His Heart is in the Present
If I remember my life in colors, Cambodia will be green. Green
when I ride my bike to work, with the sun shining through palm trees
at all the right angles, and green on the way home, when the clouds
hang ominously in the air, waiting to water the lush foliage framing
the river.
And, most of all, green with youth. Children have a vibrancy and
resilience that can only be captured by the color green. Wordsworth
said the child is father to the man. I like to think about the kids
at the center as little parents, sometimes, when I watch them play.
Each one is a promise, with so much potential, and every experience
shaping who they will become. There is something they have that
I lost on the road to adulthood.
Despite my best efforts, I have a favorite: Penh Mao. He walks around
the center with an impish glint in his smiling brown eyes and an
ear to ear grin that seems almost too big for his face. At nine
years old, he has undeniable charisma. The police found him begging
on the streets of Poipet — a seedy town on Cambodia’s
border with Thailand — and sent him to Homeland. But I bet
he was the most successful beggar in Cambodia in his day: nobody
could look at that face and resist. I can’t help being reminded
of Jack Dawkins, the charming and clever ringleader of Fagin’s
pickpockets in Oliver Twist, for while Penh Mao has Oliver’s
innocence he has none of Oliver’s boring naiveté. He
is all savvy, and I can easily imagine him terrorizing the streets
of a city. The comparison always makes me laugh, but then, so does
Penh Mao.
He is a normal size for his age, but I think of him as small because
his intelligence makes him seem older than he really is. He’s
exceptionally bright; as the other children struggle through my
basic English classes in the mornings, he works independently on
far more advanced assignments. To see such discerning eyes in a
face so young would be unsettling, if the eyes weren’t constantly
smiling back at me. Nobody is prouder of me than Penh Mao when I
get a few new sentences in Khmer, and nobody is more patient in
trying to filter through my mispronunciations.
Over the last month I have had plenty of opportunities to observe
all these characteristics, but I knew he was special my first day
at the center. It was oppressively hot, and the humidity seemed
to hang on me like a blanket. When dark blue clouds descended in
the afternoon sky, I rejoiced silently to myself. I was in the middle
of a very poorly played badminton match in the courtyard of the
center when the first rumblings sounded, and my partner grabbed
the birdie and shouted a warning to the other children. They scattered
almost instantaneously, running to the houses that surround the
courtyard. I was left standing somewhat bewildered in the empty
courtyard, hoping to enjoy every spare cool moment and reluctant
to go inside. But two seconds later the sky came crashing down to
the earth in torrential rain. I ran for the office, and stood on
the covered patio, watching the rain and musing. It was my introduction
to Cambodia’s monsoon season; Heaven had broken and an ocean
was being unleashed.
Penh Mao sprinted past me. “Sous s’day Penh Mao!”
I shouted. He turned around, slapped my hand and yelled “PENH
MAO!” correcting my pronunciation with a wide grin. He raced
to the center of the courtyard, shirtless and in loose cotton pants:
one leg solid navy blue, the other thick navy and white stripes.
Children looked on silently from the covered patios of the houses.
Penh Mao raised his arms up to the sky and paused for a few seconds,
as if in thought. Then he threw his head back and yelled defiantly.
The other boys sprinted from the houses, responding to Penh Mao’s
summons. The courtyard became a shallow sea, and the young boys
became warring gods, fighting fiercely as rain pounded them from
above (pausing only to pull up their pants, which refused to stay
on their slender waists).
They fought with ninja kicks, spins and blows. Penh Mao fought two,
three, then four opponents! The potholes in the courtyard became
small pools, breaking the young warriors’ spectacular falls.
The subtle, Hollywood-esque pauses each fighter gave Penh Mao before
attacking were almost imperceptible in their brevity, so he really
seemed to be fighting them all at once.
The rain forced me inside the office, but I glanced up incessantly
from my Khmer studies to watch them through the open door. It was
like looking through a window into someone’s dream—the
heavy rain made them seem farther away than they really were, and
Penh Mao’s joyful cries were just audible above the deafening
pounding of the rain on the roof.
I knew Penh Mao had nothing, but that afternoon, I wondered if he
wasn’t the richest boy in the world. When I found out a few
weeks later how he ended up in Poipet, I was shocked: his mother
had sold him to a child trafficker.
One of the hardest parts of working at Homeland is that I have to
refrain from judging others. Child trafficking is all too common
here; families in desperate poverty are often forced to sell their
children to pay back debts, or to put food on the table. I realize
I know nothing of the suffering these families face. Intellectually,
I understand why I can’t say ‘I would never do that...’
But I still say it! Every time I look at Penh Mao, I say it. And
I do judge. It seems impossible to be exposed to the children at
Homeland, to care for them, without feeling indignation at what
many of them have suffered. Love is so closely tied to hate; they
are two threads that wrap around each other and form the bonds that
connect us to other human beings. I feel absolutely bound to Penh
Mao, and I well up with positive emotion every time I look at him,
but I also feel irrepressible anger at his mother for selling him.
While this reaction is satisfying on a visceral, emotional level,
it doesn’t stand up to any test of reason. The more I try
to identify and define, the more confused I become. The comfortable
black and white categories that people use to understand pain and
suffering are elusive to me.
Penh Mao’s mother gave him a charm necklace before she sold
him to protect him against evil. He is never without it. But where
is the evil? Who is to blame for his abandonment? Surely there must
be some responsible party?
It is possible Penh Mao is angry at his mother, or at the people
who trafficked him, but he doesn’t show it. He is not preoccupied
with blaming the world for what happened to him. It’s almost
as if he’s forgotten to be angry: his heart is in the present,
and every time it rains, he races outside and becomes the king of
the world. Maybe when I was a child I was the same way; maybe that’s
what I lost when I became an adult. I wonder if I will ever be able
to forget again.
-- Jen Hasvold, August 2005
|
