Thicker than Blood

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Now, leaving my side, Tia takes his mother’s urn from a glass case. He holds it out so I can see and says simply, “Mama.” He smiles his vast, guileless smile, and I get the sense that he is introducing us. Through the unthinkable pathos of this moment, there is also sweetness. This little man knows just where to find his mother and wants to introduce her to his new friend.

If it seems incomprehensible that a small boy could find solace with his mother’s ashes, consider this: It is his only connection to something that, by any stretch of the imagination, could be called his own.

Sixty-four children like Tia currently live at Wat Opot. Twenty-three are HIV-positive; the rest have been orphaned by AIDS. They live with two dozen HIV-positive adults. Each story here begins with profound loss, for these are the poorest of the poor, the outcasts of their society, the throwaways. Whether, as is common, the virus was brought home to a poor or middle-class agrarian family by a husband who had sex with a prostitute, or was caught by a woman forced into the sex trade by poverty, the result is the same. Neighbors, even families, in terror and ignorance, may well ostracize the infected, stone them, or worse.

The seeds of Wat Opot were sown in 2000, when Wayne, a medic in the Vietnam War who had returned to Southeast Asia to work with street children, met Vandin San, a quietly charismatic young Cambodian man working for a Catholic relief organization. In 2001 they formed the nonsectarian organization Partners in Compassion, and building on land donated by a Buddhist pagoda named Wat Opot, they opened a small clinic and hospice. They trained home care teams to travel through villages teaching about AIDS, bringing medical care, food, and emotional support. So it went for several years, as hundreds of people were nursed and died and were given funerals. The picture changed radically in 2003, when Medecins Sans Frontieres—Doctors Without Borders—began distributing antiretroviral drugs. Wat Opot evolved from a hospice for the dying into a vibrant community where children with and without the virus eat, sleep, and play together as family.

The facility is virtually unique in Cambodia and in other places where segregation of HIV-positive children is common. For the children themselves, and as an example for the rest of us, the benefits are profound. Here, they are hugged, wrestled with, teased, taught, challenged, encouraged, and loved. Most of all, they are accepted into the human family, not merely warehoused in orphanages. Adoptions are rare and not sought after. Wayne explains, “I don’t want the ones who aren’t adopted, the older ones, those with AIDS, the ones who maybe aren’t as pretty, to feel left behind. They’ve had enough rejection. I want the kids to think of this as their family, a place to come home to.”

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