One woman’s mission to save Cambodia Story by Jeanne Malmgren Photos by Jamie Francis of the Times Staff Right: These are the faces of prisoners executed at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, where 20,000 people died at the hands of Khmer Rouge captors between 1975 and 1978. Read Part One Did you miss the first part of Sophie’s story? Read FACING THE GHOSTS here.

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 12, 2000

SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA

IT'S A LONG WAY from Florida to Cambodia, and right now Sophie Stagg is feeling that distance. Swatting mosquitoes, she slumps in a rusty folding chair outside a room where her uncle hovers on the knife edge between life and death.

Holding vigil for a sick relative is hard enough. When you feel responsible, it's worse. Sophie's urge to help, her good intentions, landed her uncle here in a sweat-soaked bed in this northern Cambodian city. She persuaded him to have an operation he didn't want, and she paid the $280 bill.

Now, a few hours after surgery, he has gone into shock. The doctors at this primitive, sweltering clinic are afraid he will die. If his heart stops, they have no medical equipment to restart it.

"I should have left well enough alone," she moans.

Sophie, 34, was born in Cambodia. She lives in Palm Harbor now, with her American husband and four sons. Her life as a full-time mom is, as she describes it, "secure." In July she left that security and flew 10,000 miles to this desperately poor country, which is still recovering from the devastation of a genocide called the killing fields.

She came on a mission of charity, with this simple philosophy: Just help as many people as you can. Take the money and the Imodium and the cotton shorts from Wal-Mart and give them, with your own hands, to people who need them.

On her first trip back to Cambodia in 20 years, Sophie Stagg visits the site of her grandmother’s house on the Mekong River, near a village called Praik Chagkran. Even at the beginning of the rainy season, in July, it was flooded.

One of those people -- a little girl with no parents -- is especially fortunate. Sophie hopes to bring her home with her.

But for now Sophie is trapped in a dingy hospital with geckos crawling on the walls and her uncle semiconcious.

After hours of anxious waiting, the doctor treating So Eung takes his blood pressure and announces that the patient is stabilizing. His heart seems to be working on its own now. They can reduce the Adrenalin in his IV.

The tension drains from Sophie's face. She hugs her cousins, pats her uncle's hand.

He smiles weakly.

"Aw kohn," he says in Khmer. Thank you.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Sophie bounces along potholed country roads in a rented minivan. Midway through her 16-day odyssey, she is on her way to Battambang, Cambodia's second largest city, in a region called the country's rice bowl. There she hopes to find the boy who kept her alive in the killing fields.

His name is Peath. She hasn't seen him since 1977, when they were imprisoned in the same work camp. She was 11; he was 5. Despite the difference in their ages, they struck up a friendship. Sophie still feels a kinship with Peath, as well as a debt to him. She wants to know what became of him.

One of the cruelties of the killing fields was that workers received little or nothing to eat, even though they toiled seven days a week growing rice. Anyone caught raising a personal crop or foraging for food was executed.

Sophie ate crickets, grasshoppers, any kind of insect she could hide in her pocket. Sometimes she'd have a treasured delicacy, a tiny frog impaled on a stick and roasted over a fire.

At night she and Peath would steal into the rice paddies and pull unripe, green rice off the plants. They knew if they were found, they'd be killed.

While visiting the flooded village of Ba Prey in central Cambodia, Sophie is ferried in a dugout canoe to the site where her charity will build a new classroom for the village school. On the way back, her boat is swamped with muddy water from the Mekong River.

"He was smaller than me, so he could sneak in there and not be seen," she recalls. "I would hold the container and he would go steal the rice."

Peath's parents died in the killing fields. Sophie wanted him to go with her family to a refugee camp in Thailand, but his brother wouldn't let him leave.

Two decades later Sophie is back here, looking for him. She goes to the barber shop, an open-air shack with a thatched roof. The barber is an emaciated old man in a white loincloth. Most of his teeth are missing.

One of his customers says he can take her to Peath's house. It's in a nearby village called Beng. They start off on foot and soon come upon a one-room clapboard house with a tin roof, hidden in a banana grove.

A young man comes out, buttoning a shirt over his short green sarong.

"Oh my God!" Sophie crows.

Peath seems to recognize her, too. He smiles shyly, his hands pressed together in the traditional greeting of sompiah. His teeth are stained black.

Sophie jabbers excitedly in Khmer, her hand on Peath's shoulder. His wife, a young woman with waist-length black hair, stands smiling in the doorway, one child on her hip and others clustered around her. Tinny folk music, amplified from the village pagoda, floats through the jungle.

"I cannot believe it," Sophie says, over and over.

Near the town of Battambang, Sophie is delighted to find her old friend Peath Mean, whom she hasn’t seen in 20 years. As children in the killing fields, they were so hungry they stole unripe rice out of paddies. “He was smaller than me, so he could sneak in there and not be seen. I would hold the container and he would go steal the rice.”

Peath is 28. He tells Sophie he supports his wife and four children, his mother-in-law, his elderly uncle and his sister, who is mentally disabled.

He used to farm rice on a rented half-acre. Then his cow died, and he had no way to plow the paddy. Now he scrapes together a living by baking pastries; his wife takes them to the market in town and sells them.

Peath asks if she would like to go see his sister Yun. Sophie remembers her from the killing fields, too. She is now 33, nearly Sophie's age.

Yun's one-room house sits on stilts in a clearing in the jungle. As Sophie and Peath approach, they see her squatting on the porch. At her belly she clutches a large stone, wrapped in the traditional checked scarf called a krama.

When she catches sight of the visitors, she gets up and scurries into the house. There is fresh blood on the back of her sarong.

Sophie stands in the dirt yard, unsure what to do.

A minute later Yun comes out, a clean sarong knotted around her waist. She is small, barely 5 feet tall, with straight black hair pulled into a loose ponytail. Her broad cheekbones and deep-set eyes give her the look of a South American Indian.

She greets Sophie, then says something softly to her in Khmer. Sophie's eyebrows lift, then her face dissolves into tears.

Yun has had a miscarriage. She was four months pregnant. It happened while she was carrying bricks at a construction site, where she earns $1.02 a day. Two weeks later, she is still bleeding and having cramps. The stone was warmed on a fire. It eases the pain.

Yun seems almost embarrassed by Sophie's tears, by this Western woman in the Ralph Lauren shirt who seems to feel so much grief for her misfortune.

"Kum yum ay," she says. "Kyom maen ay taay."

Don't cry. I'm okay.

Sophie asks how much it costs Yun and her husband to feed their three children, 11, 7 and 4. For 10,000 riel (about $2.60), Yun says, she can buy enough rice to last 10 days. Sophie scratches numbers in the dirt with a stick. When they add the cost of vegetables and meat, it comes out to $85 a year.

Sophie is quiet. She's thinking about the bank envelope full of cash she has brought with her. It was donated by friends and supporters of the Southeast Asian Children's Mercy Fund, a non-profit aid organization she and her husband, Bill, set up three years ago.

She asks Yun what she would want most, if she could have anything in the world.

A motorbike, Yun answers immediately.

"Then my husband could load it with fish and take it into town to sell. We could make a living with it."

In the village of Beng, Sophie visits with Yun Mean, center, and her brother Peath, right, who was Sophie’s childhood friend in the killing fields. Immediately Sophie is drawn into their lives, trying to help relieve the misery of their poverty. Yun, with two of her children, Sokkosall, 7, and Soklichy, 4, helps Sophie calculate the cost of food for the family. Rice, vegetables and meat for a year would cost them about $85.

But a motorbike is an impossible dream, she says, looking at the ground. Even a used one costs $500.

"And what would you wish for?" Sophie asks Peath.

He wants his house raised off the ground. Every year it floods during the monsoon and stays wet for months, he says.

In her head, Sophie is computing. A motorbike, a cow to replace the one Peath lost, a little bit of lumber to raise his house.

Then there's the party she planned to throw here, a village banquet of sorts. Her idea is to buy rice and meat and vegetables, then cook it up and invite the whole neighborhood.

Sophie pulls out a note pad and pen. What dishes would be good for a feast? she asks.

"Clear noodle soup," Yun says. "And sour chicken soup."

"Stir-fried noodles with pork," Peath says, grinning.

Dessert?

"Fruit," says Yun. Then she smiles, for the first time since Sophie arrived.

"Could we have coconut pudding, too?"