In my dreams she is running through the jungles...

In respect of the children at Rappha House, I cannot post any photographs of them.

This is a photograph of two children I saw making a sand Angkor Wat at Ta Prohm.

It’s 5 in the morning. I haven’t been able to sleep that well tonight. After my failed attempts at sleeping for the past few hours, I’ve finally decided to enclose myself in the bathroom so that Ican try and write in order to find a bit of peace.

My dreams are haunted by a 13 year old girl who is running through the jungles looking for her mother. She is small from malnourishment, ragged from homelessness, and dirty from the earth that clings to her skin as she tries to hide from people who are hunting her down. Her eyes—red and swollen from crying, are not the eyes of a 13 year old but rather the eyes of a person that wants to die but still clings to a desperate attempt to live because she does not know what else to do. The jungle, swollen with the hot humid heat, swallows her into its safety. She hides behind the strong trunk of a banana tree. Her mind and body, focused on surviving has forgotten for a merciful minute how she ended up in the jungle…

If this were but a dream I would be able to fall back asleep. But this is not a dream. This is the story of Ng (name has been changed), a 16 year old girl that I met yesterday at Rappha House, a safe house for trafficked and sexually abused children.

We sat in a circle in the teacher’s room upstairs from the shelter when the heavy wooden door was pushed open. Ng, a Cambodian girl with a beauty mark on her right cheek, black curly hair that was tied back and a smile with upturned corners that showed slight signs of her mischievous nature, walked in and sat down across from me. I had met her last night when she shyly asked me to sit down next to her during the night’s program and asked me if I would be her bong srei (older sister).

The room, decorated with drawings that the girls at Rappha house made crisscrossed the top of the ceiling and lined parts of the wall. The room, chosen for it’s safe and nurturing feeling, was where I had been granted permission to interview Ng as well as some other girls.

I remember looking down at the page full of questions in my hand, trying to hide my nervousness. I looked up and smiled at her and began the interview.

When Ng was 6 years old she watched as her step-father ripped the gold necklace from her mother’s neck and grabbed a knife to slit her throat. Ng screamed as she threw herself towards her mother to instinctively protect her. Her step-father then ripped her from her mother’s body and beat her until she was unconscious, then took all the money and jewelry from the house and left. Forced to find money in order to eat and feed her four children, Ng’s mother took all of her kids and moved into the city to find a job.

Barely making more than $1 US a day and finding it harder to provide for her children as they grew, Ng’s mother sold her daughter to an elder man so that she would be able to work in his house as a servant. Ng was 7 when she left her family.

When Ng arrived at the elder man’s house, she was scolded by the other servants, slapped around by others living in the house, told that she was worthless and immediately put to work. Her small hands grasped a towel that she dipped into a bucket of soapy water over and over again as she cleaned the floor on her hands and knees. The other servants, unhappy with the amount of time she was taking to mop the floor, came by and hit her over the head whenever they passed by. That first day, she washed the dishes, dried and put them away, swept and mopped the floor again, helped to do the laundry and was told to massage the elder man’s feet.

As I watched Ng tell her story, I noticed that her demeanor had completely changed. She was no longer the happy and mischievous child I had seen walk in the door. Her head, hanging so low that I couldn’t see her face, focused on her hands as she scraped the chipped nail polish off of her fingers. She paused and looked up at me for a second, then averted her eyes and looked back down at her hands and continued to tell us her story.

Later that night, she was woken up and told to go to the elder’s room. She remembers hearing the crickets outside. She remembers the yawn gathering in her mouth and lungs. And then she remembers him grabbing her roughly and tearing her clothes off.

She doesn’t look up. She focuses on her hands and she says, “Koat tva bhap.” He was bad to me.

I notice that I am also staring hard at my hands, ripping the hangnails at my thumbs, stealing glances at her but afraid to make any eye contact. The therapist, breaks me out of my focused silence and tells me, “she was repeatedly raped by this man over a long period of time.”

I look at Ng, 16 but smaller than most 16 year olds I’ve seen. And then try to imagine her being only 7. The image of a much older man forcing himself upon her makes me instantly nauseous and I force the image from my mind so that I can stay present.

Day after day she was beaten and treated like an unwanted dog. Night after night, he raped her, ripping her insides and causing her so much pain that she passed out. I ask her how long she stayed.

“6 years.”

She paused to take a deep breath and rushed through the next part of her story. Someone in the house told her that her mother had moved. Desperate, she ran only with the clothes on her back to the jungle to get away from the man. An older woman took her in and fed her. This woman knew her mom. When Ng asked this woman where her mom was, she told her that her mother had met another man and had moved away with him. When she asked her where she went, the woman said that she did not know. Ng was 13.

Ng told us that she left the woman’s house after a couple of days because she did not want to be a burden. She slept on the jungle ground, ate food from the trash and begged for money. When she had diarrhea, they would not allow her into any restroom, so she went in the river or on the road. Several days later, two young men grabbed her as she was passing them by, pushed her behind a house and raped her.

With another heavy sigh, she told us, “I ran when they were done and I saw a police man. When I ran up to him he told me at first to stop begging. Then he saw that my pants were ripped and there was blood.”

Ng was taken to an emergency shelter and transferred to a NGO in Phnom Penh, where from there she was transferred to Rappha House (the location of Rappha House cannot be disclosed for safety reasons). When she was finished telling her story, a long silence followed. The fan quietly spinning above us now seemed to roar. And again, I noticed that I pulled at the hangnails on my thumbs.

“Tell me what living at Rappha House has been like,” I asked, trying to make a transition from her past to her present.

“La ah.” Good.

When Ng first arrived, she was incredibly small, skin darkened from constant exposure to the elements, and hopelessly depressed. According to the staff, she raised hell, was the unruliest of all and would fall into long periods of deep and utter sadness. At some point during her stay, when she starting making friends with the other 63 girls, started going to school for the first time to read and write Khmer and English, and started trusting adults, she became more stable and felt safe. Ng has been at Rappha House for over a year now and has started vocational training in Rappha’s beauty school program.

When I ask her, “What do you want for your future,” I know that what she wants most is to see the mother and brother and two sisters that she will never see again.

And she, looking at me, knows that I know this, so she smartly says, “I want you to be my bong srei and to become a good hairdresser so that I can do your hair next time you come here.”

Ng has a long way to go. When talking to the director, I found out that because she has no family to go home to (the shelter works with the families of the girls to make sure that the home is safe to return to, often times, Rappha house also works with the family to teach them about sustainable mushroom farming as an economic development project for them) she will stay with Rappha House until they can find a safe and permanent solution for her.

Before I left Rappha House, I gave my San Francisco address to Ng and asked her to be my penpal. She came up to me later on and gave me her favorite piece of jewelry that she had made. The necklace, made of beautiful crystal clear beads and sea shells is in my bag, safely tucked away.

Though I think of her and feel an immense sadness weighing so heavy on my heart that it is difficult to breathe, I know that is because I left Rappha House just half a day ago. Overall, I know that the hardest part is over for her. And that as much as she has gone through, her ability to continually fight to survive and the fact that she can now have a smile on her face, makes me know that she is an incredible survivor.

I hope that Ng writes me. And I know that within the next couple of years, I will make that journey back again to Rappha House in order to see her, with her beautiful necklace around my neck, so that at least she knows, I have not forgotten her.

I don’t think anybody knows what her exit strategy will be when she is ready to leave Rappha House. The organization has only existed since 2003 and has kept every single girl that they’ve been referred to work with who has wanted to stay (almost all the girls who go to Rappha House choose to stay there). They have yet to find a permanent solution for those who have no family.

Whatever ends up happening though, I know that I will stay in touch with her until that point not of return but of new beginnings, and probably afterwards. And I know that the more time I have with her to build a more meaningful relationship, I will no longer be haunted by images of her running through the jungles, but rather by memories of her being happy, healthy and whole.

In my dreams, she is running through the jungle. But I hope that one day she will stop running away from the demons that haunt her and instead, towards the hope that will guide her.