The things we’ve gone through together

The Wat Opot Family Center is a community of children who are either orphaned or infected by the AIDS virus located amid rice fields and villages about an hour’s drive from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

According to the NGO’s co-founder, Wayne Dale Matthysse, who was a Marine medic in the Vietnam war, “This is the first generation of children here growing up with HIV/AIDS, the first for whom we can even talk about a future. “The picture had changed dramatically in 2003 when Doctors Without Borders opened a clinic nearby distributing anti-retroviral medicines. They changed Wat Opot from a hospice into a vibrant community where the children and a dozen or so HIV-positive adults eat, sleep, and play together as family.” 

Gail Gutradt’s portrait of Mr. Tia, who is eight years old, embodies the community’s ebullient spirit as he plays with the guitar of one of the other volunteers. “In America,” she wrote, “when I give talks about Wat Opot, adults always ask safe questions like ‘Did you have a bathroom? …Third grade children ask, ‘If they know they are going to die, why do they look so happy?’”

Gutradt, an American from Maine, volunteered at Wat Opot yearly and was so moved by what she was experiencing there that she sent KJ an article and photos to tell the world about this incredible place. Encouraged, she continued write and photograph until she had an entire book, In a Rocket Made of Ice. It was edited by former KJ Associate Editor Stewart Wachs and published by Kyoto Journal in a limited edition. Later it was picked up by Alfred A. Knopf and republished in 2014.

Gail Gutradt died of cancer in the winter of 2016. The book is her humanitarian and literary legacy.