All That Is Bitter and Sweet (17 page)

After I emceed for a while (they don’t necessarily know my specific films, but boy, do they understand “Hollywood star”) I snuck off to a field with tall grass from which I could watch the spectacle from a distance. I sat very still on the ground, aware of where I was on the globe, the night sky looking so different than it does from our back porch. I peered through the dark, rich air around me, gazing toward the cone of light and eruptions of laughter that pulsed from the circled-up crowd. It was quite a sight.
Look at me now, Mamaw and Papaw, playing on a summer’s night
.

The next morning, we drove to another neighborhood on the edge of the city and squeezed through a narrow dirt lane, arriving at a makeshift school for poor kids and AIDS orphans run by Khemara, our partner NGO. The building was no more than a collection of thin straw walls surrounding a clay tile floor with a few woven mats in the middle. The kids did their darling “Oh, here’s the grown-up we are supposed to charm with our songs” routine, and I was charmed indeed. Then they scattered.

I sat on a mat and waited patiently. Finally, by ones and twos, and then in a swarm, they surrounded me. They had dirty clothes and runny noses, and some of them were visibly malnourished, with the telltale yellow-tinged hair that comes with vitamin deficiency. They were tiny for their age—some of the five- and six-year-olds looked no bigger than toddlers because of stunting—and their eyes were sad beyond their years. Many of the orphans were already HIV-positive.

After asking permission to hug them—a custom in Cambodia—I cradled them, held their hands, smoothed their hair, and made them giggle. We basically just loved on one another. I spoke in English, trusting that tone and melody would be intuitively understood and felt, giving them my encouragement, prayers, and affirmations. It was difficult to leave, and I struggled to stay on the schedule that had been created.

My next destination was at the end of the dirt road in a peri-urban slum. It was yet another collection of one-room houses on stilts, with ravines ribbing their way underneath. As we got out to walk, an ebullient little girl with long black hair and a short-sleeved blouse with a Peter Pan collar burst out of the crowd. Before any grown-ups could explain, she leaped onto me, wrapping her legs around my waist and flinging her arms around my neck. Introductions were no longer necessary; she was my next appointment. Ouk Srey Leak was an eleven-year-old AIDS orphan who was being cared for with the help of Khemara. Although her delicate face was sad and serious, she greeted me with unusually intense and spontaneous physical warmth.

She jumped down, took my hand, and began to pull me toward her home. I asked if, on the way, she would give me a tour of her neighborhood. An important feature we passed was the well that provided her community’s drinking water. It immediately brought to mind the wells on family farms in eastern Kentucky that fascinated me as a child and the deep satisfaction of drinking delicious cold water. Srey Leak’s well looked functional, but of course microbes and parasites are not visible to the naked eye; there was no way to ascertain the quality of this drinking water upon which thousands relied. Diarrheal disease is a massive global public health crisis, the second leading killer of children under the age of five worldwide. PSI addresses unsafe drinking water by socially marketing point-of-use water purification solution, which costs pennies to provide safe water for a family of five for a month. We also socially market and give away oral re-hydration salts, essential for recuperating from otherwise deadly episodes of diarrhea. Srey Leak was very patient with my keen interest in her well, and I was so glad it was nearby. Girls in Southeast Asia can spend up to six hours a day doing chores, much of that time involved in searching for and carrying water.

Her small hut was where she had lived with her parents until they died of complications of AIDS. She was able to stay here alone with the help of an aunt who lived in the neighborhood and a health care program run by Khemara. I stepped inside her spare, neat wooden hut and felt a shiver of recognition. With a translator seated nearby, I sat on the floor and Srey Leak, whose name means “Perfect Girl,” curled into my lap. I was cross-legged, and we fit together perfectly, as if we belonged just this way. As she nestled up against me, my arms completed the circle of holding, fully enveloping her, and I began to rock her. She relaxed against me as she told me how her parents had died one after the other and how much she wanted a mother. If the rocking slowed, she would press into me, wordlessly letting me know she wanted more. She showed me a small photo album with pictures of her beautiful family—mother, father, and grandparents—enshrined in plastic. It was all she had left of them.

I told her about my grandparents and softly shared some of the ways I am able to keep my relationship with them dynamic and alive, even though they had passed on from the physical world. Last night, in fact, I had very auspiciously had one of my deep, beautiful, heart-piercing dreams about Mamaw, the kind that happens on occasion and nearly breaks me in half with its bittersweetness. She had come to me just as she had been in life, appearing so naturally and fully that I could see every eyelash, the exact color and flecks of her irises. She had whispered guidance, direction, and care to me, soaking me in the unconditional love she gave me in such abundance in life. I described the dream to Srey Leak and told her how I could tenderly conjure scenes with such attention to detail that I could re-experience my grandparents’ love, walking in my mind’s eye through precious memories. I talked with her about praying.

I made a stupid mistake while I was trying to be lighthearted for a moment and had changed the subject to daily chores. When I found out that she did the dishes, I exclaimed, “Oh, I had that chore when I was a kid!” I told her I didn’t think that had been fair, as it should have fallen to my older sister, and didn’t she agree? “Aren’t the dishes for the bigger kids in the family?”

She thought it over and said, “Well, I don’t have anybody.” I felt ashamed—I had forgotten she had no siblings. I said a silent prayer, asking to be taught how to be more considerate. She handled my gaffe with poise.

We carried on snuggling and talking for the better part of an hour. When it was time to go, Kate and I gave her a wrapped gift box filled with a backpack, clothes, and school and art supplies. I knew her grief transcended being “fixed” by a gift, but I hoped it would keep her mind distracted for a spell.

I told her I would never forget her, and I asked her to show me where she slept so I could picture here there. She led me to a thin mat on the floor, a few feet from where we had been sitting all this time, in the corner of her hut. I found this especially sad, maybe because of those evenings I’d spent on the bed with Mamaw, and I fought back an urge to sweep her up, carry her on my hip, keep her safe, and bring her home with me.

It is wholly unnatural to walk away from a child in need, especially one with outstretched arms. It defies my humanity and is easily the hardest part of this job I have so eagerly taken on. I have often pictured Srey Leak in our home, daydreaming that she and the aunt who looks after her have come to live with us. I have stood in the doorway of the guest room in our house I have imagined would be theirs (she would want her aunt to sleep in the same room with her, at least at first). And in my imagination, Srey Leak goes on to assimilate the best of what America has to offer, and whether she grows up to live a quiet, simple life, or has troubles that stem from her many losses, or overcomes those losses and goes on to be of great service to her fellows, I love and accept her unconditionally.

But she still has a place in Cambodia with her aunt and her people. I know that. And with help from Khemara and PSI, she also has a chance at a better future. I have a picture of her burying herself into me, her eyes a million miles away even as she clings. My chin rests gently on her head. My eyes are closed. I am wearing Mamaw’s pearls, a treasured gift from the woman who taught me to love this way, whose lap was the high holy altar of safety and comfort when I was little. Sometimes still, Tennie, the grandmother of choice God has given me, holds me this way. She has a swing on her screened-in porch, and various of us kids and grandkids will on occasion ask her, “Will you please rock me?” We never outgrow our need to be held.

I haven’t seen Ouk Srey Leak again, and because of standard personnel changes in our staff in Cambodia, I have sadly lost track of her. Once, though, I received a package from her. She had drawn beautiful pictures for me. One is a pair of hands, reaching up from the bottom of the page as if growing up from the earth. They are cupped. Out of them flows all of creation, all manner of wonderful animals, plants, the sun, moon, and stars. It took my breath away.

I rock her still.

That afternoon we flew to Siem Reap, northwest of the capital, where PSI was opening a satellite office to serve Cambodia’s rural areas. We stayed at a beautiful, peaceful hotel near the Angkor Wat temple compound, where the magnificent ruins of Cambodia’s past are being slowly reclaimed from the jungle. I took advantage of a few hours off to hike barefoot through the tangled forest, but I wasn’t fully present. The next morning, I was up early, feeling tight, anxious, and frustrated. After tea, I began recording my daily entry in the video diary I was keeping to be used as part of a documentary for PSI. I set up the camera on my dresser, started to talk about the time I had spent with a tiny orphan the day before, and promptly exploded into tears.
Cut
. Well, that was a clue to my agitated state. I wept bitterly for Ouk Srey Leak and her grief and for something that her story touched deep in my own heart, something I couldn’t yet name.

I began to revive during a long drive out through the rural Cambodian countryside. Fresh air, open fields, and gentle farm animals cheered me. The views were lovely, the roads narrow, people few. When we arrived at a
wat
, or temple, I discovered where a lot of the people were: here, waiting for me! There were village children lining the road, and from a distance the monks in their saffron robes and the white-shirted Buddhist nuns looked like a bouquet of marigolds, dahlias, and zinnias scattered on the pagoda steps.

The polished stone floor was cool on my bare feet as I was led out of the blazing sun and into the quiet corridors of the simple stone building with a soaring roofline. The monks came filing in and greeted me in an extraordinary and happy ceremony that had me lying prone before them as they chanted a blessing on me. We all sat cross-legged on mats; even the shoeless Papa Jack in his safari vest and khakis managed a half lotus. The head monk led his charges through the prayers, their resonant singsong voices sometimes echoed, and always affirmed, by the rows of observers on either side of the Buddha’s sacred alley. At the end the senior monk spoke special blessings and graced me by gently tossing sprays of jasmine blossoms and lotus flowers. Praying? Flowers? It was a dream come true.

As if that weren’t transporting enough, I then went outside, where I was surrounded by the “wat grannies,” a posse of five-foot-nothing, shaved-headed Buddhist nuns, mostly toothless women with brown, weathered faces who pawed me into a state of belovedness. Through my translator they murmured beautiful, hopeful things to me about well-being, long life, responsible and giving nature, and future happiness. I instantly adored them. I soaked them up and kissed them and held them while the most toothless of the bunch cheerfully gummed my arm. I showed them a picture of Dario and told them that I hoped to bring my handsome husband for them to meet someday. They laughed and clucked like happy hens as they passed around fresh coconuts to sip the cool, sweet milk.

The
wat
grannies are part of a PSI program funded by USAID that pairs vulnerable, at-risk children from the countryside with surrogate grandmothers. The elderly nuns each take five or six children and basically do to them what they did to me: love them. They mentor the children and help educate mothers (if they haven’t migrated to the city for work) about proper child care. Most important, they provide compassion, wisdom, and continuity in a place that is still reeling from the ravages of war and cultural annihilation.