Playing With Someone Else's Kids: Part 3 - Sihanoukville, Cambodia

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Continued from Part 1 and 2...


One day, taking a walk with the kids, we watched a helicopter land right by the beach. Each day, for the past 6 weeks, a team of nine American servicemen, supported by forty Cambodian military men, had been searching one island believed to contain the remains of nine lost servicemen from the Vietnam War. The mission had only three more days left, and they had found four of the lost men. Another mission would arrive shortly after the first mission, determined to find every last man left behind.

At the Vietnamese Embassy to apply for a visa, I met an American man in his late fifties. He had been living in the Phillipines for the last ten years and about a year ago had started looking for a wife. He was very open and friendly and we ran in to him and chatted a couple times. He had recently gotten remarried to a 16 year-old Phillipino girl, now 18, and she was pregnant with their child. From his perspective, he was doing a good thing. Apparently, her family is very poor and is delighted to have their daughter marry a Westerner. From the young wife’s perspective, it's probably a good thing too. I had some very interesting conversations with him, in which he explained his viewpoints and I tried very hard to see his point of view. It was an excellent test for my open mind, because I run in to cultural clashes like this often and it's too easy just to pass judgement. It's a lot more of a challenge to just listen and learn. I'm not so sure I agree with this man but I do understand why he thinks his actions are legitimate. They work for him, they work for his wife. According to him they just don’t work for his American children, in their thirties, and his ex-wife, in her fifties.

There was one very memorable little boy, he looked about four, who ran around the beach filthy and naked. He never smiled or came over to play with us. He seemed really sad. He would just approach tourists and point to their food, trying to get them to share. I think he may have been part of a begging family because I saw him with a woman and a few other kids occasionally. But most often, he was on his own, naked and forced to fend for himself. Maybe his mother thought he'd be better off begging on his own, maybe she even advised him how to dress and act. I don’t know.

There were also all-night bars on the beach, with plentiful cheap booze and loud techno music. Little kids would hang around these bars, begging table-to-table, or sleeping in the hammocks or on the sand. One little girl carried her baby brother in her arms, and would walk around the tables, her penetrating and sad stare melting hearts. I don’t know if her father made her work this shift, believing it would earn the most sympathy and money, or if she really was on her own, fending for herself and her baby brother.

We were both sad when it was time to leave. We had gotten the opportunity to spend hours talking, playing and learning about the lives of local people. We were given the chance to see, intimately, the effects of the intense poverty we had before read about or seen from a distance. We could completely understand why Angelina Jolie adopted a Cambodian child; we each wanted to adopt at least four or five. We often said to the kids, when they did something particularly amazing, “Have you considered adoption?” They couldn’t understand us of course, but I think they knew we adored them. Of course, adopting a few kids wouldn’t solve the situation for the hundreds of other poor kids.

Sihanoukville was a hard place to leave and an impossible place to forget.




Side Note: There is an excellent charity, M’Lop Tapang, that cares for and helps street kids and working kids in Sihanoukville. Their website is http://www.mloptapang.org/page.php?id=215

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