Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Once this initiation was concluded, she would move on to a formulaic system: “I take it in three steps. First, I teach them to forget. We have exercises we do each day, so that each day they can forget a little more of the things they will never forget entirely. During this time, I try to distract them with music, or with embroidery or weaving, with concerts, with an occasional hour of television, with whatever seems to work, whatever they tell me they like. Depression is under the skin, all the surface of the body has the depression just below it, and we cannot take it out; but we can try to forget the depression, even though it is right there.

“When their minds are cleared of what they have forgotten, when they have learned forgetfulness well, I teach them to work. Whatever kind of work they want to do, I will find a way to teach it to them. Some train only to clean houses or take care of children. Others learn skills they can use as they care for orphans, and some begin toward a real profession. They must learn to do these things well and to have pride in them.

“And then when they have mastered work, at last I teach them to love.” I wondered aloud how one teaches such a skill. “Well, I actually teach them that by way of manicures and pedicures,” she said. I raised an eyebrow. “In the camp, I built a sort of lean-to and made it a steam bath, and now in Phnom Penh I have a similar one, a little better built. I take them there so that they can become clean, and I teach them how to give one another manicures and pedicures and how to take care of their fingernails, because doing that makes them feel beautiful, and they want so much to feel beautiful. It also makes them give up their bodies to the care of others. It takes a lot for a woman who has been so wantonly and violently injured to extend her hand or foot, to trust a relative stranger to come at her body with a sharp implement. When they learn not to flinch, it rescues them from physical isolation, and that leads to the breakdown of emotional isolation. While they are together washing and putting on nail polish, they begin to talk, and bit by bit they learn to trust one another, and by the end of it all, they have learned how to make friends, so that they will never have to be so lonely again. Their stories, which they have told to no one but me—they begin to tell those stories to one another.”

Phaly Nuon showed me the tools of her psychologist’s trade: the little bottles of colored enamel, the steam room, the sticks for pushing back cuticles, the emery boards, the towels. Grooming is one of the primary forms of socialization among primates, and this return to grooming as a socializing force among human beings struck me as curiously organic. When I remarked on that, she laughed and told me about monkeys she had seen in the jungle. Perhaps they, too, were learning to love, she remarked. I told her that I thought it was difficult to teach ourselves or others how to forget, how to work, and how to love and be loved, but she said it was not so complicated if you could do those three things yourself. She told me about how the women she has treated have become a community, and about how well they do with the orphans now in their care.

“There is a final step,” she said to me after a long pause. “At the end, I teach them the most important thing. I teach them that these three skills—forgetting, working, and loving—are not three separate skills, but part of one enormous whole, and that it is the practice of these things together, each as part of the others, that makes a difference. It is the hardest thing to convey”—she laughed—“but they all come to understand this, and when they do—why, then they are ready to go into the world again.”

Phaly Nuon died on November 27, 2012, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. Her funeral took place over seven days and was attended by thousands of people, many of whom had been children at her Future Light Orphanage. Hundreds of children who lived there mourned her as their mother.

The situation of the mentally ill in Cambodia is still bleak, and continues to be aggravated by forced displacement and human trafficking. PTSD is ubiquitous. The suicide rate is nearly three times the world average. Yet despite the citizens’ fragile mental health, the care system is abysmal; roughly one in three mentally ill people is kept in a cage or tied down with chains. Most mentally ill Cambodians neither seek nor receive help. Only 0.02 percent of the Cambodian health budget goes to mental health. Only the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital provides inpatient treatment, and Cambodia has a mere thirty-five trained psychiatrists to serve a population of 15 million. In the spring of 2015, one Cambodian province proposed that mentally ill people be rounded up, sent to pagodas, and cared for by monks to recover their “beauty and order.”

MONGOLIA

The Open Spaces of Mongolia

Travel + Leisure, July 1999