Love146 Partnership Trip: Day 2

Phnom Penh, April 23, 2009

We wake up at 4:30 the next morning for an early flight out to Phnom Penh. The flight attendants of Thai Airways pass deep purple orchid corsages to me, Sharon and Paula, and we pin them to the front of our shirts. After producing two passport pictures and $25 for a glittering Cambodian visa, we get in a van and take off for a Love146 partner office. The van navigates in between motobikes, trucks spilling over with boxes stacked precariously on their tops, bicycles, tuk-tuks, and entire families crammed onto a single motorcycle. Most passengers are not wearing helmets as their drivers zip and weave between imaginary traffic lines. The heat, again, is suffocating, and I hold my breath as we narrowly clear a collision with a man and his daughter. They don’t seem to notice.

Beth* greets us at the door and ushers us upstairs. The meeting room has high ceilings and bright sunlight streams in from the windows behind blinds the color of butter. The room is cooled by air conditioning until about midway through our discussion, when the power suddenly goes out. Beth laughs as if this is a normal occurrence; she has been in Cambodia for over a decade, but still has a European accent that blends back and forth between excitement, encouragement and weariness. She reminds me of what Claire Danes might look like in about ten years.  

Beth introduces us to Phillip*, a Cambodian man who plays a large role in the organization, and we gather around the meeting room table drinking glasses of purified water.  A sign on the far wall says, “On our own we travel faster, with others we travel farther.”  The organization has a network of 40 members and also hosts focus forums on topics like shelters, preparing children for court cases, law enforcement issues, etc. As Beth ticks off the issues on her fingers I am reminded again of how tangled this web is.

For example, the deck could not be more stacked against the ethnic Vietnamese living in Phnom Penh: their nonrecognition as citizens by either the Cambodian or Vietnamese governments, extreme poverty, and several cultural customs, among other things, put them square in the crosshairs for easy trafficking. Some families sell their children out of destitute poverty, but others do it for a new piece of electronic equipment for their homes. Many instances of trafficking here are not the locked-up-in-a-brothel-forever kind, but instead take the form of virginity trafficking, where a young girl is sold to a businessman for two weeks and then returned. The price of this can range from $40-$4,000, depending on the girl’s age. A four or five year old child can be “priced” at the higher end of that range, but it’s all about what the market dictates.  In a few particularly poor communities in Phnom Penh, 80-90% of families have sold one of their children.

Other issues are raised throughout the hour-long meeting; the crumbling economy has meant a rapid loss of garment industry jobs, one of the main sources of income in Cambodia, and has resulted in a large number of unemployed young women. Poverty draws traffickers like nothing else. Beth also tells us that child pornography can be bought for as little as 35 cents, and that five years ago brothels were relatively drug-free; now they are rife with methamphetamine use. If you can get a girl addicted to methamphetamines, she can work for up to 20 hours a day—and you have the ultimate control over her. Beth laughs tightly as she tells us that the same issue pertains to fishing labor slavery in areas of Thailand, but that in the West “some people are more worried about not catching dolphins for tuna.”

As the list of complications gets longer I feel myself get heavier throughout the day. It is a physical pressure, like a cloud made of iron growing in my chest. But there are also encouragements: brainstorming is evident on the colorful pieces of construction paper hanging on the surrounding walls, and diagrams fill the whiteboard. The partnership coalition is combating the different threads of the puzzle through everything from halfway houses aimed at easier reintegration to rapid response campaigns in magazine outreach to the garment district. Beth is joyful and friendly and I find myself wanting to be just like her, or at least to be her friend. She tucks her hair behind her ears when we ask how she can do it, day in, day out, and says that she has suffered post traumatic stress disorder at times so strong that it leaves her temporarily paralyzed. Then she flashes a grin, clasps her hands together and says that it’s time for lunch.

We drive to a fair-trade café that has air conditioning and fresh fruit juices. The second floor is like an oasis away from the frenetic traffic and heat of the city. I order a watermelon juice and ask Beth for her thoughts on everything from the TVPA report to what she thinks of Nicholas Kristof and the Dateline special on Svay Pak—something she says actually led to increased sightings of Western men after it aired. I am horrified, and then surprised by my own continued naïveté.

After lunch we merge back into the traffic until we turn down a hill onto a thin dirt road.  Another organization has set up shop in this neighborhood, turning an infamous brothel into a center to help the community.  Conner* greets us with a huge smile and an outstretched hand.  He's lived here for two years and the children know him, pulling on his arms, some barefoot, crowding around us as we step inside the former brothel.  They are young, elementary- and middle-school-aged, although I doubt that many of them are receiving formal schooling.  I almost can't believe my eyes; I've seen this, in research for my blog, and now I am here.  A few years ago this place was full of cell rooms no bigger than a closet; rows like stalls that held small girls as slaves.  There were no windows, and the single backdoor had been filled to the ceiling with concrete to prevent escape.  

Now the cell walls have been knocked down--all but one room, which stands as a reminder of how far this place has come.  Light streams through the open front, and children run in and out.  A mother rocks her young baby in a small hammock near the door.  Beth stands in the center of the room, glowing as she looks from left to right.  "The last time I was here, I was knocking down parts of those walls myself," she says.  "How good that felt."  Some of the girls who were rescued from the brothel are here now, helping and healing the next generation.  

A steep, rickety ladder leads up to a room on the second floor--the closest place to a hell on earth I have ever been.  The room used to be a mildewed pink: the "Virginity," or "VIP" room.  I look around the small, hot room, as Conner tells us softly that thousands of videos of child pornography have been filmed in this room. When the brothel was eventually closed down, CSI investigators from the United States and Canada flew over to extensively document it, taking pictures to help identify all of the horrific scenes it was witness to.  Hot tears well behind my sunglasses as I think about how much fear must have been in this room; how much selfishness, how little compassion.  

Today is the perfect day for us to be there, as if it were handpicked before we arrived.  A Khmer man who cares deeply for the community is in the process of moving into this very room with his family; their things are pushed against the far wall.  Normal things--lamps and books and the objects that belong to a family.  The room has been painted a soft yellow, and workers are sanding the door to make a bathroom.  We can hear laughter and voices and excitement spilling through the slats in the wall.  

We shuffle back down the stairs and outside into the daylight.  The children continue to crowd around us, tugging on our hands and asking us our names in English.  We have been told that a large percentage of the girls are still currently being trafficked, plucked off of the streets at night for the brothels still functioning in the area.  Conner treats them all as if they were his brothers and sisters.  “This eight-year-old is my little troublemaker,” he says affectionately.  "What's he do?" one of our group asks innocently.  “He’s a meth dealer and he’s pimping out some of the other kids,” he says.  

Down the street Conner shows us another establishment his organization has built and funded--this one to minister to the traffickers and pimps themselves.  The children follow us down the road, and I stoop to unpin the deep purple orchid, and give it to a girl who looks like she's about ten years old.  She is thrilled, and twirls it between her fingers.  Kathy passes out sticks of gum and speaks to the kids in Vietnamese as Conner gives us a small tour of the other facility.  I wonder if this is the hardest part of what he does; finding love for the people it's so easy to feel hatred for.  But he seems able to see much farther down the road than what I can today; and I know that his wisdom, to be able to minister to both sides of the problem, is the only way that this will ever end.  

The afternoon sky darkens with a coming storm and a breeze blows the open garbage around our feet. The kids are playing jumprope and waving, Conner in the midst of them, as we pull away.  The rain opens up and patters against the roof of the van before we are halfway back to the hotel. 

After today, I have no doubt that I've stood somewhere near the depths of what evil can look like on this earth.  And I have also seen, with my own eyes, the glimmer of redemption.

Photo by ŭn-sŭng