The Healing Fields

KAMPONG CHNANG, Cambodia - One woman hopes to escape her past. The other is running from a dangerous future.

But on this rain-soaked November evening as they arrive at Setan and Randa Lee's women's center, they face only a warm welcome. The most difficult choice Nane Chan and Son Put must make tonight is to pick a bunk bed in a dormitory.

Setan and pastor Hoeun Lao have brought the women from a town a five-hour drive away. Nane and Son had showed up unannounced at a brothel where the Christian ministers were negotiating a failed bid to buy six prostitutes' freedom. The two women had asked to come to the center.

Director Phally Mam, 49, and manager Lyn Kit, 23, greet them. Son is curious and asks questions, while Nane is quiet, wary, frowning. Her face is puffy, and she looks exhausted.

In one of the two dormitories, Nane sits on the bed with the director as they chat quietly.

"If you have any needs here, you just ask Lyn or me," Phally says. "If you're sick, just let us know. There's no need to hide anything."

Phally doesn't push for information. Tonight is for introductions, a bath to wash off the long day. And sleep.

For now, Phally invites Nane and Son to meet the students, who have gathered in the other dorm after dinner and evening devotions.

Among these 24 who have been at the center since early fall, there are, for the first time in the center's history, no prostitutes. Recruited from remote villages, they appeared to be at high risk of turning to prostitution if they didn't learn a trade. Most are illiterate and unskilled. Many have parents who are ill or dead.

Nane stands silently against a wall, arms crossed, as the women tease each other and giggle, looking shyly her way, interested in their new classmate. They welcome Son, too, who is eager to join in.

The students invite Nane and Son to watch television in Phally's room. Nane sits a little apart, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette.

Smoking is prohibited, but Phally keeps quiet. She knows when to enforce a rule and when to let it go.

Days begin early for women

Mornings begin in the gray light before dawn at the New Development Center.

The simple tan buildings, with their high ceilings and large windows, are cool and inviting.

In addition to the two dorms, there is a building with a kitchen and dining hall. The two-story main building houses classrooms and offices. Construction has begun on another dormitory-classroom building and a two-story guesthouse.

An old-fashioned school bell clangs at 5 a.m., some days awakening even the roosters.

The students rise sleepily from their bunk beds. It's not long before they are running laps, giggling and racing each other, their flip-flops slapping the dirt. After five, maybe six times around the grounds, they wash up, clean their rooms, straighten the bamboo mats on their bunk beds, sweep and mop the floors.

Cambodian pop music floats from a CD player as the sun comes up.

Dogs bark.

At 6:15, precisely, the bell rings again for devotion in the dining hall, where the women take turns reading Bible verses in Khmer from the podium as the others follow along. The cook takes a brief break from her breakfast chores to join them in prayer. They sing as Phally prays, head uplifted, eyes closed, arms outstretched, palms facing toward heaven.

Sometimes their songs compete with music from loudspeakers at a Buddhist temple down the road.

For most of these young women raised as Buddhists - if they were raised with any religion at all - this is their first experience with Christianity. Randa and Setan say the students are "encouraged" but not required to attend the daily devotions and Bible study.

"I want them to have a life of Christ, but I don't want to force them to believe what I believe," Randa says. "I just want to give them the option."

The religious study also is part of the discipline of the day's schedule, she says. "We want to teach them to learn to obey the rules and regulations of the school."

Sometimes Setan teases the young women who don't go to devotion. "But they get shy and say they want to take a nap or talk to each other. So we don't make them go.

"We do share with them. And we tell them that whatever happens, God will protect them and provide for them. He will give them comfort and peace."

The devotion completed, the women quickly turn their makeshift chapel into a dining room again, carrying steaming bowls of chicken soup from the primitive kitchen. The cook works magic on a two-burner portable gas stove. Electricity runs from a generator, but only from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., so there's not even a refrigerator.

The women eat quickly without much chatter.

They are in their classrooms at 7:30 a.m.

Overcoming a hard life

The morning after Son and Nane arrive, Phally seeks out each of them to learn their backgrounds.

As she makes her way through the day, she jokes with the students, comforts a puppy that had been attacked by a larger dog, consoles a young woman worried about her family and admonishes another who hasn't completed a chore. She dresses professionally in crisp blouses and skirts, and she passes hugs around at will.

She's learned to be patient, and the women almost always wind up confiding in her.

Nane, 26, says her hard life started early. The youngest of seven, she was barely a toddler when her mother left her father for another man. Nane stayed with her father, helping him tend their cows.

"I was 5 years old when I started smoking," she says to explain her persistent cough. "I'd herd the cows and smoke."

She never attended school. "My father couldn't afford it."

She grew into a big-boned woman, lacking the delicacy of many Cambodian women. Married briefly at 16, she had a baby who died two days after it was born.

When her father died five years ago, Nane went to live with her mother, but she didn't stay for long.

"My stepfather was very cruel. He beat my mother," Nane says. "The only time he was nice to me is when he wanted money."

Nane eked out a living doing odd jobs. But she couldn't do much. Something had happened to her left arm after she had her baby, leaving her left hand paralyzed. She couldn't afford to see a doctor.

The paralysis makes any type of labor difficult.

She talked to a friend from her village who worked in a brothel in Kampong Thom. "I never wanted to be a prostitute," Nane says. "But how can I eat if I don't do something to earn a living?"

In some respects, the brothel wasn't a bad place. She got along with the other women. The owner didn't force anything on her.

She sometimes made 20,000 riel, about $5, in a day. She gave half to the owner and kept the occasional tips of 50 or 75 cents.

Sometimes, though, she made nothing. Nane squirms a little. "I didn't make a lot of money because sometimes when a man told me to take off my clothes, he'd see my hand. It would disgust him and he'd leave."

When she heard about the women's center, she saw a chance at a new beginning. She owed no money to the brothel, so she just walked away.

Running from slavery

Son Put didn't walk away. She ran for dear life.

When the 19-year-old showed up at the brothel in Kampong Thom, she had only recently escaped from another brothel nearby where she had been locked up for a day and a half.

She had gone to the first brothel because a friend said her boss needed someone to do housecleaning, and Son was desperate to help her parents, who were scraping by as farm laborers.

But Son learned she had been sold to the brothel owner, who locked her in a room and tried to force her to put on makeup and dress up. She refused.

Luckily for Son, a prostitute unlocked her door and helped her escape.

Son then cooked and cleaned for a family in exchange for room and board, but no pay. Later, a brothel owner in Kampong Thom offered to hire her to cook. But cooks aren't merely cooks for long at brothels.

Son had heard about a group of Christian ministers who helped women, and when she saw Setan at Polly Chan's brothel, she asked to go with them to the center.

Polly, watching Son climb into Setan's truck to head for the center, had remarked wryly: "There's a fish that got away."

"I want to work, but I don't have any skills," says Son, who never finished first grade. "I don't want to be a prostitute."

A taste of learning

Son and Nane must choose whether to join the sewing or cosmetology classes.

Upstairs in the sewing classrooms, a few of the 16 women in the class work at the manual sewing machines, while others sit on the balcony sewing hems on pant legs or watching their instructor fix an incorrectly cut sleeve. One young woman irons a hem with an ancient-looking iron.

Son and Nane decide to attend the cosmetology class downstairs. Phally joins them.

Bible verses in Khmer decorate the otherwise stark white walls. The women take turns doing each other's hair and makeup and nails in front of the mirrors at the carved wood tables. Randa bought all the equipment. Most of the supplies are donated. The women work quietly, coaxing neat sections of hair onto rollers, patting on foundation or applying eye shadow or nail polish.

With experienced students guiding her, Son puts Nane's hair in rollers, then combs it out and watches intently as a student shows her how to roll up the sides. When Nane disappears to take a nap, Son gets the full treatment: hair, makeup and a manicure.

Phally praises Son as a quick study.

"She's doing really well, better than the others when they first started."

Son says she'd like to have her own shop and do makeup for weddings. She already seems more carefree, hopeful. She's making friends. "I like it here," she says. "Everyone is doing things. It makes me happy."

But Nane is worried. "I'm afraid I won't be able to do anything because of my hand. I can't use it at all," she says, struggling just to lift her arm to her chest. "I'm afraid I won't be able to do the course."

Chattering young women

When classes are over at 4:30, the women have free time - to do laundry, sit and talk, perhaps bathe in one of the secluded areas outside where they scoop water from a large clay pot. There are no showers or tubs.

The plumbing is minimal. Each dormitory has a squat toilet. A separate building houses a couple of others.

Many of the women are in their late teens, but they tease and play as younger girls do: grimacing in mock horror at each other's armpits, squealing and running from a pair of ill-tempered geese. They feed the small monkey that Phally keeps tied to a rope near her room. (She had set it free, but the monkey came back to her.)

Some of the women gather on the steps outside with Nane and Son. When someone discovers that Nane might have lice, a young woman offers to pick through her hair. Phally joins them to find out a little more about the new students.

Phally says later that she is concerned about Nane. "She's having a hard time. Son is reaching out, and it's easier for her to meet the girls than it is for Nane."

After dinner, the women help wash the dishes and clean up. At 7, they line up chairs in the dining hall and divide into teams for devotion, taking turns at the podium as those who can read follow along in the Bibles they share, all under Phally's watchful eye. They stand and recite the Lord's Prayer in Khmer.

With devotion over, they put away the chairs and straggle off to their dorms, wash their hair or crowd into Phally's room for TV before going to bed.

At night, two male guards take turns patrolling the center until dawn. A 10-foot-high concrete wall helps keep out intruders, too.

Because of the stigma attached to prostitutes, the center keeps a low profile. It's one reason for the intentionally vague name: The New Development Center.

The area is sparsely populated, but it's inevitable that word gets out.

"The community looks down on these girls," Setan says.

The concern for their safety is real.

Not long after the center opened, a gang of men with guns broke in, dragged some of the women outside and raped them.

"One of the women had AIDS," Setan says. His voice hardens a little. "She died . . . "

Living for the successes

By late November, Setan has returned to Aurora and Randa makes her first visit to the women's center in two years.

Randa learns from the staff that Nane had grown increasingly uncomfortable in her first few weeks there.

Nane complained constantly that she was ill. She insisted that she had malaria, but when Lyn took her to the hospital, the doctors found nothing.

Nane smoked all the time, despite the no-smoking rule. She refused to eat with the others. She didn't want to get up and go to class.

Every morning, she asked the staff and other students for money.

By the time Randa arrived, Nane had run away.

Staff members found her where they often find runaway prostitutes - back at the brothel she had left.

Randa is frustrated, a little fed up. How do you help somebody who doesn't want or know how to help herself?

"I want to make sure all the girls have the right care. I want to make sure we don't favor some girls over others.

"Some girls need more help. Some are lazy. Some don't know how to do anything.

"I want them to learn to take initiative. They have to learn how to solve problems, to make the right decisions."

But Randa doesn't allow herself disappointment. As she has done her entire life, she pins her hopes on the successes. "With the small amount of resources we have, at least we saved some lives," she says.

Sharing a dark secret

Although Son loves the center, she weeps every night at first, worried about how her parents are surviving without her help.

She grows frustrated when the more advanced tasks don't come easily to her.

"She's slower than the rest of the girls," Randa says. "She's depressed because she can't learn as quickly. But she started later than the rest of them."

To reassure her that her parents are surviving, Randa and the staff take her home to her village on Christmas Day. "They were surprised and happy to see her," Randa says. "She told us they wanted her to go back to the center and learn some skills."

But even after her visit home, she cries constantly.

In early January, Randa comes home to Aurora, and Setan returns to Cambodia. When he sees Son again, she tells Setan that she wants to go home, that her parents need her.

Finally, Setan learns that Son has harbored a dark secret.

Son's original story that a friend tricked her into the brothel was a lie.

"We learned that Son had been sold by her parents," Setan says. "Probably for $40 or $50.

"These girls are so innocent, so naïve. They have no idea they have to become prostitutes. They only know they have to make money to help their families."

Setan spends some time with Son, trying to help her make a good decision.

You can go back to be with your parents, but what is your plan to make an income? Setan asks Son.

She tells him she doesn't have a plan.

How will you make money to support your family?

Son starts to cry. She doesn't know.

Setan is frank: If you go back, you could end up being a prostitute. If you stay, your parents won't get any money while you're here. But they've survived so far. They can survive a little longer.

If you stay, you will learn a skill, then you will be able to make money.

Son decides to stay.

Setan hopes she will learn sewing and be part of his new plan for teams of young women to work in garment factories.

And Son thrives. She smiles and seems more at peace now, Setan says. She is more patient with herself as she struggles with new skills.

"She has become a very happy girl," Setan says.