I was lucky to go back onto the streets for three days this week with an outreach team from Friends-International. The scenes, the voices, the smells, the stories, all jumped out at me cast in different lights this time. Maybe it’s because my head is clearer and revolving on a more stable axis now, or perhaps it’s how much more I know and the greater context in which I could place what I was witnessing. I fought off tears and clenched my jaw and fists in frustration much more often.
I still saw the tragedies that wait under every tarp—a teenage boy dropping out of school at Mith Samlanh because he’d become addicted to sniffing glue, lying listless in his own stench and broken future. I shared rice with yet another large family with two days left before they would be evicted from their platform shaded by sheets. The government wants to turn the land into a public garden, a project which will never be finished but one that leaves the family nowhere to go but the damning curb a block away. I met the filmy and exasperated eyes of a girl one older than me with an unplanned newborn baby and a boyfriend who picked up his things and left her to days of pleas and holding out her malnourished child to tourists outside the National Museum. These are human beings who feel their hearts beat in their chests just like you and I do, who taste bitterness and faith with the same tongues as us.
There were the life and mission-affirming moments, too. A mother plunked her distressed and sick baby girl into my arms and stroked my cheek with blackened fingers that trusted that I, the smallest onlooker to her life, could give comfort and help. I sat in a cross-legged circle with rowdy young boys who revel in destruction every time they feel that annoying pulse of boredom, and we simply tossed a rock back and forth in amplifying creativity for an hour. Our shrieks and giggles were the only communication that passed, and it was more than sufficient. They started to get up from the game to beg from a passing group of foreigners when they caught my sad and disapproving eye—and sat back down. One morning a university student in uniform looked shocked to see a white girl crouching in the dirt helping hand out buns to scabby brown kids and asked what I was doing. I replied that I was a volunteer with Mith Samlanh, and his eyes softened when he thanked me and said that he would remember me in his prayers.
I helped with hygiene-administration on Tuesday morning. It was Buddhist Day, meaning hordes of street children were gathering by the river for the windfall of karma-cash that comes from the worshippers who queue in large numbers to pray under the makeshift pagoda constructed for these occasions, which happen every fifteen days. The sight made me fill my lungs with its beauty, as it was a cloudless day and the traditional bright golds and reds shone and peeked from the incense-shrouded pagoda platform, covered by kneeling Buddhists with hands pressed tightly together with cabbage-like white flowers squeezed between palms. Chanted prayers and traditional drums and xylophone wafted through the heat. The children, in wild and ecstatic moods because of their riches, shoved fried snake and frog into their mouths with gusto and stripped naked to jump off a rickety pole construct extending into the river. The outreach team capitalizes on the kids’ swimming mood, and we had buckets, lice shampoo, soap, and combs at the ready. Everyone lined up along the crumbling steps at the river’s bank and scrubbed their hair to frothy heights, then passed a bar of soap along to work away at the grime. Live turtles were thrown into the water for the kids to chase after as they rinsed, then staff members delivered the luxury of lice-combing and towel-drying to every child’s head. It was like seeing and feeling in Technicolor. The minutes crackled with high emotions and liveliness.
The afternoon was heartrending. I waited with the team drug counselor Palah on the steps of Phnom Penh’s mosque for the team financial counselor. The mosque was overwhelmingly peaceful. It was like the essence of peace had been turned into the filmy soap of a bubble and stretched to form a dome from a perfect circle in the earth to an arch over the dark Arabic marble. Sheep that resembled noisy lumps of dirt with a few pieces of wool clinging to them roamed and sipped at the flood-ponds. Dark orange dust kicked up from brawling wheels spun in the afternoon sun.
I walked with the two counselors away from the oasis that stroked my soul to calm into raging cement, chickens, and the cook-fire smoke of poverty in the community next door. I took off my shoes and waded barefoot through knee-deep oily water bottomed by rotting wood, garbage, and strange pokes to the soles. We reached dry lumber and tin and bowed to a young woman leaning against a support and picking at a coconut. Mith Samlanh has been supporting her by providing rent and food money since her husband left a few years ago, leaving her with a two-year-old who attends the center every day in return for the support. The husband returned just over nine months ago, the young woman had a baby two weeks ago—and sold it, her own flesh nursed by her blood.
Her husband had come back addicted to smoking yamma, and he had been able to hide the financial needs of his addiction until the new mouth arrived. Then he lost all wits and demanded with violence all the Mith Samlanh support money in his wife’s possession, extracted a promise from her that she would deliver all future money to his hands, and threatened her with the loss of two children instead of one that she sell her newborn child. After one counseling session with both husband and wife, the husband said he would attend drug rehab independently if Mith Samlanh continued to support the family.
The teams has obvious reservations about cutting such a deal, and have been left with an enormous problem. They cannot force the husband into rehab or the wife to leave him. If they continue to support the family, in all likelihood the money would literally disappear into a cloud of smoke. However, if they do not support the family, they are stranding a mother and most importantly an innocent child. I suggested a trial period of a month where support could continue under a vigilant eye and Mith Samlanh would require proof of where the money was spent and the husband’s participation in rehab and eventual recovery, with check-ups in high frequency if he was successful. But there are so many holes in any solution.
How does a referee make this sort of call? Is the ball still in play? What strength and trust does it take to blow the whistle on a life?
