Rahab's House is a School -- Toph

The children of the village of Svay Pak are more used to us now. This is both good and bad… the familiarity means that they try things they didn’t before. Any gesture might have another motivation. Several kids end the day with our empty drink containers, each earned one at a time, through grabbing gestures, pleading eyes, or whatever.

The tension of their poverty is confusing. They are all thin, barefoot, with terrible teeth behind their (often) broad smiles. And yet there is money in the village. We see an occasional expensive car. Yesterday a young boy, perhaps seven, had a wad of US and Cambodian bills carefully folded in his pocket. As he asked for a drink canister.

This was one of my wheelbarrow helpers on the first day, and we are by now a familiar sight to him. He introduces himself, but an hour later is using another name, which might be Paul. He becomes anyone I might want.

Today he wears only shorts. He has bright intelligent eyes, but the language barrier is apparent. We try counting together, and some other kids join in, but there is no real exchange, beyond the smiles. We trust these children have some sense about what we are doing here.

“Mynyemiz Paul. Mynyemiz?” he asks, pointing first at himself, then at me.

“My name is Toph.” I answer. He repeats: “Mynyemiz Taw”.

He will shout “Taw” at me several dozen times throughout the day, as indeed he shouts the names of many of the team.

Before I begin scraping, in the front room of the former brothel, Paul and a little girl (the same one Richard described yesterday blowing kisses) point at coloured images of Bible stories. “I did this one” they each seem to say, and, as I nod and smile, the girl seems to understand.

She is perhaps five, and, apparently, is Paul’s sister (“may” and “(k)om” are the words he seemed to use). She has long earrings on, and wears only shorts. She also has some scarring around her mouth, which interrupts the smoothness of her young face.

When she sees me show approval at her colouring skills (sure, the people were blue, and I like it when people colour outside of the lines), she starts laying claim to other ones, until she has taken possession of a dozen of them. I don’t know when she stopped pointing at her own work. She too will spend most of the day in the front room, close to her brother (“Taw…Taw...” I hear as I am on a ladder scraping). He is calling her a name I hear as “Gail”. At lunch, it is explained that the marks on her face might be genital warts, or an STD. This had not occurred to me.

Both these kids, and the others with them, are trapped. They smile, and are bright eyed, but are thinking things, and living things, which leave me speechless. So I scrape scrape scrape scrape scrape.

In the afternoon, some of the girls who work at Rahab’s House arrived. These include girls who had been rescued from the building when it was a brothel. The sort of courage that it takes to come back to a place like this is beyond reckoning.

The opportunity to meet them had not been a planned part of the trip. We had not expected they would want contact with any white men. They look nothing like the urchins I have tried to communicate with. They walk with grace, stand with poise. They are smiling, and respectful, and radiate joy. We all awkwardly introduce ourselves, over the course of a few minutes, before we quickly leave them to their work, in the building we are renovating, and which they, through their work, and God, though His, are transforming.

These girls, women, are in their early teens. When rescued, they might have been eight. And they have unmistakable joy.

As we are leaving, one of the girls makes a respectful gesture, and in perfect English says, “It is very nice to meet you.” I am taken aback for a moment, at the impeccable pronunciation, and at the sentiment. (This is the one Marty calls Hanna.) Then she points at my bald head and giggles. “I’ll remember you.”

There is an immense warmth at being teased in this way. She is comfortable here. This is their building, her building. And she has let us in.