Snapshots from the September 21-23 advocacy trip

1. A brothel worker rubs my shoulders inexpertly as a cover for our interview in the grubby room. There are brightly-coloured posters of houses and gardens plastered to the walls, and a sheet hung up as a curtain over a window. It's not her room - they haven't got places of their own, she explains, they just sleep where they can, because they are always working. Where does she keep her things, I ask. In a plastic bag under one of the other beds, she says. She's the only single woman working there. The other six women have children, husbands or boyfriends. She keeps 30% of her fee, just over $2 for sex. I slip her $5, our interview rate, out of sight of the brothel owner.
   
   
2. At the Vietnamese slum, it was like stepping back eight years to the first slum Riverkids worked in, now demolished: kids running around, laughing and playing, and then suddenly the girls at 11,12 onwards are gone. 25 teenage boys, they reckoned for this community. Seven girls, all working "at night". The rest are gone.
   
   
3. Little girl, 2-3 years old, scowling at me when I tried to make her smile, then turning and running after the other children, laughing. Sold for $50 to another family, then dumped when she turned out HIV positive.
   
   
4. A beautiful teal-blue strapless dress with a short bubble skirt and intricate ruching, the singer shyly admitting that she wasn't sure quite how many dresses she had and then more confidently, about her plans to pay for a tailoring course so she can quit the beer garden. She lost her job as a receptionist when the company closed, but this, she said firmly, is not her future.
   
   
5. A small boy with probable cerebral palsy stays with his relatives in the slum. He's thin and cries out to the Riverkids nurse for milk. After several interviews, what seemed to be neglect turns out to be a family struggling to do the best, turned away by doctors, trying to find food he can manage and a pair of doting cousins carrying him around. We're helping with leg braces, liquid nutritional supplements and physiotherapy. He holds on tight to the little toy car he's been given, then waves it at his cousin with delight.
   
   
6. Lunch with a young woman from a tiny village in one of the poorest provinces, hoping to start university. She wants to be an architect. Her mother kept her and her sister in school even though they had to go without anything else because her father, who died in 2003, made her promise that the girls would stay in school too, believing that his daughters deserved the same education as his sons. She's tall for a village girl, tall and loved and volunteering at the local temple, teaching english and so earnest.
   
   
7. Stepping carefully across the flooded floor of the one-room to sit on the single bed and talk by a dim fluorescent light to a heavily pregnant thin lady, and watching her eyes flick past us to check on her little girl playing behind us, then to the door where her husband waited patiently for us to finish. A love story - they married young and her husband and her were trying their hardest, but she'd had to quit her job at the garment factory when the fumes made her painfully ill this pregnancy. Her daughter's hair is streaked from malnutrition.
   
   
8. "I had an abortion yesterday," she said when we are asking the three sex workers we were visiting about contraception. She touched her abdomen gently and then explained that it wasn't the herbs or medicine, but that she was lucky, an NGO (one I know that does good work) helped her get to the hospital for a D&C. "Why the hospital?" I asked. Because she started bleeding after the police beat her when they had arrested her for prostitution. And she has HIV.
   
   
9. The police will take your money, they said. All you earn that night, then your jewelry if you have any. Sometimes they are polite and they pay for the sex. But sometimes they don't.
   
   
10. "What about this girl?" one of the women said later, when we were all standing in a group around the railway, saying goodbye to the women who had talked with us. She pointed to a girl with her hair tucked up, leaning against a woman in her forties in pyjamas. "Has she been to school before? Is she working? What about her family?" A little bit - she can write her name, no, only collecting garbage, just her mother as a sex worker and she has, you know, problems, mental problems. Not the girl, they assured us. She's a good girl. Can we help her?
    
    The staff talked quickly. Thursday, our fourth group of Get Ready girls graduate, and the fifth group starts. We have two places left. If her mother brings her, if the girl wants to -yes. And the food box, so she can study fulltime, yes. Be there on Thursday, we tell her. You can do this, give your daughter a chance.
    
    And she does come, with her hair clipped back neatly, clean shoes and incredible shyness, to watch 13 girls graduate from the Get Ready program (six back to school, seven to vocational training), and to meet the rest of her new class.
    
    
11. The Vietnamese-style coffee at the tourist sex bar is very good. I drink, with a headache from awful taiwanese beer I bought at the beer garden earlier when we talked to the singer, while the tour talks to another bar girl. Her story is practiced, a sob story. She needs money, she has a sick child - there's something off about it, or maybe it's just that the women here are even more artificial. The men want to pretend that they're carefree asian girls, that they sleep with strangers because they genuinely like them, that they enjoy sex for cash. Their english is good, but after the beer garden, where the women relax out of sight of the customers, where they sing for pleasure as well as pay, where it's Khmer, not a bad copy of a Phuket bar, they look exhausted and harsh.
    
    
12. The Vietnamese-style coffee at the "coffeeshop" is terrible. Plastic loungers lined up to face two televisions. All men, drinking a bit, talking. We go in and conversation falters then starts again. My staff - Soklee! - talks to the man sitting near us. He's a boxer, he comes here in the mornings to relax. They work in the markets, as motodrivers, it's just a friendly place to drink. We look at the upstairs balcony, shut off almost entirely with wooden panels, at the group of young waitresses bringing the men drinks. Soklee goes to pay the bill, and to ask questions away from the foreigners.
    
    The owner, a woman, says oh yes, they're all cousins that she helps with good jobs waitressing in her shop. Free room and board. She doesn't know about if they go with customers or not, she tells them not to, but sometimes they don't listen. She pays them $50 a month too. Where do they come from? The countryside, when she visits her home province, the mothers, they ask her to help find them jobs. The waitresses are dressed in nice clothes, with small jewelry, handphones. She claims they make less than the woman, standing barefoot in her flooded slum room, ever did at her 12-hour 7-day garment factory job did. None of them look related. The men look away, embarrassed.
    
    
13. But it's like a pub in a developed country, isn't it? There are sex workers everywhere. But choice - when you choose to become a sex worker, when you could change to a job that paid as much, that had the same hours so you could take care of your children and feed them, rather than hoping you might have family, a husband (gone, they say, over and over, gone. Another woman, to work somewhere, he beat me, he ran away, he died maybe. Gone.) A husband, a father means the difference between your children surviving or selling yourself to strangers - and someone asks me, puzzled, why do the women want children with their husbands? why do they let their husbands beat them, be so cruel? Because here, a bad husband is still so much better than no husband, than despair.
    
    
14. We look at fat babies, nursed and talk about breastfeeding and slings, and why Cambodian women don't scream when they give birth. Some do, the women say at last, our nurse included, but the doctors and nurses don't like it usually. They will tell you to be quiet or the baby dies. And you scream, one of the mothers says, what's the point? It still hurts the same.
    
    I try to explain the Khmer code for women, that to be quiet, to never react to pain, is the ideal. I wonder why the code for men is not as widely known.
    
    
15. We change at the last minute to visit a different school. We're annoyed with the school where most of our children go, the one that's physically closest. The bathrooms have been broken for a long time, and the director admitted that they had the funds to repair it, but they had kept it instead. We offered to repair the bathrooms in exchange for a discount on the unofficial daily school fees for our children, but they'd rather collect more bribes. The school is slowly falling apart, and the last time I saw the senior staff, I counted the number of gold rings on their hands.
    
    
16. We visit a school where 24 of our children, older ones that can cross the busy streets between it and their slum home, go for free. The headmaster waived the fees for NGOs, charges a fixed daily fee for the others - I walk in the gate and stop. Painted signs, neatly tended gardens, children running around and playing, but not hitting or screaming. Teachers walking through with children asking them questions, not ducking away. I look into a classroom and gasp - posters, homemade artwork, good schoolwork hung up on display - it's beautiful, so beautiful.
    
    The headmaster, I'm asked - is he rich? He looks rich. I'm puzzled, and then I realise what they mean - he has one ring, a clean pressed shirt, and tidy dark pants. Look at his shoes, I whisper. Sophon had shoes like that once, still does. His shoes are cracked at the side, worn out from use. The shirt is pressed by his wife, his ring modest by local standards.
    
    I ask who paid for all the improvements, the little fence around the garden for the pet rabbits, the paving stones so the children can play in wet weather, the playground equipment - parents, he says proudly. They saw that we tried to work hard, that we are doing better, and then they give a little, some more. Later, we are talking about a donation from us so we can enroll more students, and he says can the school top up the donation so they can get better quality equipment? I feel like I should pinch myself. Does this school really exist?
    
    
17. "She's just like a limp pillow," he said. A man complaining to the parents of a 14-year old girl he'd bought in Cambodia that she wasn't affectionate enough in sex.