Travel Writer, Cambodia: ‘A line of children gathered and we fed child after child’

[This story is one of ten shortlisted in the 2015 Irish Times Amateur Travel Writer competition]

In the photograph, he’s sitting alone on the steps of the Riverside Bar in Hoi An.

In many ways, he was no different to the countless other child beggars we’d met on our honeymoon trip to Cambodia and Vietnam. In every bar and restaurant they’d appear, paper cup in hand. The guide books advised ignoring them and I understood the rationale. The head and the heart, however, don’t always concur.

In Phnom Penh, we learned a harsh lesson about trying to be beneficent tourists. Psah Thmay, the central market, is a vast warren of stalls selling everything from dried fish to custom-made clothes. Outside, amongst the hawkers, are numerous amputees, stark emblems of the devastating Pol Pot regime. One of them, a double amputee, whizzed around on a crude square skateboard. He began a bizarre dance at my feet, wiggling his truncated hips, his arms flailing.

Half horrified, half embarrassed, I threw some coins into his box and fled towards the market. Wandering through the pandemonium inside, a hand slipped quietly into mine. A little boy held up his cup. Tired of feigning indifference, we made our way, child in hand, to a food stall.

I lifted him up and asked the woman serving to feed him. She filled a paper tray with food, which he devoured. Within minutes, a line of children had gathered and, for an hour, we fed child after child as a queue continued to form. Eventually, my husband said what we both knew: “We have to stop.”

The bill came to 140,000 Riel, the equivalent of about €30. I will never forget the bewildered faces of the children still queuing, nor the guilt as we walked away. Outside, as we waited for a tuc-tuc, I watched the amputee harassing a boy. The child cowered and, with horror, I realised it was the first boy we’d fed. He was being reprimanded for not having any money to hand over to this diminutive Fagin.

As we drove away, I vowed not to interfere again. Then, in the town of Hoi An in Vietnam, we met the boy we photographed. He approached us as we ate, holding out a handful of bogus lottery tickets. We shook our heads and he walked away and sat on the steps of the restaurant.

Over the course of the evening, he sat there, looking up at us every so often and smiling. When we asked the staff about him, they said he was a “mute”, and that his father had abandoned him when his mother died. During the day he sold tickets and at night he slept in the market. They’d named him Ticket.

When the restaurant closed, we sat chatting with the staff. I watched Ticket and Ticket watched me. I wanted to reach out to him, but the events in Phnom Penh had left me wary, so I kept my distance. We took photographs, and Ticket posed with the others. When it came time to leave, he sat back on the steps, and it’s in the photograph I took of him there that the sadness screams out to me. I didn’t know then that in the years to follow, my own children would be lost inside me before I’d had a chance to know or name them. If I’d known, perhaps I’d have tried harder to connect with that little boy, mutely grieving his mother’s touch and the name she’d given him. Instead, we’re both frozen in that moment – he, a motherless child and I, a childless mother – a perfect match, separated by the lottery of life.