The Road of Lost Innocence (12 page)

“I’ve seen everything and lived everything,” he told me. “It’s all useless. When you’re young, as you are, you’re enthusiastic. You want to understand a great many things. It’s no use. I fought all my life and for nothing; now I wait for death. The only thing to hope for in this world is the peace you need to look after your own garden.”

I understood him and I thought about his words often. When you’re a frog, it’s best to keep your head low. You don’t stick your neck out and try to change the world. I understand that. I don’t feel like I can change the world. I don’t even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering. I want to change this small real thing that is the destiny of one little girl. And then another, and another, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself or sleep at night.

In August 1996, a big conference on the sexual exploitation of children took place in Stockholm, Sweden, and several journalists wrote about the situation in Cambodia. After that, the big international aid agencies seemed more interested in our plans for AFESIP, and one big UN agency promised us funds.

They were a long time coming. By now, Pierre and I had several girls living with us. One was pregnant, two had been addicted to drugs by their pimps, and another had two children under the age of five. They all slept in our spare bedroom. Pierre and I slept with Adana and Ning in our room, and if there was too much crying from the baby, Pierre would try to catch some sleep on a cot in the corridor.

It was a lot to take, and Pierre was becoming exasperated. After a series of sleepless nights, he exploded with rage one day and told me that if we couldn’t find a better solution, I would have to throw the girls out. In desperation, I went to Robert again. He talked to John Anderson at Save the Children UK, and they decided to lend us a house, which would become our first center.

It was a small wooden house on a tiny plot of land in northwest Phnom Penh. I could hardly believe our luck. At last we would have somewhere to house and feed the traumatized women and girls who so badly needed a refuge. To get started, Robert gave us six thousand dollars from PADEK funds.

We needed somebody to help run this place, to cook and to live there, to keep it organized. We didn’t have the money to pay a salary, and who would work for free? Then I thought of my adoptive mother. She looked after people. I knew that she too had once been in a brothel, even though we had never even broached the subject. I knew she would never look down on the girls in our care.

I went to Thlok Chhrov to talk to her about it. By the time I finished she had tears in her eyes and wordlessly began putting her clothes into a suitcase. Father was quite surprised by this. He had no plans to move to Phnom Penh, but he agreed that Mother should come back with me and work for a while at the new AFESIP shelter.

Our shelter began as just that—a shelter, a place of refuge. It was a one-room house on stilts, and everyone slept together on mats on the bare floor. Dietrich’s friend Guillaume had given me ten sewing machines, but there was no room for them. We had to set them up on the bare earth underneath the house, exposed to the rain.

The sewing machines were crucial. My mother could teach the girls to cook, but they also needed a more marketable skill. A trained tailor who knew how to draw a pattern and fit a dress could make real money—honest money—and hold her head high.

But I couldn’t afford to pay for a sewing teacher to train the girls. In Phnom Penh, tailors were now asking four hundred dollars a month to train one apprentice. Finally, after thinking about it for a long time, I asked Phanna if she would teach sewing. She had always been a good tailor, and she was used to teaching. She knew I couldn’t pay her, but she wanted to move back to Phnom Penh anyway because she had learned that her husband was fooling around with other women.

We also hired a woman to do the accounts. She was the only one of us who was paid, and her salary was tiny, I think fifty dollars a month. We had enough money to pay for a few months of electricity, food, and medical treatment. For a long time, health care was our biggest expense.

We held an official opening ceremony on March 8, 1997—Women’s Day. By then we were sheltering about twenty women. I was very nervous. I had invited my hero to the ceremony and I wasn’t sure she would come. Men Sam An was the head of a government body called the Central Administration Commission, as well as a number of women’s associations, and she was a fighter. During the Khmer Rouge years she was indoctrinated and enrolled in the militia like all the other young people, but she fled into the forest and became a guerrilla, fighting the Khmer Rouge. Later the Vietnamese-backed government made her a cabinet minister. Sometimes, when I was in Chup, I would see photographs of her in a newspaper—a small woman, pretty and smiling, wearing military fatigues.

Men Sam An came to the ceremony, with a whole entourage of staff and bodyguards. She was very simple and seemed genuinely interested in our work. She signed our guest book. When the time came for me to speak I was so overcome by emotion I could hardly talk. I really messed up my speech. But I was so proud. My two dreams were to open a women’s shelter and to meet Men Sam An, and now both had come true.

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Guardian Angels

I was still doing social work in the brothels, distributing condoms and health information and taking girls to clinics. This was useful work in itself, but it also served as a kind of cover, because I could encourage girls to escape and come to our shelter in secret.

I was also working with the police. I began informing them whenever I heard about a girl who had been sold or kidnapped and was being held under guard. We would pressure the police to stage a raid on the brothel, and then Pierre or I, representing AFESIP, would go along on the raid as observers. That way, the police would release the girl into the custody of AFESIP instead of taking her to a police cell.

But the whole process was often extremely difficult. The police in Cambodia are not like policemen in the West. Especially in those days, many police officers were in the pocket of the pimps. Sometimes they took money from them in return for protection and sometimes they beat up clients who refused to pay. Some policemen even owned brothels, and many were regular clients.

Every so often we would come across a decent policeman—someone like Srena, who had compassion for the children who were being abducted and abused. Often these men were new to the force, with no power to change anything, but if a family came to the station to report a stolen daughter, they would alert me. Then I would dress up in my Khmer de France clothes and come to the station to file a formal complaint in the name of AFESIP, just like a white person would. That sometimes got the process moving, because it was more difficult to ignore.

By the end of 1996 we had about a dozen women living in the shelter. We had gone on perhaps a dozen police raids and saved girls who were chained and guarded in horrible conditions. Yet it was becoming difficult for me to go into the brothels as a social worker, because people had begun to recognize me. I was shoved around and threatened.

Meanwhile, good people were joining our effort. A woman I had known in Kratie had recently moved to Phnom Penh to work as a translator. Chang Meng was a woman of great intelligence and compassion who had suffered a great deal. Though we rarely talked about it, I knew that she had lost her husband and children under the Khmer Rouge. I asked her to join me as a social worker and investigator, working in the brothels together. She’s still with AFESIP today.

In 1997 a French journalist, Claude Sampère, heard about my work. He was in Cambodia filming a story about land mines for his program,
Envoyé Spécial.
I had a pretty low opinion of journalists in those days—I had spent days taking reporters through brothels in Phnom Penh, translating long and painful conversations for them, only to find that AFESIP was never quoted and only the most titillating details were used.

But Claude Sampère was different. He and his team got up at 6:00 a.m. to accompany us on our rounds. When he interviewed the girls in our little shelter about their lives, I saw him crying. I’d never seen anything like that.

One of the girls Sampère filmed was Sokha. She was from a refugee family. Her parents had tried to leave Cambodia for a better life, but they were sent to a refugee camp in Thailand that was run by the Khmer Rouge. When they came back to Cambodia, they had nothing. They were beggars in Phnom Penh when Sokha’s stepfather raped her and then sold her to a brothel. She was nine years old, and by the time we rescued her from the brothel, she was twelve. It was very hard for her to talk to a man about what had happened to her, but Claude was very careful, very respectful.

Another girl Claude Sampère interviewed was Tom Dy. She was a girl I found in the road one afternoon, in a neighborhood south of the Royal Palace. She was dirty, with her hair clumped with mud, and frighteningly thin. People were throwing stones at her. Her head was bleeding, she had sarcomas on her skin from AIDS—she looked half dead. I thought she was about thirty or thirty-five. I asked the driver to stop and I put my arms around her and took her into the car.

The driver said, “Are you mad? She’s filthy, she has lice, AIDS—don’t touch her.” He was disgusted by the smell. But I took her to our shelter and washed her myself—I didn’t want anyone else to look after her. I tried to bring her to the hospital, but the nurses glared at her. She told me she was just seventeen.

I brought her back to the shelter and talked to Pierre. He used his contacts to get her tuberculosis medication and other expensive drugs. Every morning I washed Tom Dy and dressed her wounds with antiseptic. She told me she had been a prostitute since the age of nine. The pimps put her out on the street and threw stones at her when she became too sick to work. With our care, she put on weight and became like the chief of the whole center. Tom Dy was a naturally positive person and became an enormous help around the center—cooking and cleaning and bustling everyone along, looking after the younger girls if they didn’t want to eat or became depressed.

Tom Dy told Claude that her dream was to work with AFESIP, to help the other girls. But she knew she wouldn’t make it. She knew she had AIDS. I knew it too, of course, and I knew that it meant she was going to die, though I didn’t care to think about it. Claude seemed deeply affected by their conversation.

He and his crew also accompanied us on a police raid. We were looking for the daughter of Mrs. Ly, a Vietnamese woman. Because she was Vietnamese, the police wouldn’t help her—the Khmer hate the Vietnamese even more than they hate the Chinese, and anyway, she had no money. Mrs. Ly told us that her daughter Loan had left the village where they lived to become a waitress, but now she feared that she had been sold into prostitution. She had heard she was working in Svay Pak.

Because the police wouldn’t help her, Mrs. Ly went to Svay Pak herself. She walked around the street waving a small black-and-white photo of her fourteen-year-old daughter. One young man pointed to one of the brothels. She knocked, and the
meebon
threw her out.

After Mrs. Ly came to us, we went to the police to ask for an authorization for Claude Sampère’s crew to film in Svay Pak. It was a Saturday, which was probably a mistake, because the police don’t like to work on Saturdays. Also, it gave them plenty of time to warn the brothel owners. When we finally managed to get a permit for a raid on Monday evening, there was nobody at the brothel. No girls, no pimps. Svay Pak was clean.

Pierre and I were furious with the police, and we threatened to hold a press conference to expose their double dealing. They rallied and arrested one of the brothel owners. Somehow, they forced him to confess where little Loan had been taken. But when we got there, that house was closed up—these people too had been forewarned. How were we to work with the police under these conditions?

Despite the locked door, we refused to leave. Finally we saw some girls coming out of another house down the street, trying to run away, which made sense—many of the brothels in Svay Pak are connected by tunnels. Loan was among the girls. She was in shock. When she saw her mother, they both wept. We filed charges at the police station.

Before they left, Claude’s team gave Loan and her mother a little money, so they could go back to Vietnam. They traveled discreetly, without any passports—Mrs. Ly knew a place where they could sneak across the border. We were still new to these matters in those days, and there seemed no better way to do it.

I began receiving threats. Men would phone our house in the middle of the night and threaten me or my family if I didn’t stay at home. I received letters that said, “Leave Phnom Penh or you will die.” One day when I was in the neighborhood around the Central Market, a man drove alongside me on a big black motorbike, the kind we call dog bikes. He held a pistol against my side and said, “Leave. Because I won’t kill you, but somebody else will.”

I suppose he was a contract killer who had been hired to eliminate me, but for some reason, he didn’t want to do it. Perhaps I had helped his sister or some other girl he knew. So he warned me instead.

I took that warning seriously. It felt different from the other threats. The cold, metal feel of the gun against my skin was very real. That evening, I locked the windows and doors. I began pacing around the house every night, waiting for the sounds of a gunman outside. I was most afraid for my family—for Ning and Adana. I didn’t know what those people might do to my two little girls. I was becoming a little unhinged.

Pierre said it was time to take a break. He took me and the children to Laos, where he had friends who would lend me a house. He said it was just for a while, until the trouble blew over. In those days Cambodians couldn’t travel easily, because they needed visas, which were almost impossible to get. But because I was married to a Frenchman, I was French and could therefore get a visa easily. I left the AFESIP shelter in the hands of my mother, and she and my adoptive father came to the airport to wave good-bye.

The night before I left I wrote a letter to the Cambodian prime minister, Hun Sen. It was like throwing a needle into a pile of dried rice stalks, but I was angry and I needed to tell someone in authority. I said the traffickers had threatened to roast my baby like an ordinary chicken and that I should not be driven out of my country in fear of my life because I wanted to improve the lives of women who were being kept and traded as slaves.

The night we arrived in Laos, I had a dream. I saw my adoptive parents’ house in Thlok Chhrov burning. I woke Pierre and told him, “We have to go home.” He was irritated. He told me to stop behaving like a superstitious old Khmer witch. “Try to live in reality,” he snapped. Still, he promised that when he got back to Cambodia, he would find out whether anything had happened.

My adoptive mother was at the airport when Pierre arrived, and he could see that she was distraught. He said, “What’s going on—has the house burned down or something?” She started to cry. She said, “How do you know?”

The evening I left Phnom Penh, someone had gone to Thlok Chhrov and put gasoline all round the house where my adoptive parents lived. I suppose they assumed that if I wasn’t in Phnom Penh, I had gone there for safety. Perhaps someone watched my car drive away from my house, with the children and the luggage, and figured that must be where we had fled.

It took just ten minutes for my parents’ house and everything in it to burn to nothing. It was only made of dried leaves and bamboo. Because they had gone to the airport to see me off, my adoptive parents weren’t inside. However, there was an elderly man there, looking after the house while my father was gone, because of course it didn’t have a proper lock. The neighbors pulled him out of the blaze. He was hospitalized, and he never fully recovered.

I knew then that the threats against me were real. But I couldn’t stop my work. I was in danger, but so were the thousands of girls in the brothels. I was safe in Laos, but they were not.

Then I received a response to my letter from the prime minister. A little black girl from a tiny village had written to the prime minister of the kingdom, and this man actually wrote back. Hun Sen wrote that the police were investigating the arson of my parents’ house. He asked me to continue my work.

I felt proud to receive such an acknowledgment. It’s true that although many Cambodian officials are shockingly corrupt, and some are simply evil, I have also received support for my work from certain people in the Cambodian government. Without them, none of what we do would be possible.

I decided to return to Phnom Penh. The holiday in Laos had done me good. It had calmed me down. I vowed to be more careful in the future and hired a driver who was a former policeman to be my bodyguard.

When Claude Sampère’s program aired in 1998, he invited me to France to talk on the air about my work. Pierre and the children came along—little Ning, who was seven and a half, and Adana. Before we left, Tom Dy asked me not to go. She hung on to me and cried. She begged me, “Don’t go. If you’re not here, I’ll die and I don’t want to die without you.”

She didn’t seem very sick—in fact, she had just begun to put on weight. I told her she wasn’t dying and that we wouldn’t be gone for long. I promised to buy her a present. She asked for something pretty to wear in her hair.