosquito net when he slept, Hang was inquisitive, creative, funny and wholly good-natured. He rapidly picked up English, and by the time school started he was excited to be able to go. He was the first HIV-positive child to start public school in our village, and in no time he became the teacher’s pet. Until that time the teachers had not let any kids with HIV attend classes, but Hang was so lovable they could not refuse him, and his going opened the public schools to the rest of the Wat Opot children.

  Hang’s mother died in September of 2001, long before antiretroviral medicines were available in Cambodia. It was a terrible time; all Wayne could do was comfort the sick in the villages, and wash their bodies and cremate them when they died.

  When testing finally became available, Wayne began checking everyone who came to the clinic. To his horror, most of the people he tested were HIV positive. “It was relentless bad news, a nightmare,” Wayne told me. “I felt as if I had stepped into Hell. It seemed as if everyone in Cambodia was HIV positive; adults, children, young women who had been virgins when they married, and young husbands who married them not knowing they themselves were HIV positive.”

  By 2003, Wayne was losing two or three patients a week. Sometimes several were cremated in a single day. According to the Cambodian National AIDS Authority, the country’s first cases of HIV were reported in 1991, and by 1995 more than a third of the country’s sex workers and nearly 10 percent of its military had been infected. By 2002, Cambodia had the highest prevalence of HIV infection in Asia.

  Then in 2003, Médecins Sans Frontières arrived, bringing with them a single line of antiretroviral drugs.

  “But the doctor in charge had not received training in pediatrics yet, and he wanted to wait before starting children like Hang on the medications,” Wayne told me. “I was assured, however, that Hang would be the first one to get them once he received the training.

  “It was just before New Year’s of 2004 that I took Hang to the hospital in Takeo for his appointment. The doctor informed me that he would be leaving in the afternoon for Thailand to receive instructions for using ARV medicines for children. Hang had a bit of fever and had started to have some diarrhea the previous night, and so the doctor wanted to keep him in the children’s hospital in Phnom Penh so that he could start the medications immediately upon his return. I was reluctant, but the doctor was just as concerned as I was about Hang and so I let him convince me that it was the best thing to do.

  “I called each night for an update and was assured he was doing fine.”

  But Hang never had a chance to begin taking ARVs.

  “On the morning of the fifth of January, the day the doctor was supposed to return and start the medications for treatment, I called to see what time we could pick him up from the hospital, only to be told that he had died during the night. I was stunned and in tears. I told them we would be right in to pick up the body, but was informed that they had already sent his body to the crematorium and all that was left were his ashes.

  “I still wait for Hang to come home from the hospital. I imagine him jumping out of the car and running into my arms, arms that have held so many other children since then, children whom I also had to let go of as I placed them into the crematorium furnace. The difference is that with Hang I couldn’t hold on to him for that one last time, I couldn’t look into his face and see that he was at peace, and I couldn’t release him from my heart with the first puff of smoke rising out of the crematorium chimney.

  “The doctor came out to pay his respects the following day and, as he was lighting a candle and incense, he offered to open an investigation into Hang’s death. Something didn’t seem right about how things were handled, and I could tell he felt deeply responsible. We told him there was no point in having an investigation because it would only create hard feelings and it wouldn’t bring Hang back to us anyway.

  “They say that time heals all wounds, and I suppose that is true … but time seems to have stood still since the passing of Toon Hang, and even the mention of his name brings back all of the memories.”

  It was February 2010 when I returned to Maine, during one of the warmest late winters on record. At home in my hundred-year-old house I was grateful for the sunny days and lack of snow, even as the little voice in my head kept insisting, “Global warming.” As spring approached, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, beginning a saga of environmental desecration that has more recently been eclipsed by the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima.

  In May the New York Times ran a front-page article on the state of world efforts to control and treat HIV/AIDS (“At Front Lines, Global War on AIDS Is Falling Apart,” May 9, 2010). They reported that because of the global recession, major donor nations and charitable foundations were cutting back on programs to provide antiretroviral drugs. As a result, doctors and nurses in the developing world were being forced to turn away growing numbers of new patients, as well as existing patients who had become resistant to the cheaper lines of ARVs. Particularly disturbing was their report that in families where one person infected with HIV was receiving care, but another was turned away, patients were known to share their drugs with their loved one, rendering each patient’s dose ineffective and possibly resulting in the development of drug-resistant strains of HIV. These powerful mutant strains could in turn be passed to others and spread ever outward through the global village.

  Donor nations and charities, beset by “donor fatigue,” were beginning to concentrate their resources on diseases that could be cured cheaply by one-time treatment, or prevented by distributing affordable items like mosquito nets or water filters. The new buzzwords were “cost-effective” and “more bang for the buck.” While I was in Cambodia, I was told that a grant proposal had a better chance of approval if it was couched in terms like “community development,” or “mother-and-child health,” and although nations and charities all continued to make large donations to HIV/AIDS programs worldwide, these were not enough to keep up with the rising numbers of new cases.

  In the grimmest terms, the Times article predicted that “for most of Africa and scattered other countries like Haiti, Guyana and Cambodia, it seems inevitable that the 1990s will return: walking skeletons in the villages, stacks of bodies in morgues, mountains of newly turned earth in cemeteries.” I sh
uddered, remembering Wayne’s stories of his early days at Wat Opot, when the village was too poor to have a crematorium, and dogs roamed about eating the remains of victims who had been only partially cremated in shallow pits in the earth.

  In Cambodia, oil and gas exploration were poised to bring more money into the economy. Land prices were booming and new commercial developments, upscale housing and tourist resorts were drastically changing the landscape. Almost every day the Cambodian press ran stories about people evicted from their homes and land to make way for new development. Mysterious fires broke out in the city. The land around Boeung Kak, the lake area in the middle of the capital, which some call the lung of Phnom Penh, was being cleared and filled to make room for upscale development, and people living around the lake were fighting eviction. Villagers in the provinces complained of illegal lumbering and mining operations that forced them off their land and polluted the environment, and foreign powers were investing in hydroelectric dams and power lines that could light cities and run factories, but that would change the ecology of rivers where their ancestors had fished for generations.

  Médecins Sans Frontières had initiated the HIV/AIDS program that served not only our children but also thousands of people affected by AIDS in Cambodia. After their initial five-year commitment was over, the Khmer government took over the program and the administration of international funding. Although Wat Opot children are still receiving medication and care, they are not seeing the doctor as frequently.