The Road of Lost Innocence (13 page)

Then the day before we left, Tom Dy was hospitalized. She had some kind of galloping infection and a high fever. When I took her to the hospital, she asked me if I loved her and cried in my arms. She kissed me and begged me again not to go.

I thought about her every day during our trip to Paris. Phone calls were expensive, and I had no news of her for two weeks. One afternoon Claude offered to take me out to find something for Tom Dy. We were in a department store when my phone rang: Tom Dy was dead. She died alone, in the hospital.

I raged and wept. This sweet teenage girl, who was sold by her parents into prostitution, who had been beaten and raped for years, had now died from her ill treatment at the hands of people who had no compassion, no human feeling for anyone but themselves.

There is nothing that can excuse the sex slave industry in Cambodia. I am no big thinker, but I think even Pol Pot cannot be seen as an excuse.

After Claude’s program aired, congratulatory phone calls started coming in from everywhere. But in spite of the good press, the funding situation at AFESIP was becoming critical. Claude took me to see Emma Bonino, who was then the European commissioner for humanitarian affairs, running the European Union’s massively wealthy aid agency, ECHO. Emma Bonino was a world-class politician and she happened to be in Paris that week.

When we arrived at her Paris office, Emma Bonino was shouting into the phone—a blond Italian woman, tiny but with ferocious energy. I shrank back, but Claude said, “Don’t worry. She’s like that—she shouts. But her heart is in the right place.”

Emma Bonino already knew about our work. She spoke to me briefly and made a couple more phone calls in Italian, furiously chain-smoking throughout. Then after barking orders at some underling, she turned to me again and put her arm around my shoulder. She said, “You’ll be all right.”

I was astonished by the energy that emanated from this small, smiling woman who could shout down the line and at the same time show me such kindness. She is a rock.

Of course that one visit wasn’t the end of our struggle. We had to go to Brussels to talk to the bureaucrats in the European Commission. It was my first visit to Brussels, and Pierre came with me. We looked like scruffy refugees, dragging our luggage around in the rain. I didn’t have a sweater and I was cold; I was wearing two pairs of socks in my cheap shoes, and my feet were bleeding.

The bureaucrats looked down on us with barely disguised disdain—me with my twisted shoes, Pierre with his lopsided grin, our worn suitcases in the corner. Apparently we didn’t have proper appointments. We were shunted from office to office. Finally we managed to get a commitment of subsidies from the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office, but the funding stopped after a year or two—we never learned why.

.12.

The Prince of Asturias and the Village of Thlok Chhrov

When funds began coming in from the European Union and from UNICEF, the first thing we did was start building a new shelter about ten miles outside Phnom Penh. By this time we had more than thirty women and girls sleeping in one room, and AFESIP’s wooden house in Phnom Penh was much too small. They were young, almost all of them under twenty-two, and some of them were children. They had very different levels of schooling—many of them couldn’t read or write. They were also traumatized. They had nightmares and suffered from drug withdrawal. They were suicidal, depressed, mute, or uncontrollably angry.

We began building the new center in 1998, and planned to name it after Tom Dy. We wanted to put up a series of buildings on a piece of land AFESIP had bought, near a village about ten miles southwest of the city. I wanted to have a large covered room for the sewing classes and a separate room where a full-time schoolteacher could hold small classes in literacy and basic math, according to the girls’ different educational levels. We planned several spacious bedrooms, each with room for ten women’s mats, and separate cupboards for every person and her personal effects.

Then, in June 1998, while we were building the Tom Dy Center, I was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award. Pierre took the phone call. He told me that the heir to the throne of Spain had chosen me to receive a special award for promoting humanitarian values. Neither of us had ever heard of this prize and we had no idea how they had heard of us, but we quickly learned that it was an enormously prestigious award and carried with it the almost unimaginable sum of five million pesetas, about forty thousand dollars.

To collect the prize, we went to Spain, with five-year-old Adana. Ning was in school, and my adoptive mother looked after her while we were gone. We traveled first class, which I had never done before. We were treated like kings, even though we looked just as scruffy as ever. When we got to Oviedo, the capital of the Spanish principality of Asturias, we were told that I would be making a speech that night. I hadn’t prepared anything and I’ve always been terrified by intellectuals and any well-dressed crowd.

We were welcomed into a grand reception hall where TV crews and photographers were waiting. The Prince of Spain introduced us. The beautiful African woman standing near me was Graça Machel, the wife of Nelson Mandela and a great woman in her own right. Behind me was Rigoberta Menchú, who had already won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in Guatemala—even I had heard of her. Emma Bonino was there too—she waved at me and sent me an encouraging smile. There were seven women who were receiving awards for their work to promote the rights of women and children. I felt smaller and smaller.

I was so nervous I could barely understand what the prince was saying, but what I heard was very moving. He talked about the indifference of Western countries to the horrible cruelty of life in other parts of the world, where there is such pitiless abuse of women and children. When it was my turn to take the stage, I closed my eyes and just began talking about the situation of women in Cambodia.

I talked about my own life and about the girls imprisoned in brothels as slaves. I talked about how badly they are treated, the violence that they must endure. I talked about the gentle smile of Cambodian girls, and how that smile isn’t genuine.

I had no idea I could talk in front of a crowd for that long. When I finished there was thunderous applause. The lights came on slowly and I could see that some of the people in the audience were crying. I felt exhausted, but I also felt that I had achieved something important.

The next day was the prize-giving ceremony. All of us had been asked to wear the traditional dress of our homelands, and a crowd gathered in the street to watch our procession. The Asturians were also wearing their traditional clothes. For me, it was as if the world had turned upside down. In my universe I’m nothing, a mere woman who works for imprisoned, penniless girls. Here I was being treated like a queen. I felt like Cinderella, from Adana’s French storybooks.

All seven of us moved forward, holding hands. There was the roar of applause. Then we had to pay our respects to the prince. I had been dreading this. I thought that meant that we would have to get down on our knees and bow our heads to the ground, like Cambodians have to do, to show we are mere dust beneath the feet of royalty.

I don’t like to kneel. I’m no longer a slave. I hope I will never have to abase myself and go down on my knees in front of anyone again—I’ve done that much too much.

But the prince arrived in front of me very simply and said hello. He held out his hand for me to shake. He talked to me naturally—he spoke in French. In Cambodia there is a special archaic language in which the king is addressed and no one speaks it outside the royal palace. But the Prince of Spain was friendly and seemed sincerely interested in me.

Then I met his mother, Queen Sofia. She is a wonderful woman, firm and caring, and truly dedicated to the cause of helping women around the world. Emma Bonino translated for us. The queen picked up Adana and played with her. I could sense that she was kind and good and I liked her immediately.

I was fascinated by the casual charm of this amazing family. These people were the monarchs of a powerful country, and yet they behaved as though I was their equal. I felt that I had spoken from deep inside me. They knew what I had done, and what had been done to me, and yet they respected me anyway—a little Phnong girl, a dirty prostitute.

Afterward we were asked to sign autographs, and there were photographers and a huge banquet with a crowd of people. My feet were bleeding from the high-heeled shoes I had bought for the occasion. I wasn’t used to high heels, so I surreptitiously stashed them in my bag. I spent the rest of the evening shaking hands, dazed and barefoot.

The warm welcome of the Spanish made me think for the first time that our campaign had found real support and that we would no longer have to go begging. Until then, almost every time we’d gone to big Western donors for money, we were looked down at with cold superiority. The money came in dribbles, never when they said it would, and often less than we’d expected. But when I returned to Cambodia from Spain, I had enough money to undertake something really significant. But almost more importantly, I felt people finally understood what we were doing and how important it was to help us. I felt we were no longer alone. Until then, everything I had done had been spontaneous, instinctive, a little disorganized. Now I felt that AFESIP could begin to plan for the future.

After completing the Tom Dy Center, my first priority was to find a place where the children we had rescued could grow up. Some children could simply never be returned to their families—there was too great a risk that they would be sold back into prostitution. By now we were housing several very young children, some as young as seven or eight, whom we had rescued from brothels. These girls had suffered enormously and they needed care. They needed someone to talk to and trust. They needed to go to school and rebuild themselves as people. I didn’t want to give them to an institutional orphanage where they would be rejected and mocked or merely fed and watered.

I thought the ideal situation for these girls would be to grow up somewhere outside Phnom Penh. Sometimes the pimps stood outside our shelter in Tuol Kok and threatened the girls. Its location was becoming known, and there was a lot of movement, with new women arriving and residents leaving all the time. It was not a stable place to grow up. The idea came to me that I could buy some land in Thlok Chhrov, near my father’s property, and make it into a children’s center. I had visited my father several times, and the village was growing—prosperity was spreading there too. The school was spacious. The forest was close. There were a lot of new people in Thlok Chhrov, and the old ones were excessively nice to me now that I was a white man’s wife and drove there from the city in a car.

I wanted to show those villagers that even if you have been a prostitute, even if your skin is dark, you can still be a good person. You can be clever, and you can succeed. After the way they had treated me, I had made a good life for myself. I was helping others, and they could do that too.

Above all, if I built a shelter in Thlok Chhrov, it would be far enough from Phnom Penh that the children would be safe. They could grow up in a garden, straight and strong, and go to school.

With the money from the Prince of Asturias Award, AFESIP bought a piece of land right near the village school in Thlok Chhrov. As a matter of fact, the land we bought was the same field where I had thrown a grenade and practiced cleaning a gun in military training. All around it were rice paddies and orchards. On it we built a spacious house on stilts. It has a fishpond and a chicken coop and space to house a dozen weaving looms and sewing machines, so the girls can learn a trade. I want it to be beautiful for them too, so we plant flowers together. A seed is like a little girl: it can look small and worthless, but if you treat it well then it will grow beautiful.

Whenever we find underage children in the brothels, we always ask them if they want to see their families again. They are sometimes very young, but they deserve to be heard, and we do occasionally reintegrate girls back into their families, if their parents can be trusted. We need to be sure that they won’t be resold, and we follow up such cases with frequent visits. Sometimes it is enough to give the family a little money, so they can start up a business.

But often the girls beg to stay on with us, and I take them to Thlok Chhrov. They see the little girls their age—seven, eleven, thirteen—in their blue skirts and white shirts, happy together. They see the food—it is good home cooking, and many of these girls are hungry. They see animals and flowers. They know that all the girls in our house have done the same things they have done, lived through the same life they did. They ask me, “If I stay here for a week, and try to go to school, can I have a school uniform like the others?” I tell them yes, and at the end of the week they want to stay forever. They can live with us, but only until they grow up. Then, as hard as it is to say good-bye to a child you have brought up—for whom you are, in some sense, her only family—it is time for her to leave too.

When the children moved into that center in 1999, my heart lifted. I felt that I had finally done something right. They live there in an atmosphere of love and understanding and they know they are safe. We have fifty-five children there now, and we recently expanded the house again. The youngest is Ath, thirteen months old. Strictly speaking, we shouldn’t have taken him in, but someone left him in the garbage outside our center in Phnom Penh when he was a few days old, and the cook adopted him.

One of the girls living in our Thlok Chhrov house right now is Sry Mach. She was six years old when AFESIP rescued her from a brothel, along with her sister, Sry Mouch, who was nine. That was in early 2006. The raid took place in a town near the Thai border and rescued about ten girls, but those two sisters were by far the youngest prostitutes on sale. We took all ten girls back to Phnom Penh with us, but those two I took with me, on my lap. They were much too frightened to talk. They didn’t answer my questions and only ate fruit like savages when I stopped by the roadside to buy them some food. They held each other like little animals. They reminded me of little birds, with huge eyes and with their mouths open only for food.

As I said earlier, younger girls are very likely to become infected with HIV and other diseases, because of tearing. Sry Mach has AIDS. She’s very sick—she has had pneumonia and TB, and she has been in the hospital several times. She does not want to leave us to go to a special AIDS charity, so she’s receiving antiretroviral treatment from Médecins Sans Frontières. She has never told me much about her story, only that a white man hurt her. The AFESIP psychologist says Sry Mach has put her trauma behind her and we should help it stay that way, so we don’t ask her questions. Her sister, Sry Mouch, is ten years old now and she’s doing fine.