Despair and Love in Cambodia

Elia Van Tuyl

I am back in Bangkok after a week in Phnom Penh, and my thoughts are about despair. Not alone the hopelessness of those whom life has treated harshly, but the searing pain which sometimes intrudes even on the safest and most privileged, the suspicion that to be alive involves sustaining a mysterious, unidentifiable and unhealable wound which is despair itself. The most mysterious thing of all: despair seems to be the only real teacher of hope.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge (then an anonymous army of young, armed thugs) cleared out Phnom Penh, made this city a ghost town, beginning one more shameful episode of human cruelty and stupidity. I, who during this era was completely immersed in creating a world of safety for my own children in America, now listen, 30 years later, to stories of those whose own families were destroyed.

No connection exists between Steung Meanchey dump outside Phnom Penh, and the genocide of the 1970s. Yet, in my heart, they will be forever joined. Steung Meanchey is a mountain of refuse off which the poorest of Phnom Penh feed, a place where a mere visitor may feel in whatever part of his or her body is responsible for this kind of knowledge, that myths are true. The mountain is prone to belching smoke, igniting of methane fires, and trapping of children knee high in muck during the rainy season, where tractors sometimes crush them. Garbage trucks arrive and depart in endless procession, depositing their loads, adding stature to this "Smoky Mountain," providing heap after heap of debris for the poor, the sick, the young and old, the filthy and tired to hover over and pick through.

Objectively, this dump is far from the worst place on earth. The indifferent dismemberment of everything decent by Pol Pot was far worse, yet he, like the Nazi death camp administrators, was, in the end, banal---boring, hideously vacuous. Steung Meanchey is none of these things. Rather than swallowing our collective evil in a pit of nothingness, Steung Meanchey incarnates it in a mountain, giving us the gift of burning eyes and a wounded heart. No one can come away from this place indifferent, and only the least self-aware could possibly feel righteous.

Back in the light of our common, privileged day, what is one to do with the ghostly insistent despair which remains like a virus one has somehow inhaled from the mythic smoke? For me, the answer has been: learn from someone who has known in personal extreme great suffering, and has transmuted this into love, practiced the impossible alchemy that redeems the irredeemable, moment by moment.

Mech Sokha spent his teenage years in the heart of the genocide, parents and siblings dead at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, himself suffering through malaria, praying for deliverance for over 3 years. Decades later, Sokha has founded the Center for Children's Happiness, which he runs with his wife, Dany. CCH is first of all an orphanage for over 80 children rescued from Steung Meanchey, and secondly, it is a school. Yet first, second, and third, it is a place of love and safety. Sokha is father to them all, a herd of little, affectionate hearts. For a few days, I had the honor of being a visiting uncle.

Love is absurd. There are more reasons why CCH should not exist than there are used hypodermic needles at the dump. Yet Sokha was once an orphan of war, intimate with despair, and is probably still so. But something happened to him (I can only surmise) that has cracked through the reasons for despair to reveal a heart of love. Most people say they have never seen Sokha get angry. One boy at CCH disagreed. He saw Sokha get very angry.

"What did he do when he was angry?"

"He raised his eyebrow!"

During our short stay, Marc Gold of 100 Friends Project and I arranged for and witnessed the freeing of eleven children from Steung Meanchey. We committed to support these children over the coming years, yet the act in the moment, the lining up of little faces to be interviewed by Sokha amidst the noise of heavy machinery, the parade of happy feet down the garbage road into another galaxy, the act itself, with its many uncertainties, was for me a moment of living hope. Not just reasonable, but alive: one of those times when you feel you have been asleep but now are awake, have forgotten but now remember, were lost but now are found.

Still, the "light of common day" is where we are called to live, whether in remembrance or forgetfulness. CCH is two large dormitory buildings in two separate locations, one in serious need of repair. One is owned. One is rented. The CCH program has a few permanent staff, all Cambodian, plus a stream of volunteers, usually idealistic Westerners who stay for periods ranging from weeks to months.

Each child at both centers has a declared dream: computer specialist, teacher, hair dresser, doctor, yet Cambodia itself is economically backward, opportunity challenged, and surprise, surprise, plagued by a corrupt elite. Transportation is underdeveloped, foreign trade is limited, internet service is slow, roads are sometimes impassible, and people yearn for work. Women at the dump with no-account husbands plea for a decent jobs to support children. Servers at hotel restaurants work at the dictates of owners, live on the roof at night, and huddle in the dining room area when the monsoons come. Owners themselves know, all too well, that business failure is just a bad decision away.

Yet Sokha dreams. Some children he wishes to send off to foreign universities, those black holes where money disappears, but where essential expertise is gained. Others he hopes to educate at local universities, or in useful vocational skills. One of CCH's students is even in northern Thailand, in a leadership program run by the anti-trafficking leader, Sompop Jantraka. In all this, Sokha has one core goal: creation of indigenous leadership, brains that do not drain to foreign opportunities, but remain to heal and prosper Cambodia. A tall, perhaps impossible, order, and yet a vocation of courage, a direction toward hope. Center for Children’s Happiness orphanage builds a shelter where the seeds of love planted in each new arrival might grow to fruition, and spread more seeds in a land so recently raped by an evil spirit.

At this point, CCH runs on donations from hearts and purses opened by the non-violent force of Sokha’s focused compassion. But he is only a man, as he well knows. So he dreams of a self-sustaining CCH, somehow. Maybe businesses, supportive alumni, or an endowment.

Yes, maybe. In the meantime, as you read, weary and illiterate Cambodians, young and old, you, if your life had unfolded differently, pick expertly through plastic bags of refuse. What you do with that information is truly your own business. I can only thank you if you have actually given enough of yourself to have read this far.

Suffering is everywhere. Love is hiding in a thousand Smoky Mountains.

Elia Van Tuyl

December 1, 2005

Bangkok