Thicker than Blood - Orphans of Cambodia’s AIDS epidemic form their own loving family

[groovedaddy]

The Wat Opot community is in rural Cambodia, tucked amid rice fields and villages, about an hour south of Phnom Penh. I am going there to join a group of children and adults who came together to find the safety, love, and acceptance that many of us long for in our natural families.

I’ve come as a volunteer from the United States to live with children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic that has raged in the country since the 1990s. The infection rate here is among the highest in Asia: some 130,000 out of a population of 14 million. Approximately one-third of new cases are among children born to HIV-infected mothers. Interventions that can virtually eliminate transmission to newborns exist, but only some 30 percent of mothers deliver in health care facilities.

Arriving at Wat Opot, dusty from my travels and apprehensive, I am greeted first by Mr. Tia. He is 8 years old. He runs out from the crowd of children, with an enormous toothless grin, and throws his arms around my knees. My heart is his. My uneasiness vanishes. The children help me unpack and settle in, fascinated by my First World necessities, searching my bundles and pockets for toys and candy.

After dinner, everyone walks slowly toward the pa cha, the crematorium, for the brief memorial service that is held there every evening. Back in Phnom Penh, I visited Tuol Sleng, the prison where the Khmer Rouge tortured thousands during the Cambodian genocide. The faces of the lost stared back at me from walls covered in grainy prison photographs. Here, the walls also are covered with portraits, but instead of prison numbers, there are people’s names and the dates they perished of AIDS. And here are stories, remembered and retold, because the dead are family to the living.

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