The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison (23 page)

I asked her how she found out that she had the disease. She told me that it wasn’t until the disease had spread to her eyes; she was gradually losing her sight when she went to the ophthalmologist who did lots of tests to find the cause of the problem. Eventually she was diagnosed and immediately packed herself off to the shelter. Amazingly she harbours no ill will against her husband and has decided, instead, that the disease has presented her with an opportunity to help others. She helps the staff out by nursing other patients who are worse off than her and she also attends the HIV support groups, which are held every two to three months. She says the meetings give her hope to continue fighting her condition and are a source of inspiration to her. She really believes that she will survive to help others and this keeps her going. She receives a wage from the shelter for the work she does and she puts it carefully aside for her kids’ education. New arrivals are welcomed personally by her and she is always available to listen and give advice. These marvellously strong women have so much to give and teach. I am honoured to know them.

I had spent the last year trying not to be angry at Garth for the callous way he ended things. I think I was afraid that if I acknowledged my anger it would consume me and destroy my chances for a normal future. Now I realise that it’s ok to get angry. In fact, it’s healthy to get angry when someone has treated you so badly. It’s all part of the process; you grieve, you get angry and most importantly you learn to forgive; only then can you begin to heal. These women have had to pick themselves up after their initial rage and they are determined to get some good out of the rest of the lives; whatever amount of time they have left, they are not going to waste it in being angry at what has happened.

There are also lots of children in the shelter and again some of them have had to see or deal with things that they shouldn’t have. The worst thing is when they think the behaviour they have witnessed from their role models is the proper code of conduct. Mith is an 11-year-old boy I got to know here. His mother had taken him and his sister and sneaked away from the family home. For years Mith watched his alcoholic father beat up his mother and it was a perfectly normal occurrence as far as he was concerned. He had an unhealthy attachment to his father and thought he could do no wrong—this is normal with abusive parents. Anyway, he had learned how to treat women from his father so when he arrived into this community of women he started to strike out. His language was foul, courtesy of his father, and he demanded constant attention. He was very angry at being separated from his father and never missed an opportunity to express it.

Unfortunately, he was the eldest of the children in the shelter which gave him power over them. Fortunately, however, the women understood the reasons behind his violent temper and worked together to gently admonish and encourage him to control himself. Then the little family took off for a while and I didn’t see him. It turned out that Mith had a complete breakdown and ended up in the children’s ward of the mental hospital where he received medication and anger counselling. I got a shock when I saw him again; he was terribly skinny.

I am working closely with him today. I discovered that he loves to massage people’s shoulders and hands; he used to do this for his father. This is a very positive thing as it means that he can happily massage me while I give a class or counselling session; before, he used to resent me talking to another person when he was with me and I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. Encouragement and compliments are always a balm for troubled children.

When Mith massages anyone they always take care to tell him how good he is at massaging and how strong he must be and so forth. It works wonders. Next year Mith will be ready to attend school with the other kids. In the meantime, his mother is studying so that she can get a good job to support her kids.

Here I am now back in Thailand amongst old friends and places. I am so glad that I made it here in one piece. This time last year I wasn’t so sure. This book has been a huge healing process, seeing me going through umpteen journals and re-reading hundreds of emails and letters. I had to go right back to the beginning and start again, with hindsight, a humbling experience indeed. I have been incredibly fortunate. For 30 years or more I have lived out of a suitcase. At first it was on account of all the travelling I was doing but then, over time, it became a comfort to know that I was ready to move immediately if I had to.

In America, I did unpack for a while and it made me edgy and uncomfortable, especially when things began to go wrong. I am glad to write today that my suitcase is empty and is buried under my bed. I am more at peace now here in my little house on the edge of Bangkok than I have been in a long, long while. Apart from wishing that Thailand did a proper celebration of Christmas I don’t want for anything else at this moment in time. (Although a few of us are organising a Christmas/New Year party at Bang Kwang which will be as enjoyable for me as it will be for the 200 inmates and prison officers.) My daughter survived the perils of the last few years with me and I now want to focus on her future. I am still doing some work in the prison, reluctantly retaining my title as the name of this book suggests, but much less than before, because I want to focus my energies on her and elsewhere. It is time to close the book on the past.

Friends ask me why I don’t get rid of my ‘Garth stuff’. I’m not a collector but I have kept his letters, in plastic folders, in chronological order! Maybe one day I’ll throw them out but, for now, I like knowing that they are here. Some of them are incredibly beautiful and were meant at the time.

Through personal hard work and the power of forgiveness, my anger has abated, allowing me to finally move on. My days are as full as ever; visiting the women’s shelter, Bang Kwang, the drug rehab centres and the slums.

I love what I do. It has been my life’s work and I will continue to do it with wrinkles and aging limbs. I still have my bad days—I’m only human, and there is the constant tussle between the scars and the blessings. It’s hard to get the balance just right.

There is a Sigmund Freud quote that means a lot to me; it sums up what I feel is the essence of life, and is an apt way to finish off my story;
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful
.

I hope that through my work I can share this sentiment of hope to those I try to help.

Afterword

I remember the contradictory emotions I felt about my mother while growing up. People were constantly praising her for her accomplishments, constantly interested in her life story, and almost always finding themselves bewitched by this 5ft 6” spunky, down to earth, blonde bombshell. They were almost always telling me what a jewel she was and how I should aspire to be half the woman she is when I grew up.

I suppose I was more than a little confused how my mother—
my mother
—who laughs hideously loudly, cried hysterically over dying her hair the wrong colour, gets pimples, bad haircuts, and sometimes suffers from horrific black moods, could be portrayed as the ‘Angel of Bang Kwang’; a saint who roams some of the filthiest maximum security prisons, slums, wards etc., yet always seems to emerge pure and untouched, and smiling. I thought, ‘Shit, I want a refund because this isn’t exactly an accurate perception of the mother I know.’

The mother I knew was bouncy and full of energy, temperamental, yet always as compensatory with her affectionate mannerisms. My mother is a classic example of a strong woman, a real woman, because, of course, she is not perfect and she is not a saint and no, she does not flitter above us all with perfumed farts and angelic melodies to thrill all who suffer. In fact, she’s tone deaf and a terrible singer. But, she does try her damnedest to make a difference and she does genuinely care about other people. She is the most unselfish being I know—most of the time she is so consumed in helping others that she would forget to take care of herself. Sometimes I’ve wondered who is the parent as, occasionally, I’ve had to remind her to eat, remind her to run and pay the bills, make her cups of tea and comfort her when she bursts into tears of frustration and exhaustion.

Yet, when it comes right down to it, she has never been lackadaisical in providing me with a healthy, stable home—sometimes going without so that I wouldn’t miss out. She also never made me feel like I had to hide anything from her, which I did anyway. I’ve discovered since then that honesty is always the best policy when dealing with her. And I am eternally grateful that I always had, and have, both such a cool friend to confide in and a mother’s wisdom to guide me through the tribulations of childhood and everything that prepubescent ignorance brought me. Thanks to her open and unconditionally accepting attitude I had a safeguard to keep me from ever really falling off the ledge.

Not that she had all the answers, far from it, but who does? She has had to deal with the heartache of being both father and mother to me, which I greatly resented because she had to be both the disciplinary guardian and the loving, caring one too—which made her appear hypocritical in my young eyes.

Sometimes we got along like Siamese twins, skipping out on my school work to go to a movie, having hot cocoa, dancing hysterically around the living room, taking long walks; listening to her mad stories about her experiences and her defending me against my evil grade-school teacher who made my life a living hell. Then, around the time our hormones started to wax and wane, we fought like rabid hyenas on steroids. Sometimes, I was tempted to feel a little neglected, what with her busy schedule and jailbird love.

At other times, she seemed detached and too preoccupied to focus on me, which gave me ample time get into mischief. However, her approach as I got older was to give me independence and the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them by myself, while she stood on the sidelines watching me carefully, which was a double-edged sword because I was still a child and should have been wrapped up in protective layers, and coddled and cossetted, and not trusted to have the maturity to decipher between right and wrong.

However, it was, in hindsight, the right method for me because, though I fell, I learnt how to deal with it. I learnt from my wrongs and benefited from my rights and I became strong at the art of coping, just like she is.

And at the end of the day, I doubt that there will ever be someone who loves me as unconditionally as my mom.

- Talya Lindsey Hattan, 2007

My parents, Doug and Judy, told me I was the perfect child, with a big toothy grin and blonde hair, happy to sit and gurgle all day. They had no idea what they were letting themselves in for.

Thankfully there is no photographic evidence of my wilder teenage years.

With 2,000 pairs of shoes at Khoa-I-Dang Refugee Camp at the Thai/Cambodian border in 1986. I had only just arrived in Thailand and was eager to help in any way I could.

Community Police Training at the National Police Cadet Academy. I have always tried, in every way, to become a part of the community in which I am living, and this opens many doors to help me in my work.

Presenting a garland to H.M. the Queen of Thailand. The Thai people love and revere their hard working Royal Family and it is a great honour to meet them.

I often went to police station holding cells, where I would be locked in amongst up to 30 men, so that I could offer any assistance I could to those who had nobody else to turn to, or just needed a comforting ear. It was always a wonderful opportunity to share some floor space and a word of hope and cheer.

The Bang Kwang Prison visiting area. Until a few years ago, visitors and inmates were separated by four and a half feet, two sets of bars, and double wire mesh. After two hours of shouting and straining in turn to hear over other visitors, I would come away exhausted and frustrated, but all the more determined to make a difference.

Through kind donations of thousands of pairs of glasses from the Australian public, Debbie Singh and Optometry Aid Overseas, the
Eye Can See Clearly
programme helped give elderly inmates at Bang Kwang badly needed prescription glasses.

We were graciously given use of facilities at Bang Kwang, and after raising funds through sheer perseverence, I spent countless hours helping to fit eyewear, make up prescriptions, and offer encouragement to the elderly inmates. It was thrilling to be able to restore simple luxuries such as being able to read and write letters to loved ones once more.

Dear friends and fellow volunteers at Klong Prem prison hospital who hailed from as far as Denmark, Norway and the UK but came to Thailand to make a difference. We helped bring some cheer to the female inmates when they needed it most.

Time out with the ladies at Klong Prem hospital. Many of these inmates were also later fitted with glasses. On this day, a guard sneaked over to me and placed some money in my hand, whispering, ‘Keep up the good work.’ I was moved to tears.