Cockroaches -- Toph

I do not want to believe everyone in Svay Pak is involved in the sex trade.

This is what we were told before we arrived, and I thought it an exaggeration. It is what we’ve been told here, that any child has a price. But some people, surely, just live in the village.

When we drive in every morning, yes we get fierce stares from the teenagers playing at the outdoor pool table, but the hula-hooping granny doing her exercises in her single-chair beauty salon seems oblivious to us. When we say good morning in Khmer to the woman across the street from whom we buy Vietnamese coffees, she smiles and seems impressed that we make an effort at their language, even if the effort really is minimal.

Some, certainly. Most, possibly, especially if we include indirect participation, such as selling condoms. But all?

I don’t want that to be true.

The demographics of the children have begun to change. Yesterday (Wednesday), while I was painting the ceiling of the front room, balanced on a wooden table, seventeen children were watching. Fifteen were boys. We have been told two of them are twins. Other sibling relationships are also clear. What is the future of these guys? Are they all trapped by the poverty of Svay Pak? Might some of them leave and live in other dirt-road villages, villages without the sex trade?

This afternoon, I see my first white face in Svay Pak other than our team. He is about six feet tall (I am six feet tall), with a shaved head (I have a shaved head), heavy set (I am sixty pounds lighter than him, probably) and he is riding a motorcycle. He pulls up three doors down from Rahab’s House, and orders a drink. He sits, enjoying it on the patio, while we have our entourage around us. The white face is smiling at the scene, behind his sunglasses.

My brain screams.

What I am looking at and what he is looking at are not the same things. I see hope, and the possibility of happiness, even if it is transitory. He sees his next conquest (and yes, I am making assumptions here).

He is confident, comfortable. He has been here before. After his drink he drives across the vacant lot across from us, nodding hello to a team of eight white people covered in paint, and on into the backroads of Svay Pak. He feels absolutely no shame in being seen here.

The brothel we have destroyed was hideous. It was unsanitary, even leaving aside the years of accumulated dust and spider webs. And we have only seen it during the daytime. At night, Svay Pak becomes somewhere else. Somewhere I don’t want to be. Somewhere much less safe. So in the daytime, I see the light. In the afternoon and at night (and it seems the transition takes place between 2 and 3), the cockroaches come out. And they look very much like me.

I don’t want to believe everyone in Svay Pak is involved in the sex trade.