I want to talk about Narong (real name: Ari) because she is the best example of a person who, in retrospect, would have benefited from direct giving at the right time, although ‘benefitted’ is an understatement, because really it would have taken a very small amount of money to save her life.

I met her during the height of covid. This was when nearly everywhere was closed and at night it was a ghost town. I used to walk over to a place called Mekong River (which unfortunately didn’t survive covid). At night it was dark, gloomy and desolate, there would be one or two other people around and she would just say hello as we passed. This type of casual greeting isn’t normal, but during covid when no one was around there was a camaraderie and you would catch the eye of the few people who passed, and strike up conversations with strangers for news about vaccine locations and coming lockdowns.

One night she joined me and we had a long conversation. I don’t recall the province she’s from but she was quite different from the type of person I was meeting during that period. She speaks perfect English and back then, before her trouble, there was a kind of elegance, or grace about her. She was boyish somehow, but deliberate in her movements, and had a long, classical, well-proportioned face. Another difference about her was her intelligence. She had attended a private school and it showed. I didn’t know it then but she was just at the start of her trouble, a descent that would leave her, as far as I can see, as good as dead.

Everything was going fine for her in Phnom Pehn. She had a place to stay to continue her education, her family were supporting her. But over time she realized she is gay, and she met a partner. The partner was a f2m transexual, a small Vietnamese person I know from around. This person looked 100% male and I was shocked when I found out s/he was genetically XX.

They decided that they wanted to live together and so Narong took him back to the province and came out as gay to her family, who were absolutely horrified. They instantly disowned her, cut off all their support. This, in essence, was the start of the downfall, and I hear variations of this story all the time. This is a collectivist, family-orientated society without an extensive welfare state, and when people lose their family connections, they often spiral down quickly. The connections can be disrupted for different reasons. One is a traffic accident that kills or maims a central figure of the family. One woman I knew couldn’t stay with a husband she didn’t love and so was completely disowned by a village. Domestic violence is another common reason. Whatever it is that severs these ties, it’s usually, I won’t say a death knell, but ominous.

Anyway, this Vietnamese partner had some kind of informal business, I think buying and selling electronics. So they moved in and were a couple. Things didn’t go well. He turned out to be both violent and promiscuous (Of course, I only have her side of the story) and, as is often the case in instances of domestic violence, he controlled her movements, friends and finances. Sometimes he would go away to the province on business for days and leave her with insufficient funds to feed herself.

At some point, she shaved her head bald with a razor, and told me that she did that to spite him, because she knew that he would hate it. I saw them a few times arguing in the street and she was angrily following him around while he was nonchalant and irritated all the time – and there was something unbalanced about the whole relationship.

Well they broke up. I wasn’t ever super-close to Narong. I only found out because the Vietnamese one (I don’t know his name) went on to date a good friend of mine, who wasn’t actually bisexual until that relationship and never was again afterwards, which is in itself, bizarre.

One day I was passing a shop she often sits outside of. I was shocked to see her sitting there talking to herself, to an imaginary person, something she’d never done before. Usually she’d ask me for something, like to use my phone or a phone top up or sit and chat, but she asked for money straight up and I asked her,

‘You never talked to yourself, what happened? Who are you talking to? Are you hearing voices?’

But she wouldn’t answer and just kept asking for money. This is common to everyone I know who is hallucinating. If I try and address it directly, asking them what they can see or hear, they will never directly relate that subjective experience to me; they won’t refer to it at all.

The next time I passed her in the street, I was shocked to see that she was heavily pregnant, and also looking very rough, having aged perhaps ten years (in less than a year). I asked about her situation, but she was incoherent by then, twitching and uncommunicative. Her only real sentences were to ask for money.

A while after I saw her and she had given birth and was holding the baby, wandering around with it. Again I tried to work out if she had any support, wherever the child was born, did they pick up any problems with her, evidently not (which is common, see the story about Jenny when I write it up). I couldn’t get sense out of her.

Shortly after this I saw her while I was with a friend – and by then the baby was gone. She said they her mother had taken the child, and this is pretty much the last time I ever had any sense out of her. Since then she waves if she see’s me. If I’m sitting out, say outside a shop or something, she joins me for a while. She usually says nothing. She looks rough. Somehow her face has lost its symmetry, her mouth has kind of collapsed and is askew, and there are long frown lines coming down from her nose to her lips. I can smell the meth smell on her and, although her teeth are looking OK, I can smell when she talks that there is something going wrong. She’s twitching, mumbling, bowing to something in the sky that only she can see, … and breaking my heart. It’s an awful thing to have witnessed.

Of course, I have performed some research around this now and know that the prognosis isn’t good in her case. I’m no doctor but the studies that I researched indicate that stimulant induced psychosis that goes this far, and for this long, generally doesn’t reverse and will require constant care for the rest of her life, she won’t partake in society, her child has no mother.

So I look back at this story and think how, help, some kind of support and direct giving at the right time, could have prevented this. As I stated earlier, the real start was her family disowning her. Her fate was somewhat sealed when she lost this support. But it wasn’t obvious what was going to happen. If help had have been there, I don’t think that she would have taken it at the time because, obviously, she isn’t a fortune-teller, she was in love, and wanted to be with her partner, which is fair enough. A victim of domestic violence is never to blame.

So the second blow was loosing her home when the relationship broke up, and then having no support. Her fate was absolutely sealed then. As far as I know, there is no place to go in this situation. Any kind of government assistance, and I’m pretty sure all NGO’s require some kind of ID (which I don’t think she has), but even so, I don’t know if there even is a refuge of any kind here for a woman in this situation, let alone a gay woman.

So she went to the natural magnet for people in similar situations, the slum (I don’t want to name it in case it attracts the wrong attention). I.e. the collection of makeshift, wooden, corrugated and occasionally brick little buildings hidden behind the normal street so the middle class can forget about it. Here, a whole house is five dollars a night to rent, and a dollar to sleep on the floor somewhere, or free if you ask nicely or someone needs something doing. The people who live here are mixed, but good people, running businesses, there is a little self-created nursery there, some people work for employers, drivers, bar girls – a community of people who happen to be poor and not have much. Of course, there’s a lot of unhappiness and desperation – also and so a market for ice (methamphetamine). Meth is common here, more common that vaping or alcohol, and easy to get into as it’s social and shared, like everything else there. Strengths of collectivist societies can sometimes be weaknesses.

Obviously, I wasn’t there with her the whole time and I don’t know exactly how this happened. I might be wrong about this also. I’ve seen her attack someone in the street (common with addicts) but I saw the public drama of the time when she was in the relationship before meth, and she wasn’t on meth when she shaved her head to spite someone, which isn’t wholly balanced. What I’m saying is that she might have been unbalanced before her downfall and no intervention or friendship could have prevented what has happened to her. Also remember that that statistic is 5-15% of meth users develop permanent stimulant induced psychosis, and there is evidence, which I’ve cited elsewhere on the site, that this is to do with frequency of use, but there is also other evidence (which I didn’t include) that there might be a genetic factor to this 5-15% (based on family history of schizophrenia).

In another reality, where my NGO idea is set up and working, she is fine and well and thriving. In this reality, when her relationship broke up, rather than go to a slum where she could sleep on someone’s floor for a dollar, surrounded by ice dealers and shady ways to make money – she came to a safe place for a safe bed and what happened there was that someone (me) got her story, wrote this up, presented it to a wider, online compassionate community and she found a new network, a new family, perhaps an LGBTQIA+ community that embraced her and supported her. A very simple plan for a highly educated, articulate women would be a lease on a simple room (starting from 60usd per month in Phnom Pehn), support to write a CV, join linkedin, online job hunt). Basically, a hundred bucks at the right point, and a little friendship from equals and peers (that’s us guys) would have saved this beautiful life, and I am too damned Fu*^&ng late and I can never change that.

But I won’t be too late for the next one. If I can move towards this other reality, then life energy will guide me and bring the ones I can save to me.

In one study (Mburu et al, 2019) about transgender women in Cambodia, meth was found to be the most common drug used and emotional crisis without support surrounding gender identity found to be a source of depression leading to drug use. In fact the study specifically notes these identity issues as a risk factor in meth use and suggests including gender counselling where appropriate in overall prevention policies, and so LGBTQIA+ identities, or all varieties, could be considered comparable.

References

Mburu, G., Tuot, S., Mun, P. Chhoun, P. Chann, N. and Yi, S. (2019) Prevalence ond Correlates of Amphetaminetype stimulant use amount transgender women in cambodia.  International Journal of Drug Poilcy (2019) Vol 74 PP 136-143

The video below shows her current state.