Because I am a Girl (5 page)

So, what is Plan doing to help these brave women of Brazil? A better question would be, what are they
not
doing? Education, sanitation, nutrition, child protection, literacy workshops, health centres offering free contraception, after-school theatre workshops and football coaching to get kids off the streets – Plan immerse themselves in communities, building long term support and empowering people to fulfil their potential and improve their lives. When it was discovered that Maria and her friends were not attending school as it was too far away, Plan built a school nearby. It is here that the children
often
get their only meal of the day. (The school has two shifts, one from 7am to 1 pm, another from 1 pm to 5 pm.) In 2007, only 79.2% of children in the north-east of Brazil completed primary school. Brazil has the largest population of under six-year-olds in the Americas.

Plan trains teachers and community volunteers to help young children learn to read. They work with the Brazilian government on eradicating child labour, and providing emergency shelter and food when mud slides destroy communities during the wet season. For the past two years, Plan has been encouraging communities to develop allotments to grow food. In this part of Brazil, young children are fed a staple diet of mingau, a watery porridge made from farine, a starchy flour with low nutritional value. Now families are growing beans, vegetables and herbs like parsley, a spoonful of which every day has enough vitamin A to sustain a child.

There is so much violence in the favelas that children are not safe on the streets. And yet at home, domestic violence against the women and children is astronomically high. With much police corruption (people had told me that if you see a policeman in Brazil – run) Plan’s counsellors, elected by other locals, can be an alternative source of intervention, offering shelter and help.

Without the support of Plan, standing up to the macho Brazilian men, a corrupt police force and the patriarchal
Catholic
Church would be like facing up to Darth Vader with a butter knife.

As pregnancy consigns many Brazilian women to poverty, it seems clear that Catholicism kills. The dying process begins the moment we come into the world, but it sure speeds up if you are poor in Brazil. Two hundred and twenty-five children under the age of five die every day in Brazil. Thirty-one per cent of family houses in urban areas don’t have access to basic sanitation which results in 2,500 deaths a year of children under five as a consequence of the contamination of the water by fecal matter. The number of young murder victims grew five-fold in the last twenty years. Nearly fifty youths are murdered every day. 17,312 youths aged between fifteen and twenty-four years were murdered in 2006.

The Pope promotes abstinence. Well, yes, of course, the one hundred percent safe oral contraceptive is the word ‘no’. But with child prostitution and rape rife, this is not an option. Termination is illegal, so when women go to the hospital bleeding from a self-administered abortion, the doctors must report them to the police. One hundred women are currently awaiting trial on self-abortion charges. Recently, a nine-year-old girl was raped by her stepfather. She became pregnant with twins. The Bishop for Pernambuco swore to excommunicate the family and the doctors if they aborted the foetus. And yet it’s clear the
sanctity
of life stops the moment the baby is born – after that the Catholic Church chickens out of its obligations to those eggs. It fails to protect the children its policies have brought into the world, particularly all the little girls who have been pimped by their poverty-stricken parents or left to starve by an indifferent state.

Brazil is a patriarchal society. The girls must get up at six and help their mothers prepare breakfast. The sons get an extra lie-in. When the kids come home from school, the boys play soccer. The girls must help with domestic chores. Seventy-eight per cent of the population believe that domestic violence will go unpunished. During my time in Brazil, everyone was on swine flu alert. But Brazilian women have dated so many swine, even married one or two, and confessed to others in church, that they must surely be immune?

But even so, the spirit of the young Brazilian women I met shone through. Their joy and optimism in the face of adversity made my heart expand like an accordion. Every child I met had the sort of neon smile that made you wish you were wearing Polaroids. When I went swimming with some of the girls from the favela, they giggled uncontrollably at my conservative one-piece swimming costume and my unwaxed pudenda. Even though there is no money for waxing, the girls do trim. (Brazilians are obsessed with
deforestation
. The rainforest doesn’t stand a chance!) I retorted that I liked my pubic hair – that it was like having a little pet in my pants at which they roared with laughter, teasing me mercilessly. I may not wax, but I will wax lyrical about the resilient, beautiful young women of Brazil.

THE OLD POLICEMAN
stepped into the muddy rainwater streaming through the market. A smell of rotted durian fruit hung thickly in the air. He walked fast, with a sad joy, constantly colliding with busy shoppers, driven on by his eagerness to get home. He had to fix his rotten motorbike as soon as possible, and then drive to a village fifteen miles away before sunset.

Dara, or ‘the old policeman’, as the locals called him, was not really old. He had only just hit fifty, but was still the oldest in his police office. In Siem Reap, or in any of the big towns in Cambodia, apart from those who became bosses, all the older policemen were either retired or had no need to work anymore, thanks to the pocket money they got from bribes. But Dara was still there, and had been for half his life, carrying a gun in northern Cambodia. He was neither rich nor particularly poor, and he was reasonably kind to people, if they weren’t discouraged by his silence and often grumpy, motionless face. Dara was, after all, a man with a secret, and an inscrutable
dignity
. He barely talked about his past; some people said that he had been a soldier when he was young. But his short, solid body showed none of the usual signs, unlike others who had lost their limbs to mines during the war.

Right now, the old policeman was trying to finish his shift without incident, though a small riot was stirring up in the food market; a mango seller was fighting with a motorcycle-taxi man. The latter had blindly ridden into the seller’s papayas and mangos, which were laid on a piece of flat cloth on the dirt road, and now the fruits were crushed into a mess. The old policeman heard the seller asking for 5,000 riel in compensation, but the taxi man only cursed her. When he was tired of cursing, he pulled his motorcycle away. Dara knew the man well – he had arrested him twice for heroin trafficking some years ago. But with the intense noon sun heating up the day, the old policeman had no desire to help with anything or arrest anyone. He walked between the customers and their sellers, ignoring their loose talk and crude banter, and stepped on to the dusty white road.

When Dara arrived home, his wife Chinda was frying fish in a wok, yesterday’s catfish leftovers with some steamed rice. Without a word to his wife, the old policeman sat on a bench in the backyard under a banyan, swallowing the mashed fish bones and rice. His two dogs came out, staring at his food and waiting, but eventually even they got bored
and
started to chase each other in the yard. The sun was burning hot above Dara’s head and flies whirled around his sweaty skin.

He had bought some gasoline from a roadside store, and filled the oil tank of his old Yamaha. For some days now, the engine of his disintegrating steel horse wouldn’t start, and the sparks weren’t jumping. Dara had been riding his Yamaha for nearly ten years, but now he had to fix the rotten thing twice a week. With the dogs fighting for their lunch nearby, he pulled the spark plug out and moistened the hole with a bit of gasoline, then he screwed in the spark plug and kicked at the bike to start it. Immediately, a puff of black smoke rose up and nearly set the motorbike on fire. The engine was working, and now the only parts that still needed to be fixed were the brakes, but Dara didn’t care much. Who needed brakes? Brakes wouldn’t get him to a village fifteen miles away in one short afternoon. All he needed was speed. Dara cooled down his face with a splash of water and jumped on his motorbike.

As the traffic gradually subsided, the old policeman’s motorbike flew faster and faster along road to the jungle village of Khna. He descended south towards Lacustrine Plain, and his wheels gradually sank into water. The monsoon rain had been falling for weeks now, and the forest had become soaked in the afternoon’s downpour.
Now
, with the sun setting fire to his skin, thoughts of his lost daughter filled his mind. Normally Dara didn’t think much; he only lived. But when he occasionally thought of his little daughter Bopah, big oily tears would roll quietly down his dark cheeks.

Dara was an orphan, and since he was a child there had been no one to count on or to care for. He had been wandering around the world like a weightless leaf. The day his wife bore him a daughter, he felt that he had finally become a true man and he wanted to love the little child for his next three lives. But then, Buddha and Angkor together had played their joke on his life. One day, when his daughter Bopah was four years old, she had been walking behind him on the way back home. As they passed a rice field, Bopah played with a white buffalo while Dara had a short chat with the rice farmer. At one point Dara realised he couldn’t hear his daughter’s laughter anymore. He turned around: the white buffalo was still there but Bopah was no longer playing on the grass. He searched around all the fields until the sky grew dark and the hairs on his skin stood straight. He walked to the nearby villages but again found nothing. He hoped that the girl had managed to get back home by herself, or that someone had helped her. He returned home, only to find his wife alone. Chinda began to cry bitterly. At night, the couple lay and waited on their bed, which was little more than a
floorboard
. Then his wife got up and lit a candle to pray to the Buddha all night. When the rooster sang at the break of dawn, Dara left the house and went back to the area around the rice fields. He searched the nearby jungle for days, but found no trace of his daughter.

Fifteen years passed, and the old policeman’s wife had another two pregnancies but both of the babies died at birth. The midwife from the village said that Chinda had a very small womb; that it suffocated the child inside. The doctor from Siem Reap warned that if Dara’s wife had another pregnancy, she would die. But the worst remark came from a witch in a nearby village. The witch told Dara that he had caught an evil spirit in his early life and that the bad spirit was resting in their house. She said that it would always accompany the policeman wherever he went. An evil spirit from his early life? The old policeman didn’t ask what it was and neither did his wife. But after the witch had gone, his wife said, ‘Perhaps that woman meant those people you killed years ago.’

When he heard this, the old policeman’s head began to ache. He knew what the witch had been talking about, even if the witch herself did not. He was eighteen when the Khmer Rouge killings took place. He had been one of those ‘New People’, a young soldier of Pol Pot in the 70s. As an orphan he’d had neither education nor a home but in the army he found himself some rice to eat and a place to sleep. When the civil war broke out he was serving as a
guard
in a labour camp in the north. He had never met Brother Number 1 but nonetheless he was loyal to the leader’s words. He had beaten many enemies and killed many people. He had dug big pits with other soldiers in order to bury the corpses. After the war, he had wandered through remote areas. For a few months, he went to Thailand to start a small business selling gasoline, but trade faltered. So he switched to recycling plastic bottles, refilling them with tap water to sell at the market. Back in the country, he spent his days riding a cyclo for the visitors touring the ancient Angkor temples. Life was about earning every day’s rice – it had never let him look back. Eventually, since he was very good with guns and could shoot a target precisely, he got a job in the local police office. After living alone and being lonely for thirty years, Dara felt like settling down. He found himself a wife who came from a village near Tonlé Sap lake. Chinda was a simple woman who had never left her village before. But their happy life was finished even before it started. Their missing daughter became a sorrowful presence in their house, and when she learned she could no longer have babies, Chinda fell into a silent depression.

Months and years went by, and no one asked the policeman anything about his past. Perhaps once or twice his wife stared at him and wanted to know of the things that had happened thirty years ago, but even she gave up in the end. What would be the use? Everyone had suffered the
civil
war; every heart was dead many times over. His past was like a long night with a string of senseless nightmares. There was no energy left to talk about those bitter years. To survive was the only meaningful thing to do.

Then only yesterday, in the police office, Dara heard that an old woman had found a jungle girl in the forest. He learned that the jungle girl couldn’t speak any human words and that she behaved wildly, like a feral beast. The villagers guessed that the girl had lived in the jungle for most of her life and therefore couldn’t understand humans. But the second Dara heard that the jungle girl had a big purple scar on her left arm, he knew it was his daughter Bopah. Thoughts crowded the policeman’s mind; thoughts that constantly tortured him and wouldn’t leave him in peace. Dara convinced himself that his missing daughter was found. He didn’t want to tell his wife yet.

After an hour with the wind cutting under a poisonous sun, thinking over the past and of his lost little daughter, Dara’s cheeks were wet from his thick tears. Life was like a well dug long ago – you hoped the water supply would last the rest of your life but as the days went by, the well got drier and drier. Eventually, it became a deep and hollow dark hole. There were a very few things one could keep in this life, Dara thought. If an old man could manage to get something back from his past, then his future would
still
be worth living. Murmuring to himself, the old policeman drove over miles and miles of bumpy red dirt road alongside the banana trees.

Upon arriving in the village of Khna, Dara tried to find the family who had found the jungle girl. He got the name and a rough address from his office, and had bought a map as well. The area was poor, like the village where the old policeman had grown up. It had only a few mango and palm trees, and several buffalo. The locals made their living producing palm tree sugar – they would chop the tree trunk and heat the inside, letting the palm tree juice flow out, then they would dry the juice to make sugar. But Dara knew that palm tree sugar earned them very little money and that these people had to kneel by the fire all day long, under a hot sun, heating those tree trunks. There were no rice fields nearby and the land was occupied by shapeless bushes, grown after all the mahogany trees had been felled for furniture. The monsoon season had begun to show its power and most of the land was swallowed by a muddy, yellow water.

After a while, Dara found the grandmother who had discovered the jungle girl. The yard was full of barking dogs, chickens, cats and pigs, rats and lizards, and naked children. At first, the grandmother didn’t want to show the jungle girl to the policeman, talking instead for about an hour. Holding her two grandchildren in both arms, she told Dara that for days, the food in her house had gone
missing
. Normally she would pack the food into two lunch boxes for her son and grandson, who worked as guards in the nearby temple. Since the food kept going missing, she decided to look around and find the thief. So she went into the jungle, which was further than the villagers would usually go. That was when she saw a naked girl with mud all over her skin, her long hair covering her body. The little beast was discovered kneeling down in the dirt, grabbing at rice and pork spread out on a huge banana leaf. The grandmother recognised the food and ran fast to catch the jungle thief. But to her surprise, the jungle girl didn’t walk like a human. Instead, she ran on four limbs like a monkey. Yet even the grandmother was faster than the hunched monkey girl, and eventually she caught her and brought her back to the village.

When the old policeman saw the feral girl in the grandmother’s backyard, his cheeks began to ache and his heart shrank. The jungle girl was lying under a dead banana tree, her body wrapped in a piece of cloth and her hands and feet tied by ropes to the tree. Her long hair covered her entire body like a black robe. Her eyes were the most frightened eyes Dara had ever seen, full of a certain hatred he couldn’t understand. She didn’t seem to care when flies and insects stuck to her skin. Dara looked carefully at the girl’s left arm. Yes, some purple marks, just like he remembered on his little daughter.

When Dara moved closer to her, the jungle girl started to scream like an owl. He called his daughter’s name, ‘Bopah, Bopah!’ but she trembled like a monkey caught in a forest fire. When Dara tried to untie her, the jungle girl became like a wild bull, biting into the rope around her shoulder. The grandmother said that the feral girl had been making just this kind of noise all night, barking at anyone who passed in front of her. The old policeman paid some riels as compensation for the old woman’s food, and half an hour later, the village kids watched as the policeman tried to fix the girl on to his motorbike; it seemed to take all the old man’s energy to manage this at last.

Back home in Siem Reap, the old policeman’s wife burst into tears when she saw the jungle girl. She immediately prayed to the Buddah and then she seemed suddenly to become a woman of strength. Together, with great effort, the couple tried to give Bopah a bath, though the effort it required exhausted them. After washing her, Dara’s wife attempted to dress the girl in a shirt, but as soon as the clothes were on, the feral child would violently tear them off again. Outside, the moon was already high in the sky; the night seemed to have arrived faster than any other night. Dara made some lentils but the food was left untouched – instead the wild one ate a cluster of bananas. They organised a small room and bed for her, then they left her alone. Dara made sure the door and windows of her room were always closed in case the girl ran away.

No one really knew what was going on inside Dara’s house. The neighbours knew only that on the second day after the jungle girl’s arrival, she tried to run away, but the neighbours caught her and brought her back. Another time, two journalists came to visit and took some photos of her. Then a week later, the neighbours discovered their chickens were going missing. They traced the blood all the way to Dara’s house, and through the window they saw the girl sitting on her bed, blood and feathers around her mouth and in her hair. The neighbours ran back to their yard scared, without a word.