The Road of Lost Innocence

by Somaly Mam

  The worst places, without question, were in Svay Pak. We had a car—a rattling pale-blue Camry that Pierre had bought for eight hundred dollars—and I used to drive there. Six miles out of the city, it was a whole neighborhood of brothels, clustered around the main road. In Svay Pak there were shacks, but there were also other brothels in concrete houses with high gates and walls. They looked like fortresses, and it was obvious that the people inside were armed: every business in Phnom Penh had a weapon. Most of these places wouldn’t let me in. Many of the girls inside were captives and some of them were very young children. Svay Pak specialized in ethnic-Vietnamese girls, pale and beautiful, virgins.

  Some of the children were ten years old, sometimes younger. I had never seen that before, and it shook me. They were often badly hurt. I began my daily routine: going out to the brothels every day and bringing girls for treatment to the MSF clinic or to the hospital where Pierre worked.

  Phanna’s daughter, Ning, was very sick. She was about five years old, and since they’d moved to Phnom Penh she’d been ill. Pierre and I took her to the hospital, and she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She was hospitalized. She came out of the hospital, but she was still convalescing when Phanna came to see me one day, white as a sheet.

  She told me her husband was planning to give Ning to a neighbor, a woman who had offered to take Ning in, since she had no children—she had even offered him money. He said that since Ning was always sick anyway, this was a good solution. Phanna came and begged me to find a way out, and so, when I was eight months pregnant, Pierre and I decided to have Ning come and live with us. She was the sweetest child in the world, a truly endearing little girl, and we already adored her anyway.

  The time was coming for me to give birth, but I was still uneasy at the idea of having a child. There was a creature growing inside me who moved and kicked and soon would need me, but I felt paralyzed by the thought of being a mother to someone. I had never had a mother and I painfully felt that hole in my life. To be a mother myself felt impossible. Pierre didn’t help a lot—he said I looked grotesque and called me “Truck” because I was so big.

  I’d been having nightmares for months with horrific images of the women I had “helped” through labor when I was a nurse in Chup. I told Pierre I didn’t want to have anything to do with the obstetrics in any Cambodian hospital. Cambodia had become a place where everything was for sale, even doctors’ diplomas. He told me it was no problem; I could give birth in the Thai capital, Bangkok.

  I flew to Bangkok for a routine visit two weeks before the birth date. Pierre’s mother met me there. She was much nicer to me now, and eventually we would grow quite close. The hospital was very clean, very crisp, and very technical, but the whole visit didn’t make me feel any better about having a child. I couldn’t understand the doctor—he spoke only Thai and English, and in those days I didn’t speak English.

  The doctor told me my contractions had already begun. It was all over very quickly—I gave birth before Pierre even arrived. After it was over, they handed me the baby. The room was dark. I held this warm, beautiful little creature whose name we had already decided on. After much discussion, we had opened a dictionary and fallen upon the name of a Turkish town between Cambodia and France—Adana. She looked very peacefully into my eyes.

  Something happened to me that night. It was almost like my life began again, a whole new life. This was my baby, my child, who’d come out of my body, like I came out of my mother’s body, the mother I can’t remember and never will. I looked at her all night long, crying, “My little baby, I don’t want you to have a life like me.” I told her, “I will never leave you,” and promised that I would keep her safe.

  We went back to Phnom Penh. My mother-in-law was enchanted by baby Adana. It seemed now that everything was forgiven because I had produced a grandchild. Pierre too was delighted. When we went for a walk with our little girls, Ning and Adana, he told me I was beautiful. I was happy.

  When baby Adana was about a month old, an American man, Robert Deutsch, contacted me. He said it was urgent. Robert had a group called PADEK that worked with squatters—and he told me there was a woman with him who said her daughter had been sold into a brothel. She wanted her daughter back, and Robert thought perhaps I could help her.

  The girl was about thirteen and her name was Srey. Her mother told me she suspected her sister-in-law’s friend had sold her. I went back to the neighborhood where they lived, and it seemed this woman was suspect: she didn’t work, but she sometimes had large sums of money, the neighbors said. And her brother was a policeman.

  When I got home, I went over to the police station near my house and found Srena, the young policeman who’d registered me. I explained what we were up to and I asked him to keep an eye on this woman, to follow her around for a little while and keep his mouth shut about it. He agreed unreservedly—he was a very decent man, and the idea of a child in a brothel against her will sickened him.

  Srena came back and told me he had watched the woman go to a brothel in Tuol Kok, right near my house. I told him to go back there the next day and pretend to be a client. He would ask if there were any new girls, and try to find out if one was called Srey. He did, and the meebon told him, “She’s too sick to see clients right now.”

  I talked about it with Robert, and he said we should both go to the police. Srey’s mother was just a poor woman, and the police would never do anything about her complaint if she acted alone. But if Robert and I made formal complaints on behalf of our legal organizations, the police might feel obligated to take action—that was our only hope of getting Srey out.

  We made so much fuss that the police agreed to raid the brothel. I think they didn’t want to lose face. In those days, not many policemen supported our work. Too many of them were involved in the sex trade themselves—they worked as brothel guards or came as clients. Many of them were even investors.

  That first raid was a farce. There were half a dozen policemen, Robert, the girl’s mother, and me. As we went in the front door, the pimps and most of the girls were already fleeing out the back. But Srey, the girl we had come for, was still inside. She was white as a sheet and sweating on a filthy little bed on the floor. She was feverish, almost unconscious. In the space of a few weeks, the pimps had addicted her to some kind of drug—methamphetamines, I think.

  We took Srey to the police station to tell her story and file charges. She was pale; she could hardly stand. Then she left with her mother. I visited her the next day and got her some medicine. But she was going through withdrawal, pissing on the floor, and it was clear her mother couldn’t deal with her—she was trying to hide her from the neighbors. A few days later she asked me to take Srey—she didn’t want her own daughter anymore.

  Srey was the first victim who came to live with us. We had nowhere to take the girls and no money to set up a center, but we had two bedrooms and a living room. It wasn’t large, but there was space enough.

  In the beginning of 1996, Pierre, Eric, and I finalized our project to create a charity to fund a proper center to help prostitutes. We decided to call it something mild—we knew we had to avoid attracting a stigma to the girls who would be living there. We settled on AFESIP, which translates from French as: Acting for Women in Distressing Situations. This could mean anyone; it carried no label of prostitution.

  We took our project to the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office in Phnom Penh, looking for funds. Three months later we still had had no response and when we called the secretary said our papers couldn’t be traced. When we went back to submit the paperwork again, the EU representative was there. She asked, “What is it that you actually want?”

  We explained the project to her and she said, “But there are no prostitutes in Cambodia.” She had been in the country for at least a year.

  I’m not a diplomat. “Madam,” I said, “you’re living in a world of air-conditioned hotels and offices. This isn’t an air-conditioned country. Go outdoors and take a
look around.”

  We didn’t get any money from the EU. We didn’t get any money from anyone. All the big international organizations that were in Cambodia to fund grassroots projects like ours knew about our mission, but helping prostitutes didn’t seem like a priority to them, and they weren’t giving us money. Sometimes, if a journalist wanted to write about the traffic in sex slaves in Cambodia, these organizations would send the reporter to me. But AFESIP was never quoted in the article—the big organizations would take all the credit.

  Pierre’s salary had once seemed princely, but his monthly three-thousand-dollar paycheck was now completely absorbed by our daily needs and my work. I began working for a real-estate agent, trying to make a little extra money by finding houses for the foreigners who were now flooding into Cambodia with nongovernmental aid organizations. What we needed was a lot more money—enough to start up a proper center where former prostitutes could live and learn to stand on their own two feet again. But at least this new job would give me a little extra, enough to fund the girls in our house and get them sewing instruction.

  My job was to find houses for foreigners. I looked for places with charm and with gardens—not the featureless concrete villas that developers were slapping up all over town. I understood what foreigners wanted, because in some ways I was now partly foreign myself.

  One afternoon I knocked on the door of a small house that lay behind a beautiful Cambodian garden, with orchids hanging in a banyan tree. An old man lived there. Renting his house out was the last thing he wanted to do, but we started talking anyway, and he asked me in for tea.

  He was an intellectual and he’d been through every kind of revolution and change and suffering too—it was marked on his face. He said, “In Cambodia we’re like frogs in front of the king. When the king orders it, we poke our heads above water and sing. When he signals, we go back into the water. But if we poke our heads out without having been invited to, the king cuts them off with his sword.

  “I’ve seen everything and lived everything,” he told me. “It’s all useless. When you’re young, as you are, you’re enthusiastic. You want to understand a great many things. It’s no use. I fought all my life and for nothing; now I wait for death. The only thing to hope for in this world is the peace you need to look after your own garden.”

  I understood him and I thought about his words often. When you’re a frog, it’s best to keep your head low. You don’t stick your neck out and try to change the world. I understand that. I don’t feel like I can change the world. I don’t even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering. I want to change this small real thing that is the destiny of one little girl. And then another, and another, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself or sleep at night.

  In August 1996, a big conference on the sexual exploitation of children took place in Stockholm, Sweden, and several journalists wrote about the situation in Cambodia. After that, the big international aid agencies seemed more interested in our plans for AFESIP, and one big UN agency promised us funds.

  They were a long time coming. By now, Pierre and I had several girls living with us. One was pregnant, two had been addicted to drugs by their pimps, and another had two children under the age of five. They all slept in our spare bedroom. Pierre and I slept with Adana and Ning in our room, and if there was too much crying from the baby, Pierre would try to catch some sleep on a cot in the corridor.

  It was a lot to take, and Pierre was becoming exasperated. After a series of sleepless nights, he exploded with rage one day and told me that if we couldn’t find a better solution, I would have to throw the girls out. In desperation, I went to Robert again. He talked to John Anderson at Save the Children UK, and they decided to lend us a house, which would become our first center.

  It was a small wooden house on a tiny plot of land in northwest Phnom Penh. I could hardly believe our luck. At last we would have somewhere to house and feed the traumatized women and girls who so badly needed a refuge. To get started, Robert gave us six thousand dollars from PADEK funds.

  We needed somebody to help run this place, to cook and to live there, to keep it organized. We didn’t have the money to pay a salary, and who would work for free? Then I thought of my adoptive mother. She looked after people. I knew that she too had once been in a brothel, even though we had never even broached the subject. I knew she would never look down on the girls in our care.

  I went to Thlok Chhrov to talk to her about it. By the time I finished she had tears in her eyes and wordlessly began putting her clothes into a suitcase. Father was quite surprised by this. He had no plans to move to Phnom Penh, but he agreed that Mother should come back with me and work for a while at the new AFESIP shelter.

  Our shelter began as just that—a shelter, a place of refuge. It was a one-room house on stilts, and everyone slept together on mats on the bare floor. Dietrich’s friend Guillaume had given me ten sewing machines, but there was no room for them. We had to set them up on the bare earth underneath the house, exposed to the rain.

  The sewing machines were crucial. My mother could teach the girls to cook, but they also needed a more marketable skill. A trained tailor who knew how to draw a pattern and fit a dress could make real money—honest money—and hold her head high.

  But I couldn’t afford to pay for a sewing teacher to train the girls. In Phnom Penh, tailors were now asking four hundred dollars a month to train one apprentice. Finally, after thinking about it for a long time, I asked Phanna if she would teach sewing. She had always been a good tailor, and she was used to teaching. She knew I couldn’t pay her, but she wanted to move back to Phnom Penh anyway because she had learned that her husband was fooling around with other women.

  We also hired a woman to do the accounts. She was the only one of us who was paid, and her salary was tiny, I think fifty dollars a month. We had enough money to pay for a few months of electricity, food, and medical treatment. For a long time, health care was our biggest expense.

  We held an official opening ceremony on March 8, 1997—Women’s Day. By then we were sheltering about twenty women. I was very nervous. I had invited my hero to the ceremony and I wasn’t sure she would come. Men Sam An was the head of a government body called the Central Administration Commission, as well as a number of women’s associations, and she was a fighter. During the Khmer Rouge years she was indoctrinated and enrolled in the militia like all the other young people, but she fled into the forest and became a guerrilla, fighting the Khmer Rouge. Later the Vietnamese-backed government made her a cabinet minister. Sometimes, when I was in Chup, I would see photographs of her in a newspaper—a small woman, pretty and smiling, wearing military fatigues.

  Men Sam An came to the ceremony, with a whole entourage of staff and bodyguards. She was very simple and seemed genuinely interested in our work. She signed our guest book. When the time came for me to speak I was so overcome by emotion I could hardly talk. I really messed up my speech. But I was so proud. My two dreams were to open a women’s shelter and to meet Men Sam An, and now both had come true.

  .11.

  Guardian Angels

  I was still doing social work in the brothels, distributing condoms and health information and taking girls to clinics. This was useful work in itself, but it also served as a kind of cover, because I could encourage girls to escape and come to our shelter in secret.

  I was also working with the police. I began informing them whenever I heard about a girl who had been sold or kidnapped and was being held under guard. We would pressure the police to stage a raid on the brothel, and then Pierre or I, representing AFESIP, would go along on the raid as observers. That way, the police would release the girl into the custody of AFESIP instead of taking her to a police cell.

  But the whole process was often extremely difficult. The police in Cambodia are not like policemen in the West. Especially in those days, many police officers were in the pocket of the pimps. Sometime
s they took money from them in return for protection and sometimes they beat up clients who refused to pay. Some policemen even owned brothels, and many were regular clients.

  Every so often we would come across a decent policeman—someone like Srena, who had compassion for the children who were being abducted and abused. Often these men were new to the force, with no power to change anything, but if a family came to the station to report a stolen daughter, they would alert me. Then I would dress up in my Khmer de France clothes and come to the station to file a formal complaint in the name of AFESIP, just like a white person would. That sometimes got the process moving, because it was more difficult to ignore.

  By the end of 1996 we had about a dozen women living in the shelter. We had gone on perhaps a dozen police raids and saved girls who were chained and guarded in horrible conditions. Yet it was becoming difficult for me to go into the brothels as a social worker, because people had begun to recognize me. I was shoved around and threatened.

  Meanwhile, good people were joining our effort. A woman I had known in Kratie had recently moved to Phnom Penh to work as a translator. Chang Meng was a woman of great intelligence and compassion who had suffered a great deal. Though we rarely talked about it, I knew that she had lost her husband and children under the Khmer Rouge. I asked her to join me as a social worker and investigator, working in the brothels together. She’s still with AFESIP today.

  In 1997 a French journalist, Claude Sampère, heard about my work. He was in Cambodia filming a story about land mines for his program, Envoyé Spécial. I had a pretty low opinion of journalists in those days—I had spent days taking reporters through brothels in Phnom Penh, translating long and painful conversations for them, only to find that AFESIP was never quoted and only the most titillating details were used.

  But Claude Sampère was different. He and his team got up at 6:00 a.m. to accompany us on our rounds. When he interviewed the girls in our little shelter about their lives, I saw him crying. I’d never seen anything like that.