The Road of Lost Innocence

I haven't had the chance to get wifi in South Africa until today so I am posting now what I wrote a week ago on the plane. Enjoy! 

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I am currently mid-air, flying over the Atlantic on my way to South Africa. I’m not sure what time it is nor what time zone I am in. I haven’t stopped reading since I boarded the plane. Bits of prepared couscous dissolve in my mouth as I read the last few pages of Somaly Mam’s memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence. Part of me feels guilty even eating after reading the atrocities women in Cambodia have endured and continuously endure in the sex industry.

I remember Mam notes in one part of her book how she was shocked by the over indulgent meals of the French. The skin of the fish that her hosts tossed in the garbage could feed a whole family in Cambodia. Then I remembered the old saying my parent’s uttered when I didn’t eat my meal: “Finish the food on your plate. Children across the world are starving.” I always thought that saying was stupid. I was hundreds and thousands of miles from the children that needed it. What did it matter if I didn’t finish my food? But Mam made me realize there was more to that guilt-tripping adage. The saying wasn’t about shipping my leftovers to starving children in Africa; the saying was about awareness—awareness of a reality beyond my own. A reality that should have called me to action, should have shocked me rather than been passed off as a trite expression. Children across the world were starving. Not only for food, but for help.  

When I think of this expression today, I revert back to thinking without thinking, characterized by thoughts without meaning floating through one ear and out the other or evaporating upon entry to the brain. I don’t think too hard about what that must mean—to be starving—because to fully internalize that injustice, requires taking on responsibility. And it is easier to be ignorant than carry the weight of “other people’s problems” on your back knowing you have the power to do something about them. We may not be able to right every wrong in the world, at least right now, but we have a responsibility to advocate for and fight for change when injustice is served and we are aware of it.

I often contemplated growing up, why I was born in such a privileged time period. Why in my mother’s day, segregation was still a part of her Augustan lifestyle. Why my grandpa was banned from the lake by a sign declaring, “no Jews and no dogs allowed”. How had I missed those few generations that stood between the Holocaust and me? How I had gotten democracy and America and love and education? We could all question ourselves a million times over. Yet, in the end, we have no control over the circumstances we are born into, just as the girls enslaved in brothels in Southeast Asia and throughout the world. However, with each situation, we must use what has been dealt to us to build a better future.

Somaly Mam was born to a country where women were viewed as less than. Whether in the home or in the brothel, women were owned by husbands, pimps, family members. They were taught to be silent and submit. Money could buy girls freedom, but it could also buy brothel owners their way out of court. Somaly Mam risked her life to free herself from the brothels and return to save others like her. She was dealt a difficult set of cards. Yet she used them to reinvent her world. Cambodia and its culture towards women are changing. The world is changing too in response to Mam’s courageous efforts to let her voice and those of all Cambodian girls be heard.

Somaly’s memoir gave me a face and a story to place with those “children starving across the world”. She has taught me that I must not take the freedoms I enjoy lightly. She has taught me that I am privileged only by a matter of luck. Any one of us could have been Somaly Mam, Kaseng, Kolap, Sokhan, or Tom Dy. Any one of us could have been dealt a different set of cards. But most importantly, she has taught me not to feel guilty for having what others may lack. Rather, see my privileges as an opportunity. I have been given a gift that is allowing me to give voice to those that cannot speak for themselves. For all the girls enslaved across the world, I am using my freedom to fight for theirs. I am in debt to them. We are all in debt to the injustice in this world. Innate fortune does not make us above it—innate fortune makes us responsible.

If you are reading this blog, you have opened the door to responsibility. Now you must decide if you will walk through, shed your ignorance and become accountable to the world in which we live. The choice is yours.