Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (34 page)

Lusaka is an ugly city: dirty, crowded, and smelly. We stayed outside town at a plush lodge: our rooms had modern light fixtures, hot water came out of the tap whenever you turned it on, and there was even a swimming pool—all quite welcome after the swamps. When I headed to my rondavel after dinner, I found it surrounded by zebras, grazing on the verdant lawn. When I slowly approached, they stepped not more than three feet aside. I stopped at the door and looked at one, and she returned my gaze. If you have spent a week looking through binoculars and craning your neck to see animals properly, such sudden intimacy is heady. The zebra and I stared curiously like
strangers on a train; then, as though she had found out all she needed, she turned and trotted off.

The next day, the sun was dipping by the time we reached northern Kafue National Park. We collected firewood in a low gorge and arrived at our campsite in near darkness. Gavin asked us politely not to help set up camp, as we would only be in the way, so we took a bottle of wine down to the river and watched the stars come out. If I had to choose one favorite Zambian park, it would be Kafue. The animals were not so different from the animals elsewhere, nor were the trees, but things were somehow especially elegant, as though nature had been in a landscaping mood when she put it all together. We saw our first leopard there, as sensual and spotted and diffident as we’d anticipated. We saw cheetahs. For three more days we drove through Kafue’s hills and took long afternoons for walking, reading, and writing postcards. Then we drove south half the length of Kafue, arriving at twenty-five-mile-long Lake Iteshi-Teshi. We climbed onto the boulders, where the rock hyraxes, or dassies, little mammals with rodent-like features, gathered to sun themselves. Lake Iteshi-Teshi was primeval, like the world’s inaugural day, with hippos, zebras, and one boat: a little canoe making its way across the middle ground like a detail added by a sentimental painter.

The next day we headed into the nearly abandoned southern part of Kafue. The herds of animals—five hundred buffalo together, even more impalas, troops of wildebeests—looked surprised to see us. We saw a hundred pelicans roosting in an acacia tree, its leaves completely white from their droppings. We followed the turquoise flight of a lilac-breasted roller. Finally we came to a clearing in which the sun focused itself bright, an enchanted place. Beneath a spreading mopani tree, Gavin and Marjorie pitched camp. We watched the moon rise and had honest talks while the fire burned down to firefly embers.

In the morning we drove through more wilds, stopped in Livingstone to shop, and then crossed into Zimbabwe at Victoria Falls. At our hotel there, I found my wallet waiting for me. A worker in Luangwa had found it and managed to reach American Express, which had obtained my itinerary and facilitated delivery. My cash was all there.

That night we put on whatever crumpled but presentable clothes we found in the bottom of our suitcases and headed off to the Victoria Falls Hotel for supper. There was a band; there was dancing; we ordered from menus and drank champagne toasts to the bush. When, in the morning, we said good-bye to Gavin and Marjorie, we had that slight pang of an intensity ended, the same feeling I had had when I left college—that things might be otherwise and fine but would never be quite like this again.

One of the liabilities of writing about places off the beaten track is that in doing so you help beat new tracks. Tourism in Zambia has reached unprecedented highs in the twenty-first century. But this seems like a social good: the only effective defense against poachers, logging, and everything else that destroys big game is an infrastructure that supports animal protection, and tourism is often the engine of such safeguards. Since my visit, falling copper prices have made Zambia more reliant on tourism; the elimination of yellow fever has made the country more attractive to visitors. It’s easy to romanticize neglected places, but that neglect is often deadly for the people who live there.

The Noonday Demon
, 2001

I did not go to Cambodia to learn about mental illness, but to study the architecture of Angkor Wat. My first night in Phnom Penh, I sat next to someone to whom I mentioned my depression research, and he mentioned Phaly Nuon. I told him that I’d love to interview her, even if it meant losing a day touring up north. During the interview he helped set up, I realized that I couldn’t write about depression without the cross-cultural perspective that subsequently became a defining theme of my book. The following passage from
The Noonday Demon
is slightly expanded to stand on its own.

W
hen I went to Cambodia in January 1999, I wanted to see its architectural marvels, but I also hoped to understand how people lived in a country emerging from inconceivable tragedy. I wondered what happens to your emotions when you have seen a quarter of your compatriots murdered, when you yourself have lived in the hardship and fear of a brutal regime, when you are fighting against the odds to rebuild a devastated nation. I wanted to see what happens among the citizens of a nation when they have all endured almost inconceivable traumatic stress, are desperately poor, and have little chance for education or employment. The despair psychology of wartime is usually frenzied, while the despair that follows devastation,
numb and all-encompassing, more closely resembles the depressive syndrome that afflicts the West. Cambodia is not a country in which factions fought brutally against factions; it is a country in which all the mechanisms of society were completely annihilated. It was like visiting that part of the Antarctic ice sheet over which there is no ozone at all.

During the 1970s, the revolutionary Pol Pot established a Maoist dictatorship in Cambodia in the name of what he called the Khmer Rouge. Years of bloody civil war followed, during which a fifth of the population was slaughtered. The educated elite was obliterated; the peasantry was regularly displaced; many were taken into prison cells where they were mocked and tortured. The entire country lived in chronic fear.

Most Cambodians are soft-spoken, gentle, and attractive. It’s hard to believe that Pol Pot’s atrocities took place in this lovely country. Everyone I met had a different explanation for how the Khmer Rouge could have come to power there, but none of these explanations made sense, just as none of the explanations for the Cultural Revolution, Stalinism, or Nazism makes sense. In retrospect it is possible to understand why a nation was especially vulnerable to such regimes; but where in the human imagination such behaviors originate is unknowable. Such evil is both contiguous with the ordinary evil of all societies and so extreme as to comprise its own law. The social fabric is always thinner than we care to acknowledge, but it is impossible to know how it gets vaporized. The American ambassador told me that the greatest problem for the Khmer people is that traditional Cambodian society has no peaceful mechanism to resolve conflict. “If they have differences,” he said, “they have to deny and suppress them totally, or they have to take out knives and fight.” A Cambodian member of the current government told me that the people had been too subservient to an absolute monarch for too many years and didn’t think to fight against authority until it was too late.

People cry easily in Cambodia. The words of the American ambassador were in my ears each time I witnessed a smiling Cambodian abruptly begin to weep, without any apparent middle ground or transition. During numerous interviews with people who had suffered
atrocities at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, I found that most preferred to look forward. When I pressed them on personal history, however, they would seem to regress before my eyes, slipping into an agonized past tense. Every adult I met in Cambodia had suffered such traumas as would have driven many of us to madness. What they had endured within their own minds was at yet another level of horror. When I decided to do interviews in Cambodia, I expected to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.

Phaly Nuon, winner of the Figaro Prize for Humanitarian Service and a sometime candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, has set up an orphanage and a center for depressed women in Phnom Penh. Her success with these women has been so enormous that her orphanage is almost entirely staffed by the women she has helped, who have formed a community of generosity around her. If you save the women, it has been said, they in turn will save other women, who will save the children, and so via a chain of influence you can save the country.

We met, as Phaly Nuon had suggested, in a small, disused room at the top of an old office building near the center of Phnom Penh. She sat on a chair on one side, and I sat on a small sofa opposite. Like most Cambodians, she is relatively short by Western standards. Her black hair, streaked with gray, was pulled back from her face and gave it a hardness of emphasis. She can be aggressive in making a point, but she is also shy, smiling and looking down whenever she is not speaking.

We started with her own story. In the early seventies, Phaly Nuon worked for the Cambodian Department of the Treasury and Chamber of Commerce as a typist and shorthand secretary. In 1975, when Phnom Penh fell to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, she was taken from her house with her husband and children. Her husband was sent off to a location unknown to her, and she had no idea whether he remained alive. She was put to work as a field laborer with her twelve-year-old daughter, three-year-old son, and newborn baby. The conditions were terrible and food was scarce, but she worked beside her fellows, “never telling them anything, and never smiling, as none of us ever smiled,
because we knew that at any moment we could be put to death.” After a few months, she and her family were packed off to another location. During the transfer, a group of soldiers tied her to a tree and made her watch while her daughter was gang-raped and then murdered. A few days later it was Phaly Nuon’s turn to be killed. She was brought with some fellow laborers to a field outside town. Her hands were tied behind her back and her legs roped together. After she was forced to her knees, a rod of bamboo was tied to her back, and she was made to lean forward over a mucky field, so that her legs had to be tensed or she would lose her balance. When she finally dropped of exhaustion, she would fall forward into the mud and drown. Her three-year-old son bellowed and cried beside her. The infant was tied to her so that he would suffocate when she fell: Phaly Nuon would be the killer of her own baby.

Phaly Nuon told a lie. She said that she had, before the war, worked for a high-level member of the Khmer Rouge, that she had been his secretary and then his lover, that he would be angry if she were put to death. Few people escaped the killing fields, but a captain who perhaps believed her story eventually said that he couldn’t bear the sound of the screaming child and that bullets were too expensive to waste on executing her quickly, so he untied Phaly Nuon and told her to run. Her baby in one arm and the three-year-old in the other, she headed deep into the jungle of northeastern Cambodia.

She stayed there for three years, four months, and eighteen days. She never slept twice in the same place. As she wandered, she picked leaves and dug for roots to feed herself and her family, but food was hard to find, and other, stronger foragers had often stripped the land bare. Severely malnourished, she began to waste away. Her breast milk soon ran dry, and the baby she could not feed died in her arms. She and her remaining child just barely held on to life through the period of war.

By the time Phaly Nuon told me this, we had both moved to the floor between our seats and she was weeping and rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, while I sat with my knees under my chin and a hand on her shoulder in as much of an embrace as her trance-like state would allow. She continued in a half whisper.

After the war was over, Phaly Nuon found her husband. He had been severely beaten around the head and neck, resulting in significant mental deficit. She, her husband, and her son were all placed in a border camp near Thailand, where thousands of people lived in temporary tented structures. They were physically and sexually abused by some workers at the camp and helped by others. Phaly Nuon was one of the only educated people there, and knowing languages, she could talk to the aid workers. She and her family were given a wooden hut that passed for comparative luxury. “While I went around, I saw women who were in very bad shape, many of them seeming paralyzed, not moving, not talking, not feeding or caring for their own children,” she said. “I saw that though they had survived the war, they were now going to die from their depression.” Phaly Nuon made a special request to the aid workers and set up her hut in the camp as a sort of psychotherapy center.

She used traditional Khmer medicine (made with more than a hundred herbs and leaves) as a first step. If that did not work sufficiently well, she would use occidental medicine when it was available, as it sometimes was. “I would hide away stashes of whatever antidepressants the aid workers could bring in,” she said, “and try to have enough for the worst cases.” She would take her patients to meditate, keeping in her house a Buddhist shrine with flowers in front of it. To seduce the women into openness, she would begin by taking three hours or so to get each to tell her story. Then she would make regular follow-up visits to try to get more of the story, until she finally got the full trust of the depressed woman. “I wanted to understand very specifically what each one had to vanquish,” Phaly Nuon explained.

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.