Because I am a Girl (6 page)

As the days went by, the old policeman was barely seen on the streets of Siem Reap. The couple were busy in their house, trying to teach their daughter to walk on her feet, and to speak, and cooking for her. The girl preferred to huddle in the corner, staring at everything with her big, secret eyes. Her teeth were so tightly clenched that Dara could hear them grating. She had hidden herself, rolled up, like a big silent cat, creating a suspended tension which left the couple sleepless. Worst of all, she couldn’t get used to the habit of peeing or shitting in the toilet, she would relieve herself anywhere on the floor, or outside in the yard.

For weeks, the jungle girl’s words were incomprehensible. But once, when Dara was alone with her in the house, she said ‘papa’ and looked into his face. Dara’s throat tightened suddenly as he felt tears come into his eyes. Sometimes, in
the
middle of the night, when the mosquitoes were calming down, Dara’s heart squeezed as he contemplated his daughter sleeping on the bed, like a dog would sleep – four limbs laid out vulnerably, head down inside her long thick hair. He wondered if there was any kind of memory stored in this wild girl’s mind, the memory of what had happened to her in the jungle before she got to their house. Dara knew one could forget anything; he had forgotten most things from the days when he was a soldier in the Khmer Rouge camp. He didn’t want to remember. He could almost see the fragments of his memory like a handful of dust thrown into the night sky, falling into a ruined forest where the world didn’t offer any hope of forgiveness or redemption.

One day, two strangers arrived in Dara’s front yard. One was an American, who wore a pair of elegant glasses and carried a silver suitcase; and the other was his assistant and translator, a Khmer living in Phnom Penh. The American said he was a psychologist and that he had read a newspaper article about Dara’s jungle girl. This was why he had travelled all the way from the capital in a bus with his translator.

‘What do you want?’ Dara stared at the two men.

But it seemed that seven hours on the bumpy road had made the two civilised men unusually grumpy. The assistant asked for water and something to eat, while the
American
went straight to the jungle girl’s room. Dara’s wife cooked some noodles and made icy lime-juice for them. Standing as close to his daughter as possible, Dara observed the foreigner touching the girl’s hands and moving her arms, whilst at the same time speaking to her in English. It was bizarre for the old policeman to see – his own daughter couldn’t even understand him and Chinda, so how would she understand a foreigner? But the American seemed to be very patient; he made crazy hand signs to the girl and took detailed notes in his notebook. All through this the poor little thing just stared at the foreigner with deep hatred in her eyes.

Eventually the American left her alone and tried to instruct Dara instead. The foreigner claimed that at the moment, the girl’s intelligence was that of a four-year-old child and that because she had not been living with humans for so long, she would have to be systematically retrained from scratch. The psychologist explained that the girl needed to be treated in a special hospital in Phnom Penh, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to live like a normal human. A special hospital in Phnom Penh. When the old policeman heard this, his face darkened. He could not imagine the girl being sent somewhere even further away than where he had at last found her.

As the American left the old policeman’s house, he said to Dara, ‘I also think it is necessary to do a DNA test on you and your … what’s her name … Bopah.’ It sounded
like
the psychologist didn’t want to refer to the girl as Dara’s daughter. But a DNA test? Dara knew what that was; he had worked as a policeman and he knew what it meant. Without saying anything, Dara smiled and sent the men to the front yard, then watched them disappear at the end of the road. Back inside, Dara locked the wooden barrier around his house, shutting himself, his wife and his daughter inside.

Dara was on his old Yamaha again. He had just left his district after completing a shift with another policeman and was now on his way to a temple in the outskirts of the city. He had heard that there was a spirit healer living in the temple who could help to exorcise the ‘jungle spirits’ from his daughter. He spent a good while there, negotiating the price with a monk. At last, they came to agree that Dara would pay thirty-five US dollars – the spiritual healer didn’t want useless Cambodian currency. Dara’s monthly salary was only thirty US dollars, but he was willing to pay anything to cure his daughter. Anyway, the monk explained, he would find out where the jungle spirits hid within the girl, and he would organise a ritual to get rid of them. Leaving the temple, Dara was full of hope and he rode his Yamaha back home as fast as he could.

The spirit healing was supposed to take place in the monk’s temple, but Dara and his wife could not get their daughter out of the house – she refused to put on her
clothes
and she wouldn’t walk on her feet. The next day, Dara had to pay another ten US dollars to invite the healing master to visit them instead.

The healing process was long and tedious; it took from dusk until dawn. Dara and Chinda were not allowed into the room, so they stayed in the yard under their three pathetic palm trees. Dara drank beer from the bottle, which fell and broke when he heard his daughter screaming in the house.

After the healing, the girl became quiet, or rather silent. She looked hurt, her huge, dark eyes hidden in her trimmed, short hair. Her head seemed heavy and loose on her shoulders. She was like a lion struck by the forest thunders, suddenly surrendering her wild temper to the lightning. Dara’s wife kept her faith in the Buddha and continued to teach the girl to walk and to dress. Two days after the spirit healer left, the family was surprised to see that the girl could stand on her feet, and slowly, she began to walk around in the house. Her back was still hunched, like someone who had been living for a long time in a small cave. To Dara, it felt like the softest and saddest moment in his life.

In June, the monsoon rains flooded everybody’s houses and Dara had to move everything upstairs. But compared with a month ago, the family felt calm. One morning, the rain stopped and the sun began to shine. To
Dara’s
surprise, the same American psychologist appeared again in front of his house, accompanied by a local doctor. Dara’s wife greeted the two men once again with lime-juice. In a very direct manner, the local doctor suggested that he could take the whole family to a car, then drive them to the Phnom Penh hospital to do a DNA test, and after the DNA test, the psychologist said, he would be more than happy to assist further with the patient. The old policeman listened, finishing a whole bottle of Angkor beer before opening another.

For a while, the three men sat under the shade of the banyan tree in Dara’s yard. The old policeman carried on drinking his beer, showing clearly that he wouldn’t leave the house. With the help of the local doctor’s translation, the American psychologist explained further what would work best in the case of the jungle girl, but once again, the American didn’t use the word ‘daughter’. Dara seemed not to be listening anymore; he just gazed at a green-skinned lizard lying underneath his rotten Yamaha in the sun. It didn’t appear to move all afternoon. The American psychologist went back to the jungle girl’s room, where he talked to her strangely and made his peculiar hand gestures. Eventually the sun sank towards the west, and the lizard also disappeared. The two men were about to leave but, once more, they asked if Dara would bring the girl and come with them. Dara shook his head.

Nothing else could be said. Now the old policeman and his wife accompanied the two doctors to their car, which was parked near the house. The doctors gave Dara their business cards, which Dara had already received on their first visit. Unsatisfied, they drove away. The old policeman stood still like a palm tree, watching the car disappear. He appeared thoughtful for a few minutes, as if he was making some difficult decisions. But in the end he shook his head, sat back under his banyan tree, and drank the rest of his beer.

The next morning, Dara and his wife were woken by a dog’s loud barking. He got up and walked into Bopah’s room – she wasn’t there. Hastily he searched every corner of the house, including the back and the front yards, but his daughter was gone.

The search for the jungle girl went on for about two weeks. Nobody had seen her. The couple spent their days on the motor bike, searching up and down the streets of Siem Reap. When they left the city, they went down to the provinces, to those floating villages around the lake of Tonlé Sap, and then on to the mountains at the northern border. They rushed back to the area where the girl was first found and they stayed in the village of Khna for a while, but no one had seen a feral human being. Dara wandered in the jungles for days, amongst small monkeys and endless bushes, but he found no trace of the girl.

*

Time slipped away; as quietly as the white hair accumulating on the old policeman’s head. The monsoon season was over – the streets and the roads became sandy and dry again, and the green papayas started to ripen and rot. Every day, as the old policeman drove his Yamaha up and down the street, he heard rumours about his jungle girl. Someone said that the last time they saw her, she was selling some finger bananas on a small road towards Angkor Wat, while others said they had seen her squatting on a boat in Tonlé Sap lake two months earlier. Some said they met her one night in front of a night club in Phnom Penh, and that she looked like a prostitute. Dara also heard that she had died in a traffic accident; that she hadn’t stopped for the cars. But amongst all the talk, the most convincing story was that the jungle girl went back to the jungle. The jungle of the vast Lacustrine Plain, where the forest, the lake, the mountains and the rice fields had lain every century, every year and every day beneath the poisonous tropical sun.

After his wife died of lung disease, the old policeman lived the rest of his life in a temple in the north of the country. He still kept his Yamaha but he had returned his gun. Sometimes, as moonlit bats flew through the night, he tried to think of his past; to untangle those knots in his heart. He no longer wished for his past to be like a handful
of
weightless dust falling into a black hole. He wanted to keep it with him, every bit of it, like warm ashes resting in an incense burner before the old Buddha, each quiet, passing day.

‘SO, DID IT
change your life?’

We were sitting in a meeting room in one of the Plan International offices in Kampala, Uganda. I had stopped crying by then, but the four Plan workers were still looking at me with a mixture of concern and panic in case I started again. My face was sticky with the dust of a three-hour drive from Kamuli district, now distributed by tears into orange-red rivulets down my cheeks: attractive. But then probably also a good match for my sweaty clothes, mud-clogged Crocs, hair frizzed-up by rainy season humidity, dehydration-reduced physique, and general aura of exhaustion.

‘Did it change your life?’

This was the only man in the room, a white American – perhaps Canadian. I hadn’t taken in what he did for Plan, though he’d been there for years – perhaps decades – and was present for the debrief with The Writer (me) so I guessed it was something important. It seemed to matter to him, whether my life had been changed by visiting
Uganda
, and it was just a shame that I didn’t know the answer yet because I was still there and the only thing that had sunk in was the grime into my skin.

But I know now, in case he’s still interested. And the answer is yes, yes it did. But probably not in the way that he had in mind.

It wasn’t my first visit to Uganda. I’d actually been twelve years before, when my sister was living there, working for an environmental charity. So at first it seemed familiar. Arriving in the hot, crowded airport, the anxiety over what awaited me – or not – in the toilets (paper? soap? water? – one out of three ain’t bad), the anxiety over whether my luggage awaited me at all and whether it would have everything in it that I had packed at the other end, the anxiety over whether the customs people would be feeling friendly or not and what they would make of my visa (visiting writers are never exactly embraced by third world immigration officials), anxiety over which of the jostling cab drivers was likely to have a functional vehicle and a non-fatalistic attitude to driving: anxiety, basically. And then bursting out into the wave of heat and noise, and my heart lifts, here I am, I’m in Uganda, and I’m probably not going to die on the way to my hotel. Probably …

Uganda is an unforgettably colourful place: bright red earth, lush dark green vegetation and a bold blue sky when it’s not raining. The international airport is in Entebbe,
about
a half-hour drive from the capital Kampala, although it’s hard to see where Entebbe ends and Kampala begins. The road between the two is lined all the way with shops, some no bigger than cupboards, painted the lurid colours of drinks company logos and emblazoned with slogans: ‘Live on the Coke side of life!’ ‘Cadbury’s tastes as chocolatey as it looks!’ ‘Africa’s official drink of having a drink!’ Mobile phone shops are everywhere – twelve years ago nobody had a mobile phone, but on this visit my phone would work better even in the most isolated villages than it does in most of the southern counties of England.

Also everywhere: people. On foot, on bikes and motorbikes, in cars, trucks and matatus, mini-van taxis covered in stickers swearing allegiance to Premiership football teams or Jesus (similar levels of fervour here) and stuffed insanely full of passengers. As a dignitary of sorts, however, I was being driven in a brand-new NGO pick-up truck, of which football and religious preferences were unknown. We spent most of our time in and around Kampala in gridlock. There had clearly been a population explosion since I was last there, but I felt encouraged: it’s a population who can afford cars; it’s a population who shop in all these eye-wateringly bright stores; it’s a population, if the adverts on the pick-up’s radio are anything to go by, who spend at least as much time trying to figure out the cheapest phone deal in bundles of texts and minutes as we do.

At the airport and the hotel, the people I met were lovely, friendly, open, and, as often as not, laughing. This is the joy of Uganda. On my previous trip, my sister took me to the Kampalan nightclub Ange Noir with a group of her Ugandan friends. Everyone was so relaxed that people cheerfully danced facing their own reflections in the mirrored walls, unafraid of embarrassment. I taught them the Macarena to great enthusiasm, and if they still dance the Macarena in Kampala it’s thanks to me. (‘Thanks’ may be the wrong word to use here.) Uganda was the most welcoming place I had ever visited, and so far on this trip that welcome was as warm as ever.

But then the work of the trip began. On my last visit, we went to the Impenetrable Forest to track gorillas. First stop of this visit was the Moonlight Stars project, to meet a group of prostitutes. The first sign that as a tourist in Africa, no matter how frequently you visit, you’re going to miss a lot of the ‘real’ Africa.

At Moonlight Stars – named after the sex workers’ own term for themselves – we were led into a large tent pitched in front of a sexual health clinic, where a group of women in their early twenties were waiting for us. They sat on plastic garden chairs, their arms folded tightly in front of them. Their eyes were hard and they didn’t smile. Everything about their body language was angry and untrusting. We were not welcome there.

This I had not expected. The Plan brochures I had been
sent
, the images on the website and the brochures in the London office had all featured pictures of smiling children, grateful for what Plan calls its child-centred community development. ‘Children are at the heart of everything we do,’ says the Plan UK site. ‘Children are our future. They carry our hopes and dreams for the world.’ I had mentally put myself into those photographs with the happy kids, bringing them glad tidings from the West. Instead I was in a tent full of angry – and adult – prostitutes. If this was the reality of Africa, it was also the reality of NGO work.

Looking at my notes from that meeting, the first word I have written down is ‘rape’. These women were raped before they became sex workers and they have carried on being raped ever since. One by one they told stories of being raped as teenagers, getting pregnant, being thrown out of home, and finding themselves unable to support themselves or their children. Enter a helpful friend who introduces them to the sex industry. ‘Who looks after your children while you are out selling sex?’ I asked. Answer: nobody. They leave them locked in their homes.

The streets of Kampala are not a safe place to sell sex. The women complained of rape from clients, rape from the police who periodically round them up to clean up the streets. Then there are the other risks, notably from HIV and AIDS. Condom use is not popular amongst johns in Uganda, and even if the prostitutes insist on it, it’s easy to get around the issue by insisting on sex in a dark corner
and
then lying about the condom. And anyway, as one pointed out: ‘You can get a man to use a condom but you are still a sex worker.’ These are not happy hookers. The only time anybody laughed was when my Plan chaperone mentioned the Dutch model of legalised and regulated brothels, which reduced the entire group to hysterics.

The Moonlight Stars project aims to provide sex workers with healthcare – AIDS tests, condoms and so on – as well as training and financial support to help them set up their own businesses outside the sex industry, such as baking or hairdressing. But the funding has run out. So while Moonlight Stars
aims
to provide healthcare, financial support and training, what it actually provides is ‘outreach’. I asked the women what outreach is. They told me that it’s going out and telling other prostitutes about what Moonlight Stars
aims
to provide. Its not my last encounter with ‘outreach’ in Uganda. This is probably the right place to mention: outreach is cheap.

Before we left, the women asked us to give them money for the project. We explained that it doesn’t work that way, that we have to report back to Plan in London who make the funding decisions. They were not impressed. In my notes I have written: ‘I felt as if they were thinking: who the fuck are you and what are you here for if you’re not going to give us any money?’

That night, my Plan chaperone and I ate our dinner in the hotel dining room while at the other tables, much
older
men sat with beautiful young women who were absolutely, definitely just there for the conversation. On the stage at the front of the room, a girl sang the Tracy Chapman song ‘Fast Car’. ‘You’ve got a fast car, I’ve got a plan to get us out of here …’ A fast car isn’t going to help much in Kampala. It’s gridlocked.

The next day we did the three hour drive to the Kamuli district, where one of the communities Plan is working with is based. It was the kind of place I’d driven through on my last visit to Uganda, on my way to somewhere more interesting. An area 4,383 kilometres square with a population of 712,000, it is so devoid of interest to outsiders that it wasn’t even in my guidebook to Uganda. Without ever giving it any proper consideration, I had somehow assumed that everywhere on earth is featured in a guidebook to somewhere or other, that there are no places that some intrepid tourists – the type who would deny actually being tourists – do not wish to visit. But of course the world is full of such places, places with no tourist ‘attractions’, with neither the landscape nor the culture to draw in holidaymakers, but just mile after mile of flat scrubby bush, built up with nondescript mud huts, divided by nondescript fields. This is where everybody else lives, the people who are not worth meeting in the places that are not worth photographing. This is the real lonely planet.

Aside from the roadside toilets, of which the less said
the
better – just imagine – actually don’t – the drive up was as bland as a Ugandan biscuit, and left me feeling similarly as if I’d eaten a mouthful of dust. (Ugandan biscuits are a travesty of the word, and when I handed out some all-butter shortbread I’d brought from home, the locals could not believe how delicious it was.) At one point, though, we passed an enormous billboard with the photograph of an African man in late middle age. ‘You wouldn’t let this man …’ begins the slogan, but at first it was obscured by a tree. I tried to fill in the blank. Sell you a used car? Run your country? We passed the tree. ‘You wouldn’t let this man go with your teenage daughter, so why do you go with his? Cross-generational sex stops with you.’ As we drove past I amused myself briefly thinking about what that poor man might have done to deserve being the least welcome daughter-shagger in Uganda. What I didn’t realise was that this was the first and last attempt I would see to address older males’ sexual behaviour in a region where the sexual pathology was about to be painfully revealed to me.

I didn’t notice our arrival in Kamuli. The word ‘community’ had led me to expect some kind of recognisable village, with edges, and a centre, a Ugandan version of an English village green. But to my eyes it was just a sprawl, with no way of distinguishing it from anywhere else we’d passed. How did anybody know where the community started and stopped? Did everybody here
know
each other, or did they just get on with their lives more or less in isolation, like we do at home? The Plan workers I’d met in London had told me that the community got together with Plan and set their development priorities together, but I couldn’t see how or where that would happen. It certainly couldn’t be the way I’d pictured it: everyone turning up one morning to talk things over under a tree. There are thousands of people in this community: it would have to be a pretty big tree.

Our first stop in Kamuli was the Plan regional office, where we met the local team, all Ugandans, who greeted me with warmth, enthusiasm, and a total lack of knowledge of who I was and what I was doing there. Word had reached them that a visitor was coming from Plan UK to be shown around the Kamuli project, but not who or why. There were too many levels of communication between Plan in the UK and Plan here, and everything had got distorted along the way. I hoped that this didn’t happen when they had something to discuss which actually mattered.

Over the coming days, I would learn that although the Plan Kamuli team live locally, most of them have left spouses and children behind to be there, and may see their family only every few weeks or even less often. They work long, demanding hours, with time off barely delineated as local people will come to them with their needs day and night, seven days a week. But the head of the team
welcomed
us into his office with huge smiles, and waved the latest addition to his workload: a letter from a local school of 1,250 children, all of whose latrines have collapsed under recent heavy rains. Can Plan help?

Apparently this wasn’t a decision which could be made by Plan Kamuli, and would have to be referred upward. I looked at the letter. ‘All the latrines’ meant, in fact, five latrines. The headmaster was hoping for a grant to build eight new ones – one for every 157 children, rather than one for every 250.

From here I was taken to visit one of the other local primary schools – this one with functioning latrines at least – to witness some sex education training that was going on there.

Uganda, supposedly, has universal free primary education. In practice, even at the free schools parents are required to pay for uniforms, textbooks and meals, and anyway, most of the parents I met on my trip told me that the government-funded free schools are so poorly resourced that only the most desperate would consider sending their children there. By poorly resourced, what they mean is: few or no classrooms, desks, chairs, or books, and only the sporadic presence of teachers. At every school we visited there was an attendance chart on the wall of the head’s office, registering not pupils’ attendance, but teachers’. The wages are so bad that as often as not the teachers can’t be bothered to turn up.
There’s
little risk of losing their jobs, because there’s such a shortage of people willing or able to teach.

Primary schools in Uganda are typically attended by children between the ages of seven and fourteen, but schooling will be interrupted or terminated if parents can’t afford to pay the expenses involved, if they need their children to stay home and help in the fields, for illness, for menstruation, for pregnancy, and so on. Many children therefore do not finish primary school until they are older, if at all, and most will never go to secondary school.