To the Devil a Daughter (part 2)
Can you imagine an alien beaming down and inviting you to travel in his spaceship to his planet? Only if you really can do that, can you begin to empathise with the poor silent lamb. Being taken by a foreigner was just the beginning. She’d never ridden in a motor vehicle before – after feeling confused, scared and queasy for an hour, she final threw up as I held her head out of the taxi window. By this time she was suffering sensory overload as she took in her first sights of city life.
Getting from the market to home, I felt like a proper Cambodian with four of us (motodop, myself, wife and kid) riding a small motorbike through the flooded roads. At home I immediately realised, as I noted her reactions, that she’d never seen a television, fridge, cooker, settee, bed, toilet, fork – you name it. It really was like taking Tarzan or Mowgli out of the jungle, or that true-life story of the Cambodian jungle girl from earlier this year. With the combination of sensory overload, travel sickness and malnutrition, she understandably couldn’t eat.
We took her to the orphanage. I asked the director and his wife if they could help us to settle the child. They have the experience of taking 26 kids from similar backgrounds and turning them into happy, healthy, well-adjusted children; I wanted them to help us achieve the same with this little girl and allow her to socialise with the other kids. Without the slightest hesitation they agreed to everything and more.
She’ll primarily stay at the orphanage and go to school with the rest (although she’ll be starting in grade one), but I’ll be paying all expenses and she’ll stay with us when we have time. A couple of days later a form was filled out and thumb-printed by the gran. For a price about the same as that of the book I bought, officially she was adopted by the orphanage to ensure no officials got whiff of a foreigner involved and came demanding tea money (given that we’re not taking her out of the country, the technicalities are unimportant), but the families, community and orphanage are of the view that My wife and I are her adoptive parents.
I have friends in the West who have adopted children. Taking many months, they spend thousands of dollars and go through bureaucratic mazes to complete the process. For me, the process was quicker, easier and even cheaper than buying that book. On the one hand, between my wife, her family and community, and the grandmother and her community, not a second was required for reflection; on the other hand, the managers of the orphanage did not hesitate for one moment either. You might wonder if I shouldn’t have put more thought into the matter, but I’m not so sure.
Half the babies in the world are made in the midst of drunken fumbles, so what’s the big deal about planning families? I think that for us it was always going to be a question of ‘when’, not ‘if’. And sure, what with me buying land and all, I’m a bit broke right now, but given that the lass and her gran were surviving on a budget of less than a dollar a week, it would be kind of obscene to justify to myself that we couldn’t afford to take care of her. Word will out and I expect I’ll be bombarded with similar requests by destitute mothers and grandmothers; we’ll have to draw a line and it will be painful, but I’ve done it before. Right now my in-laws are happy, wife is delirious and the wee girl will quickly settle into her new life and thrive. I call that a result.
Although people here talk about our adopting (her grandmother is telling the whole community about her granddaughter’s ‘papa’), I guess the nearest English equivalent is that I’m sponsoring the child – I’d say it’s somewhere between the two, but quite where on the scale will only gradually become evident. I think that the bottom line is that I’d be quite happy for her to live with us and be legally adopted by us, but it is very much in her (at least short-term) interest that the orphanage takes full control given their experience and success; what’s best for her is really the only consideration.
Sralang Apsara
