The strong ones

Part of my project here involves working with a group of women with HIV to give them employment by producing garments and accessories that can be sold to provide them income. I am setting up a business that I hope to help them make self sustaining, although we have a long way to go because most of the women that I work with haven’t had an education, although they seem to be some of the most resilient people I have met in my life when I hear what they have had to go through.

Four of the 5 women are widows, but one of them is a young woman who had been sold by her family at the age of nine. Her father abandoned her, and her mother had sold her to a family as a housekeeper, but subsequently she was raped by the father. Through this and other rapes, she contracted HIV. Somehow she escaped and was taken in by the HOPE HIV clinic, who I work in conjunction with to help their patients. I don’t know all the details. Now she is 19. She is a beautiful, smiling girl who speaks a couple words of english and now lives with her cousins. Her mom wanted to get her back, but she refused to go because she knows her mother will sell her again. This is the way in cambodia, as I am beginning to understand. Slavery is real. alive and well. You can be a sex slave but you can also be a slave in a house or as a worker. Women and children are often still looked at as property. Property that can be bought and sold.

When Sing Nimol first came to the clinic she was seriously depressed and mentally unstable, with suicidal tendencies. Over the last two years she has received treatment and physiological attention, and they have determined that she is now doing a lot better, so the last step is for her to work with me, to help her become self sufficient with job training.

Together we make paper and she makes cards with her own paintings and designs on them. we exchange a few words in our broken languages, mostly smiles, gestures and laughter. sticking my hands besides hers and mussing up soft fibers of old newspapers and water in the paper making tub is the best thing I have felt since being here. I love to make things, to create things with my own hands. to be messy. but to see the joy on someone else’s face when they, for the first time pull the paper tray out of the vat, press down all the fibers, and make a brand new sheet of paper where before there was only broken shredded bits of old newspapers- This kind of joy is more special than anything I can think of. She shines now, she is gaining confidence. And she shares her story with people, to tell them what is happening to this day to so many women in Cambodia, so that others will be protected from her situation. And at first I wanted to cry, for her, for all the things that happened to her. But instead I laugh and smile with her. and it is ever so much better. We are moving on together. Making something new. And rather than trying to share in a past I can never comprehend, I get to share in a future that can provide a way out for her.

I can complain about nothing. just sit bleary eyed and stunned. stunned by the brightness of a few striking rays of light, peeking out from behind the walls of corruption, creeping around the devastation and atrocities, to move forward without tripping over the wires and mines of the past.