Love146 Partnership Trip: Day 3

Friday, April 24

Phnom Penh

This day is, without question, the worst.

Phillip and our van driver pull up to the hotel at 8:30 Friday morning.  We load our luggage into the trunk and set off for another notorious Cambodian slum.  The morning is already heavy and humid.  "You pick the hottest month to come to Cambodia," Phillip says, laughing.

We again drive down the street, now more used to having to weave and jolt through the Phnom Penh traffic.  When the van drops us off a short time later, we coat ourselves in sunscreen and bugspray, take our daily Malarone pill, and set off down a winding back alleyway.  

The first thing I notice are the flies, shimmering in the air and blanketing rows of exposed food on the ground--bowls of rice and little shelled snails, all covered with flies, all seemingly still planned to be eaten.  Garbage is everywhere, under our feet, spilling out in piles and half-disintegrated into the ground.  Children surround us, running past, some calling out, "Hello!  Hello!"  We smile and wave as we walk deeper into the slum, and they return to their playing.

The partner organization we're visiting today is behind a corroded aluminum sliding gate.  It opens to a dusty courtyard filled with children laughing and screaming as they chase each other.  They are playing some sort of English language-learning game.  The words "elephant" and "yellow" are taped to the inside of the enclosing walls.  Occasionally someone skids on their knees on a strip of concrete, then gets up and continues running.  Most have no shoes.

We are ushered into a small, hot room which serves as the office and are introduced to the man who runs the organization, G.*  His English is good and he beams at us as he explains the program and what it offers to the children: schooling, meals, vocational training, shelter for certain individuals.  And here the complexity continues to unravel.  This slum, like the one from yesterday, and each of the others we will see today, is mostly filled with ethnic Vietnamese, who migrated to Cambodia after the Vietnamese government overthrew the Khmer Rouge, and now live in a state of non-citizenship.  They have no legal papers, which makes it nearly impossible to find jobs.  They are also heavily discriminated against.  Currently, no government/country takes responsibility for their lives.  

G. gestures to a wall of business cards, separated into categories with labels like "trafficking" and "medical care."  Each of the business cards represent other partners, lined up like a little paper army to battle against all of the trappings these people face.  A small handwritten sign on the wall serves as a reminder that "Trafficking is complicated: A child would often rather be trafficked [for sex or labor] than lose their family."  

After G. finishes telling us how he came to be the director of the program, we step back out into the sunlight and walk through the rest of the compound; I stop in one of the tiny rooms to buy necklaces made out of wrapped paper.  It's one of the skills that the young people are learning to earn a small income.  A group of children eating breakfast under a shaded area clasp their palms together at their chins and sing a greeting to us as we pass.  Sweat runs down our faces and arms.  "The power is out again," G. says, not apologetically, not complaining: just fact.  It's in the 90's and climbing.

We finish our brief tour and then leave the compound, winding our way back out of the

cavernous alleyways.  On the way we stop at a one-room shack.   Inside is a woman sitting crosslegged on the ground.  Smoke curls off of incense sticks and her young daughter brings us miniature, cracked plastic stools to sit on.  The woman is ill, and HIV-positive.  She strings delicate silk flower petals together with quick, nimble stitches at her fingertips, and makes them into a bouquet, offering it to Sharon as a gift.  Her daughter runs to get us cold bottled water.  G. tells us in English that this woman has had to sell her young son.  We set a tiny pile of worn, faded dollar bills on the floor next to her collection of silk flower petals, and leave humbled by a new understanding of what it means to be generous to strangers even in the midst of nothing.

Photo by bartpogoda

Soon we are out of the slum and back into the blazing sun.  We cross the street carefully, in a group, to avoid being hit by a motorbike.  This first slum was bad; but it was about to get much worse.

We venture down a dirt path strewn with garbage and more flies, and then turn on to a small side alley.  Shacks line both sides of the road, and are flanked at the end by a large shed overflowing with garbage bags.  Then the planks start.  Wooden bridges weave through winding, claustrophic corriders.  Slum houses are crammed in like teeth on either side; underneath, visible through cracks in the boards and foot-wide gaps between the bridge and each home, is the garbage.  More garbage than I've ever seen, about eight feet below us--a sea of decay, plastic, sewage, rotting fruit rinds, and more flies.  The stench and sweat coat my skin and hair.  In the rainy season the river often overflows, bringing the putrid black trash water above the planks and into the homes.

Children again call out hello as we shuffle by.  Teenagers are gathered around a single television in one of the homes, watching a soap opera.  A woman walks by with her shirt pulled up, revealing the curve of a breast and her small infant suckling.  She, too, is HIV-positive, G* tells us.  "Men are permitted to have outside 'girlfriends' at the brothels," he explains.  "Women are not.  They simply receive the virus, and then pass it on to their children."  We are watched with some curiosity and a bit of wariness.  The communities are familiar with G., and so we are permitted to walk into the inner workings of their neighborhoods.  He makes it clear to them that we are not here on a tour to gawk at them, but that we want to help.  We do not take any pictures and I try to commit what I've seen deep in my memory.  Some of the boards are soft and creak shrilly as we pass over them.  I grit my teeth and try not to picture falling the few feet into the mass of wet, decomposing garbage below.  The thought that men from my country would pay thousands of dollars to fly to Cambodia and prey on this situation makes me want to literally turn my head and vomit.  My cheap clothes, picked up with a thought on a last-minute trip to Target, seem clean, bright, expensive.  My ankles begin to itch with what I assume are flea bites, and I scratch them incessantly for the next two days.

Back across the road is a school project started by G.'s organization.  Three girls are gathered upstairs in a small, airy room, sewing clothes.  Three ancient-looking sewing machines line one of the walls; the girls sit on the floor and one embroiders beads by hand on a pink evening gown.  They bring out an exquisite dress the color of charcoal with rouched flowers and hand beading snaked over one shoulder.  The pen drawing of its design is taped to the wall on a piece of torn-out notebook paper.

We thank G. for everything he is doing, and tell him we think he is a hero.  He waves it off with a shake of his head, beaming, and returns to his office and the children behind the aluminum gate.  

We climb back in our trusty van, guzzle water, and spend the next half hour navigating the famous Russian market.  A young girl, a man with one leg, and a woman whose face has been completely burned follow us through the dark stall aisles and haggle us to buy from them.  I shake my head and smile, urging them away almost twenty times.  Paula is overwhelmed and keeps handing them dollar bills.  When the van door closes behind us she breaks down, sobbing as Kathy tells us that unfortunately, with the young kids and disabled sellers, the money often goes straight to a trafficker.

We have lunch at the Bodhi Tree, another fair trade cafe committed to giving disadvantaged girls opportunities.  We eat thin, flat noodles and drink mango passion shakes, trying not to feel guilty about a first-class meal after the poverty we've been in, and then cross the street to Tuol Sleng, the Pol Pot genocide museum.

I can't explain the sick, hollow feeling that I have in this place.  (I feel it again, just typing this now.)  Kathy doesn't come in with us, as she's already been here, but she explains the importance of it being part of our trip.  We cannot combat the issues of poverty, trafficking, and the general human mindset in this country without understanding what they have seen just within the past 30 and 40 years.  That dark, weary feeling I had on the first night returns, only weighted down by everything we've seen the past few days.  Our group walks the museum with Phillip, and I have this deep desire to just shut down and not feel anymore.  

((Please be warned, the below video has some VERY GRAPHIC CONTENT.))

I'm not quite sure how Phillip is able to walk us through the museum.  He has lived through this; I will not share the stories he told us here, to protect his safety and anonymity, but the horrors he has experienced are many.  Pol Pot and other officials in the Khmer Rouge pinned a number on each person they murdered and took their picture the day of their death.  Their photos fill room after room in Tuol Sleng.  It made it even that much more realistic to see the haunted look in each of their eyes, and know that very easily Phillip could have been up there staring right back at us.  "I almost die many times," Phillip tells us, more than once, each time laughing.  "But God save me."  

For the rest of us, the hopelessness begins to set in.  We stumble around each building, our eyes tired of looking at garbage and human suffering and barbed wire and the horrors of what humankind can do to one another.  There's a video at the end of the museum that we sit down to watch, and then the skies open up and heavy rain begins to beat down on the tin roof, drowning

out the sound of the video.  One by one, we get up, and stand in a line on the balcony as the rain pours around us.  Thunder cracks through the air, as loud as I've ever heard, and then lightning flashes.  There is something so good about this rain, pounding on the pavement, like God crying and reminding us of his presence, his power, his broken heart, and the rain just keeps coming down, as if it could wash it all away.

***

The last slum almost pushes me over the edge.  It is another displaced Vietnamese slum, situated far away from the inner city, out in the middle of nowhere--where the government has recently displaced their entire community.  After selling the land the community was living on to a Korean company, the government forced the residents out and placed them in an area far from jobs, transportation, education opportunities, aid groups, medical care, etc.  These people were evicted from their homes in the middle of the night, sprayed with sewage water, and many of their only belongings were razed to the ground.  They now live in varying degrees of poverty, from the nicer permanent shelter homes that look like garages, to a group that has nothing more than a tarp to cover their heads.  They have no running water, no toilet facilities, no privacy.  They are another group so easy to target by traffickers.  As I walk through their new "home" land I see an enormous dead rat, laying bloated and face up in the dirt.  

We stop in one of the tarped areas, where everyone's personal living areas are pushed together and divided by only mosquito nets.  One of the women is having trouble nursing.  The organization we are visiting for this slum has recently paid for her to deliver her baby in the hospital, after finding out that one of the women gave birth and laid in her own blood for three days before receiving any assistance.  Pas sits on her bed, coos at the baby and prays for healing.  By this time we are exhausted and everything is a blur.  There are power lines above their heads and the stream is filled with garbage and human waste.  A woman comes up to us and tells our organization leaders that her baby has bloody diarrhea, and no medical care.  They rush to help her and we, once again, get back on our bus and pull away from the nightmare.  We all sit in silence on our way to the airport, burdened, fleetingly questioning even the use for hope. 

We are in the Phnom Penh airport for hours waiting for our flight to board, eating DairyQueen blizzards for dinner and poking fun at one another.  We laugh over the smallest, silliest things, to the point of hysterics.  Because if we didn't, we would start crying and then we might never stop.

We fly back to Bangkok that night, and are grateful to see something familiar.