A small girl with a disproportionate grin worthy of Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat pokes out her tongue, pointing at it frantically. One hand clamped firmly in mine, her flowery dress fluttering in the tropical breeze, she turns her extended index finger towards my face – a sign I’m expected to bare tongue, too. Out it pokes, steel tongue stud glistening in the sunlight. My young charge, along with a horde of bug-eyed teenage onlookers, squeals with delight and then dances haphazardly off into the dust, proudly wearing my (relatively) giant flip-flops.
This scenario is repeated at least 20 times, each with a different child and always to a chorus of shocked gasps and ecstatic squeals, during the course of my four-hour visit. We’re at Wat Opot, about 30km south of Phnom Penh on National Highway 2. This five-acre site, once a place of death and despair, is today one of the most alive, energetic and profoundly invigorating places to be in Cambodia – and plays host this weekend to an outdoor music festival starring Laura Mam.
It was not always so. When the United Nations Transitional Authority on Cambodia arrived in Phnom Penh in 1991, the 22,000 soldiers, police officers and administrators who made up this sprawling peacekeeping force brought with them not peace, but death and decay. Such was this force’s sexual appetite that within two years the number of prostitutes in the capital had swelled from 6,000 to more than 20,000, many of them underage. The HIV virus had officially arrived – and its stay would not be a pleasant one.
On Valentine’s Day 1998, just as the virus was beginning to make its presence felt in spiralling death statistics – and several years before antiretroviral (ARV) drugs would arrive in Cambodia to treat it – another, rather more welcome, visitor made land. Wayne Dale Matthysse, a US-born medic and veteran of the Vietnam War, had returned to Southeast Asia to make reparation for the horrors he witnessed during the conflict. Here in Cambodia, he instead found fresh horrors: having set up a clinic at Wat Opot with a former Buddhist monk, he discovered that 90% of the men, women and children who visited them were infected with HIV. For years, the clinic – intended to nurture health – served instead as a place people went to die. That was until the belated arrival of ARVs halted Death in its tracks.
Today, this former hospice is home to 46 children who are HIV positive, have lost their parents to Aids or both. No, you can’t tell who’s who – and the community, rather than being a place of sadness, reverberates round the clock with all the shrieks, giggles, yelps and hollers you’d expect of any group of children this size. As Wat Opot prepares to host its first ever outdoor music festival, intended as a rousing celebration of life and all its promise, The Advisor meets founder Wayne and his business partner Melinda to talk swearing nuns, a godless world & giving Death a damn good kicking.
Take us back to the beginning.
Wayne: In 1998 we visited a home with one child who was kept in a box. His parents had both died and he was about four years old. He was quite sick and they fed him with a spoon, but they wouldn’t touch him because at that time nobody knew how you caught Aids and so nobody wanted to touch him. We could see people dying underneath the house, but they didn’t want to bring them into the house. We knew that people deserved something better than this: we needed to build a hospice. Our intention was to take care of people. We never thought that those dying people would include children.
I signed on to stay maybe six months or a year, to get the hospice going. Taking care of dying people, you can burn out any time and leave and go somewhere else. I never intended to stay as long as I have and never dreamed of it getting as big as it has. Between 1994 and 1997, we were losing people every week – sometimes two a day. Six months after the medicine started, the dying started to stop. It was evident that people were getting better. It was that hope, too. Before then, there was no hope so people just died. With the medicine, word spread and people began to have hope again.
By 2007 we had one patient who was almost blind, manic depressive and suicidal, with real angry temper tantrums – sometimes uncontrollable. He would wake up at 2am sometimes and he was very paranoid. Because he couldn’t see anything, he would start hitting the beds next to him with the metal pole he used to walk with. Nobody would sleep in the room with him, so I used to sleep under his bed. For six months we took care of him and he would have good days and bad days. Finally I took him to Takeo hospital and told them I couldn’t handle him any more; I was burned out. Three days later they dropped him off at our front gate. They had done nothing with him. He was filthy; he hadn’t had a bath or anything. They threw him at our door and said: ‘He’s yours, not ours.’ He had seven days of ARV medicines left with him. ‘Don’t give them to him if you don’t want to.’ I can’t make that kind of decision! But I think he understood what was going on and he realised that even I had given up on him at this time. On the seventh day I gave him his last dose of medicine and then he died. I almost think he knew there was no point sticking around, so he died before I had to make the decision about whether to continue medicating him. The day he died, he was laying on the bed and the hospital called me and said: ‘We have a lady who’s manic depressive and paralysed from the neck down. She cusses and swears all the time. She wants people to kill her. Will you take her?’ We had never turned anybody down, but I said: ‘Let me think about it overnight. I can’t give you an answer now.’ That night I went to bed and thought: I can’t do this any more. It’s too much.’ The hospital never called me back the next morning, so I called them and said: ‘We aren’t taking any more patients.’
We had three people in beds here. I told them: ’If you want to be sick, there’s a hospital in Takeo. If you don’t want to be sick, get out of bed.’ They’re still here! They help out in the kitchen, stuff like that. So that was the end of the hospice. We had the choice of getting rid of all the children, shipping them out to orphanages, but some of them had been here for six or seven years. We could have closed, but I thought: ‘What else am I going to do?’ I figured out I’d stay on and see what else we could do, which is when we created the children’s community. It has completely changed and become a happy place.
Melinda: At first, even the 16-year-old boys were scared of ‘ghosts’ at night, but now we don’t hear that any more. They’re accepting of this place. We tell them that they’re ‘happy ghosts’: ‘If there are ghosts here, they’re your parents and they’re watching this DVD with you!’ We try to dispel the notion that ghosts are scary, because Khmer culture is very scared of ghosts. But my dad is here – and he died years ago, so now whenever a door bangs the kids will say: ‘Oh, that’s just Melinda’s papa.’
The first time I visited, I left feeling energised. It’s a place where fun rules the roost, or that’s how it feels.
Wayne: [Laughs] Usually. It’s definitely feminine, in that it has its periods.
Have local perceptions of HIV and Aids changed since you arrived?
Wayne: Once in a while the kids will mention that someone in the community said something to them because they’re HIV, but in general this community has grown a lot since we came to this place. I had found a lovely place, which was about nine miles off the road, but it was up in the mountains and had a nice breeze and was surrounded by trees. When we talked to the surrounding people they said: ‘Oh, but all your sewage is going to come into our rice fields. We don’t want you here.’ They were, of course, talking about Aids. When we got to this wat, which was the most rundown at the time, I didn’t like it at all. It was my last choice. The community had one Aids station, right outside the front door here, and one Aids station out back. They already had Aids here, so they said: ‘Come on in! Help us!’ They opened their arms to us and accepted us right away.
Of course, part of the community – and I was a Christian at the time – said: ‘We don’t want this Christian living in our wat,’ because they didn’t know how it would affect things. At the beginning, they would bring their sickest people to us and they would die, sometimes within hours, sometimes within days. The word going around town was that we were killing people! But because we had hired local staff, they would go home at night and say: ‘That’s stupid! Wayne’s taking care of them; he’s doing his best.’
Almost every family around here has been affected by Aids and so knows how it came about. The people we would get here were generally good women: wives and mothers whose husbands had given it to them. This community has become more accepting of it. Our people go to weddings all the time; when we first came, no one would even think of inviting someone with Aids to a wedding because no one would eat at the table with them. ‘You serve people with Aids? We’re not eating this food.’
Similar attitudes exist in the West.
Wayne: Actually, yes! We have Western people who come here and say: ‘Cambodia is far ahead of the United States.’ There’s one coming here on Christmas Day who’s gay and has been out since he was 14 years old. He’s now 30-something, a successful businessman who’s HIV positive. It’s his tenth anniversary of having been diagnosed with HIV so he wants to spend it here with the kids. Since he got HIV, he says: ‘My mothers, my sisters, my friends, my co-workers, they all say: ‘We still love you; nothing has changed.’ He came here and wanted to help somebody so he picked one of the kids who’s now in high school, wanting to tell him that if you have HIV it’s OK, you can still have a successful life. He was going to give this little pep talk: ‘I want you to know I’m HIV positive, just like you are.’ The kid rushed over to him and gave him this big hug and said: ‘Well then we can be really good friends.’ Rob walked back to me, scratching his head, and said: You know, for many years everybody has said: ‘That’s OK, we still love you.’ I don’t know about that now. When this kid hugged me, it was a hug of love. All of a sudden I have to really think about how people really feel about me. That was a hug of love, not a hug of pity. In the States you get pity, you don’t get love.’
What of the kids in your care today?
Wayne: Now we have three kids who have graduated from university: one with a BA in nursing who’s now working on his Masters; two who have graduated in law. This year, we have one who will graduate with his BA in civil engineering; three kids doing different forms of art; one girl in midwifery school; one boy in an international English school – he’s passing all his tests and he rides his bicycle to school, with all these kids who drive Lexuses. We have another one who just joined the circus arts school in Battambang.
They do seem an energetic bunch…
Wayne: We’re very happy with the new direction. They’re good kids. We run the place as a commune, so everybody works together and everybody carries their own weight. It’s not like we’re taking care of them; we take care of each other. The emphasis is certainly on education: they have to go to school. We have a volunteer here for a year and she teaches English classes as well. We have music and arts. They have activities but they can’t participate in them until they can show that they’ve done their homework. Education is our main goal.
Most people are shocked when they come here. We had one lady come here who was 60 years old, had never married or had children but wanted to do something with her life. She found our website and saw a picture of someone holding a baby, so she came here with the idea she would be taking care of little starving babies in cribs. Where she got that idea from, we have no idea!
Melinda: She was with a seniors group that was travelling all over Asia, doing the touristy thing, and then she broke away to do something else. ‘Oh, good. I’ll end my vacation holding sick babies.’
Wayne: [Laughs] But then she got here and there were no sick babies!
But what you do have is a lot of rambunctious children who WILL jump up and down on you until you’re exhausted.
Wayne: She wasn’t prepared for that – and she admitted it. She was very uncomfortable for the first few days. She’d never been around children. She’d never really had a relationship with anybody, is basically what she said.
Melinda: She had a hard time understanding why this child was consistently asking for this or that when you’ve already said no. Well, that’s because he’s a kid! She had a lot of questions, trying to figure out children for the first time.
Wayne: And the kids don’t mind if you’re not that accepting of them; they’ll still jump on you.
Melinda: More! It’s like they sense your fear factor, like an animal: ‘OK, I got this one…’
Wayne: So they treated her just like everybody else! When it was almost her last night and she was feeling like she hadn’t done anything here, one of the little boys was crying and she said: ‘Here’s my opportunity. I can help him.’ She walked over to him and said: ‘Would you like me to help you?’ And he said: ‘No! I can take care of myself.’ She said: ‘All of a sudden it hit me. I’m looking for needy people, but these people don’t need me. They just love me.’ It just clicked in her mind. The kids have experience with all kinds of people, from Western to Asian. It’s almost like group therapy here… [Laughs]
Wayne, you came here as a man of faith, but have since abandoned religion. What happened?
Wayne: I came here as a Christian missionary with the idea of changing Buddhists to Christians; that’s what I had been doing. In Salt Lake City we changed Mormons to Christians; in New Mexico we changed Indians to Christians; in Honduras we changed Catholics to Christians. Now I had come here and was going to change Buddhists to Christians. That was what my life was: making people see things the way I saw them, which was the way I had been taught. Then I got here and met Beth Goodwin, a Buddhist nun. We were talking and she asked what I was going to do here. ‘I came to bring the love of Jesus to the people of Cambodia.’ She said: “Bullshit!” ‘You can’t say that!’ “Why not?” ‘God will strike you down with lightning!’ “I’m a Jew.” [Laughs] Beth is an outstanding woman who has worked in Palestine and still works in Cambodia with her Aids programme. That got me thinking. She said: “What are you doing here?” I said: ‘I’m a nurse and I want to help people.’ She said: “Well, that sounds a lot more like it.” So we got to know each other and she asked me to redefine what I was saying: “I don’t understand this Christian crap you’re talking about.” Basically, when you’re with Christians, you throw out a Bible verse then someone else throws out another Bible verse and you see if you can trump them with another Bible verse, but you never say ‘Bullshit!’ to anybody, you just throw out another Bible verse. She was the first person to come out and say ‘Bullshit!’ to me and I had to think about that. Maybe it is! And I had to ask, if I take away the Christianity, who am I? I started thinking about that and doing some reading and realised that maybe I had got it wrong. I’m still working on it – I don’t have all the answers – but I pretty much left all religions; I don’t see the value in any religion. I believe that ‘God’ is the problem with the whole world. We are responsible for this world. ‘God’ isn’t going to save us; there’s no Jesus who’s going to come back and rescue us; he’s not going to throw our friends in Hell. It’s our world and if we destroy it, we destroy it. Life will go on in some other form, maybe, but if we can’t take care of this world someone or something else will do it for us. And if we want to change it, we have the power to change it. We are the creator!
WHO: Laura Mam and a lot of very rambunctious children
WHAT: Wat Opot Music Festival, featuring Laura Mam (no booze, though – it’s a kids’ community)
WHERE: Wat Opot, near Chambok town on National Road 2 (47km/30m south of Phnom Penh)
WHEN: 11am – 6pm December 22
WHY: It’s a fun, happy place
