Funeral and a birth

The chanting of the monks, echoes from the loud speaker through the dark. A young man has died in a motorcycle accident and the funeral is very close to the house where I am staying.  

They began to sing yesterday as we were sharing an evening meal.  These were sweet, traditional songs that, even without being able to understand their meaning, were full of tender memories and love for family.  I had seen the pagado being constructed, on the street, as we walked home from the clinic.  Beneath the golden pagoda, a tent of silk where the young man rested.  The structure  was covered with small, twinkling lights and was taller than the houses and small shops that make up the center of the village.  A sound system on a truck was parked in the street. A large flowered tent was put up as a gathering place for family and friends.  The translators said we could go but I felt that it was not right but perhaps again, it was wrong not to have gone.

Despite the sweetness of the music, the twinkling lights and soft silk I lie there quietly horrified that he will be burnt on the street just outside my window.  In my country, we send our dead off and they they come back to us in small cardboard boxes full of ashes for us to scatter or bury as we wish.  My own relatives seeming to have sat in cupboards or on windowsills for some years before returning to the earth.   We did not sit and pray with them all night long as the fire burnt and the smoke rose up through the pagoda to the heavens.   Crematoriums are tucked away in buildings and not put on public streets.   I want to ask how this is possible but I am afraid to be disrespectful.  I know I must just wait and be a part of the night, as everyone else is.

I had just caught a sweet baby boy and the midwives from the health center have come to wash  at the guesthouse.  They had watched as his motorcycle hit the wall of the temple next door and said that his brother who had been riding behind him had held his head with one hand and called his mother with the other as people ran to help.  They said he was a tall, handsome boy who was well loved by all.    They show me the place he hit he the wall.

I go to bed early, as I do, and sleep for some time before there is a burst of traditional Khmer music played on a marimba like instrument. There are bursts of fireworks and then a great pouring of liquid.   It is quiet and then another firework and another bucket of liquid.  This goes on for some time as I lie in the dark and listen.  Each burst and each throwing of the liquid seeming so sad, so final, so sacred.   When this is over the music resumes.  It seems a music of great joy as if the spirit is being released to a better place.  

It is quiet then and I sigh. It is over.   But here it is dawn now and the monks have begun to chant again.  I wonder if this means it is all over. The body is gone and his spirit is free.  They say his mother paid someone to find out where his spirit had gone and was told he went far  away and is not close by. 

In the village, the work of the day blends with the passing of one spirit and the welcoming of another.    A mother in the health center gives birth to a new baby boy, the morning fires are started for noodles and farmers prepare to take their cows to pasture. 

Each person passes by the pagoda on their way to school or work or to the market.  They rise and sleep with the sounds of the temple and the chanting of the monks.

I take my tea and walk by.  The box still glows a soft, golden orange.   The chairs in the tent ate scattered in small clusters and there is the cleaning up of a great party.  A few workmen begin to take down the silk and the pieces of pagoda. 

In the dark of early morning, a new baby fills its lungs with the air of his country and cries as he is placed upon his mother who rests here on the earth.  The air he is born into is warm and damp with the rains that come each year to flood the rice fields. The smell of fires, lit to keep away the mosquitoes and cook the meals fills his lungs as he breathes his first breath.  

The translator tells me that they will open the box and gather his bones and place them in a bag.   Some will be thrown in a lake or river to help the spirit find a cool resting place and others will be put in a small jar at a temple.  The family will visit this place and tend to it on special holidays.   

I look back and the pagoda is gone.  I turn and go to the health center where the baby lies beside the mother.  They say he cried al night and so I help him to his mother’s breast. 

I hold the baby as they climb onto the motorcycle; grandma, papa, mama and baby.   When I walk home the place of the grand pagoda is a simple shop on the street with a home up above. 

Since that morning, I have gone to sleep and woken to the sounds of souls passing through this world.  It is, I have come to see, the sounds of morning; like birds, the roosters crowing, the baby crying and the farmers going to the fields with their cows.   It is, in this country, never far away.

I, who have felt babies grow within me and have felt a thousand mother’s bellies grow round with new life have lived in the absence of these sound.   In the night, the work of a mother’s pregnancy, her work to feed and raise that child and make him new clothes for school reverses itself and turns to smoke above us.   The people  breathe him in, drink the water of a million bones and listen each day to the chants that will one day mark their own departure.  

The rains come and flood the rice fields. Children fish in small ponds as women gather grass for the cows. Soon the rainy season will pass and the rice will grow brown and be dried on mats by the side of the road.   The baby, born in the rainy season, will take his first steps surrounded by the people of his village who clap and sing while far away the monks chant at daybreak for another passing spirit.

Angel Houses

Outside each house is a small house for the spirit who protects and blesses the house.  Some are large and new and  brightly painted while others are old and carefully crafted with soft, faded colors.  In front of other homes they are constructed of left over building materials; a piece of board and sheet metal.   Often they sit within a small pool where cress is grown and a few small fish swim.  They are tended each day with water, incense and perhaps some fruit or flower.  

I ask if the spirit belongs to the family or to the house and they say, “the house.”    We go to a very poor family’s house to do a home visit. The father is blind and the carefully woven walls of the home are hung with plastic.  He says he cannot see to climb the tree and pick the leaves.

Inside the brother, who does not go to school, because he has no bicycle and the school is too far away, kisses his new baby sister.   The older sister has gone to work in the factories and so this is the family’s hope.

I walk around and around the yard.  There are no great clay jugs to collect water in the rainy season or large fruit tree or cow.   It is empty and there is no angel house.  This worries me but then I see around the house are branches of a tree with a special berry left to bless and protect even this humble home. 

We have left food but the one platform is so small, that first I and then the father sit on the eggs.  The boys and his mother laugh and say they will eat them for lunch.  They are in a plastic bag so it does not matter.   The baby smiles at her brother with bright, eager eyes.   We all laugh and admire this lovely baby.

As we walk down the path, I believe we all offer a simple blessing within our hearts and minds for this small home at the end of a small path off a small, red clay road in Cambodia.

Cambodia- while I was becoming a midwife and mother

While I was becoming a mother

I was not present at the birth of all of my children.  It is true that I carried some inside me and pushed them out in a state of trance like ecstasy and held them to my breast for many years as they learned to first walk  into the world.  These children, with skin and features like my own were born of a long line of ancestors who they themselves had wandered the world as hunters, gatherers, immigrants and later farmer, merchant and soldier

As a midwife, I would say to women in labor, “all over the world women are giving birth just like you. “  I liked to say this as a way of providing some sort of universal support for her efforts but I had no idea what that meant I remembered feeling the mother spirit with me at my own births; that feeling of a hundred million mothers all over the world whispering welcome in the air around me.

I first pushed a baby out into the world in the spring of 1970.   My college years had been marked with protests against the Vietnam War and a few days after the birth, before my milk had fully come in, protestors were killed at nearby Kent State University and the word Cambodia came into focus for many people in the United States.   I was a new, young mother with very few resources and no idea what I should do.   I was no longer free to move about and protest.  I was a mother and this new baby needed tending.   I had no television or internet and so what I knew was spotty at best.  Still I was firmly opposed to the bombing of Cambodia even if I had no idea what I was talking about or what was being bombed. I lumped Vietnam and Cambodia together with no idea how very different their leaders were.  

My oldest Cambodian son was born in 1963.  I was a freshman in high school and President Kennedy had just been assassinated.  He was born in the province where I am staying now in Cambodia.  We drive by the burnt down frame of a house where his father was a tailor;  a home they shared with many people  on the way to the mountain top temples.  Behind it is a lake and flooded lands where he too fished and caught crabs for an afternoon snack.  At the time of his birth,  the Cuban incident and bomb shelters and Sputnik were all on the minds of my country.  We were taught the domino theory without exactly being taught that the French had already used this to capture one Indochinese country after the other including Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.   The people there were already weary of western colonization and the constant threats from Thailand, China and Vietnam over land and resources.    Countries who had fought for centuries became allies against US forces. By the time of Kent State and the time of my first birth,  my son in Cambodia was fleeing his rural province and moving to Phnom Penh.    His province, like many, were being taken over by the Khmer Rogue.   All over the country small villages were already being terrorized by the local cells of Phal Pot.  

In 1970, the year I first gave birth, the United States and south Vietnam invaded southern Cambodia to drive out the Khmer Rogue under the leadership of General Lon Noi who had overthrown pro Communist president ( and former King )    The former movie star king went to China where he and the Chinese government supported the Khmer Rogue.  Decades before we  would hear about Phal Pot marching into Phnom Penh, my Cambodian children were packing up and fleeing the Khmer Rogue as well as US bombs.   They ran, like thousands of other Cambodian families from place to place leaving work, homes and a way of life behind.

In 1973, my daughter was born in the north near the Ho Chi Minh trail.  Her house was spared the bombs but it is surrounded by the burnt down skeletons of trees hit by bombs.   The red clay pots of her mother’s bean sprout business that were quickly left behind, remain where she left them in the back yard.  

I had not understood that the Vietcong and the Khmer Rogue had become partners against the United States and when we stopped fighting the Vietcong and all our troops came home, we left my children to the Khmer Rogue who killed their parents and grandparents and most of their brothers and sisters. 

In the time they were running around the jungle trying to survive, I like many protesters in the US had retreated.  I started a rural commune dedicated to social change and simple living.  I volunteered in the local prison, worked to support farm workers and became a Head Start director.   We told ourselves that the problem had been that we had not figured out how to live ourselves and then had interfered in southeast Asia.  We grew organic food and started food co-ops.  I sewed clothing from old bed spreads and we all started to recycle. 

In 1975, when my daughter was just three, a friend told me that the Khmer Rogue had invaded Cambodia and was forcing everyone out of the city.  I always remembered that I was kneeling down and planting seeds and I looked up and shrugged.  If they wanted to become a rural, peasant society that was their right.  I cringe when I think of that moment. I did not stand up or go to town and buy a paper.  I planted my garden and later made bread while my children were being taken by train to the north; separated from their families, starved and constantly presented with the possibility of being killed.

In 1977, when I had my second baby at home, Phal Pot had become the prime minister and it would be still another year before Vietnam would invade and stop the war.  At that time, I was a Head Start director and was coming to understand Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.  My focus was on a poor New Jersey neighborhood and the mothers who drank when they were pregnant and whose children were so wounded by the time they made their way to our center.   In this way I began to consider pregnancy and birth and to attend births with the mothers there and to begin my path to being a midwife.  

By the time my third baby was born, Phal Pot and the Khmer Rogue had fled to China and Thailand and the northern regions of Cambodia.  Famine spread throughout the country.   My children, orphaned, made their way to Thailand, over land mines and without food, to the refugee camps where they lived and one day were put on a plane and sent to me where they joined the children I had given birth to as well as other children of that war to make a big, crazy, loving, wounded, smart, ball bouncing, rice cooking family.  

In those days I was a busy midwife, soccer coach and mother.  I listed to their stories but in time they faded as they learned English, played soccer, did homework, got their first jobs, fell in love and started their own families. 

It would be many years, many books and several trips to Camboda before I could begin to comprehend their childhoods. Every mother wants to protect their children.   From the moment they first kick, within us, we feel waves of warmth and care, but I sit here 40 years later and  think where was I and what was I doing while these now grown children were running around this country trying to survive the very people who I had, with so much ignorance supported.  Why was it such a mess? 

People say all the time, “ why didn’t anyone help them or stop the Khmer Rogue?”  I say that I am sorry and that I think we were just tired of war and thought communism in Vietnam was the same as Cambodia.  We retreated into creating ecological life styles and things like daycare, women’s rights and better food systems.  I try to say that many of us cared but were self absorbed and did not want to know what we felt we had no control over.  

It does not seem a very good excuse for the world letting millions of people die.  Phal Pot lived in a jungle retreat, supported by Thailand and China, for another twenty years without ever going to trial.  In that time, I caught hundreds and hundred of sweet, bright eyed babies and placed them in the arms of good and loving mothers. I was midwife to my grand children and to my friends children.  It was a good life but one day I said I would return and look at what I had not looked at before. 

I try to say that when you are a mother your first job is to raise those children and care for that community.   I say this in part because I believe it and part as a way of excusing myself for not protecting my children in Cambodia; for not taking care of them when they were so young.   For adding my voice to the voice that said don’t bomb Cambodia when I had no idea those bombs, however poorly executed, were for the already ruthless Khmer Rogue.  I was raised a Quaker and a pacifist.  I am not sure, all these years later, what the solution was but only that I did not know enough.

I talk with an old friend who describes his years of acid dropping, pot smoking stupor.   Everyone was calling for people to “drop out.”    We were advised to leave other countries to care for themselves and go get high on a porch in the country.  

But in 1980, my then husband and I, guided by the spirits they so believe in, here in Cambodia, agreed to become parents to the orphaned children of that war.   It has taken me a long time to return to the places of their birth and to allow myself to understand what happened both in Cambodia and in my own life.  

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It must be the strangest thing to be a child in a refugee camp and through a random selection end up with one family over another. They try to explain to their relatives that they are going to drop  me off and I am going to teach midwifery skills to people in the small, rural villages of Cambodia.   They are grown now with successful careers and families.    I say, “I  was not there when you took your first breath, when your parents were killed and so I offer this very small, simple gift to the children of that war of my youth; the war that defined my generation and my family.   

Every mountain has a song

“Every mountain sings its own song”

They tell me, on this journey through Cambodia, that every mountain, has a song.   I walk amongst these mountains with the large, extended family that has wrapped their arms around me and made me their own.  We travel throughout the country, picking up cousins and aunts and uncles who walk with us for some days and then leave again.  Many years ago, a daughter and son, who survived Phal Pot, walked out of these jungles and made their way to Thailand’s refugee camps and to my family.   Now I walk with them, visiting ancient temples and sacred pools, telling stories and offering prayers. 

It is the rainy season and everywhere there is the great flooding of the Mekong River.   It is green and I can see that the people go out in the rice fields to catch fish and small animals for their noon meal.  The roots of the lotus flowers are picked and eaten.    The houses, sitting on stilts, have known many other rainy seasons and many other times of flooding.    The front yards are filled with a rich wetland garden of lotus flower, cress and other green things.   The children cast nets and wade waist deep to catch the fish they prepare for the dry times.   I had not understood what it meant to live within a wetland or a place of seasonal floods.  By the time I was born, in my country, they were filled in and the streams dammed.   We called then swamps and did not hold them in any regard.   The first people of my country also waded out and picked the roots of the wapato and caught small fish for dinner.  They too lived within the bounty of the rainy season and the food it brought. 

The first people of my country have said that, like the mountain, we are all born with a song.  I hear this song each time I touch a newborn baby.  I feel the warm water of birth; the waters that carried and nourished the baby as it is washed to earth; in the time when we hear the song of the mother and baby being sung together.

In the mountains the monks of a thousand years ago, carved Buddha resting out of rock.   They are large and tangled in the roots of trees and others are small; tucked beneath small caves overlooking the valleys and rivers below.   Sweet, lovely resting Buddha with a soft smile on his face.  Resting there through war and peace, as pilgrims, like us, made their way up paths and stairs to this place of renewal.  We walk there; stopping often to pray with the few monks that still reside in these far away places.   Money is left on plates, baskets and pools. Incense is lit.   We touch the ancient rocks and think of the monks, whose carvings merged into meditation in a timeless tradition of emptiness and acceptance.   The place women have gone, in their hearts, during birth since time began.

After the long walk back to the closest village, we eat amongst the trees a fine meal prepared by a family who lives there.  We watch them catch a chicken or bring a fish from the river. Beneath each mountain temple, there are places to rest on bamboo mats and enjoy a meal or sleep in hammocks strung between bamboo poles.   In these times, I visit with the children and talk with the women about their births and their babies; about life for them in this place.    My son translates for me as I listen to their stories. They tell me of the women who have died and the babies; they touch my aging skin with tenderness and ask me questions about their health.  I look in their eyes and  see there the spirit of the Buddha; carved into every mother’s face.

Soon the meal will be over and my big family will climb into the van.   We bow with our hands together, a sign that means the heart in me touches the heart in you. 

An uncle begins to softly sing a song he knew as a child; a song from long ago before Phal Pot; a time before they ran and hid in the temples on a mountain top looking for safety.   The time when my children were born and their mothers were alive and the rainy season flooded the rice fields bringing abundance to a grateful and peaceful people. 

These children of mine, from this land, grew up in my  home where their strange, new American mother was midwife.   And so this big caravan of extended family who in turn adopted me, drops me off at a guest house in Takao to work with the midwives of Cambodia.  We all wave and they promise to return in three weeks to pick me and take me to Vietnam where I will work with midwives there.   Lee Hai we call and I throw kisses, American style and they throw them back to me.

I was raised a Quaker and we were taught to look for that of God in everyone; to look for that song given to us at birth as the waters of the changing seasons wash over and nurture us.   As they drive away, I go inside and sit and listen about birth in Cambodia; thankful for my week amongst the mountain temples of Cambodia and all the blessings offered me and yet to come.