One woman’s mission to save Cambodia Story by Jeanne Malmgren Photos by Jamie Francis of the Times Staff

THE NEXT MORNING Sophie heads for a store that sells motorbikes. It doesn't take long to find the perfect one: a 100cc red Daelim with electric starter, made in Korea, a 1997 model. The owners want $530 for it, but Sophie knows that no purchase in Cambodia is complete without bargaining.

"What's your bottom price?" she asks.

Five hundred five.

Sophie is jubilant as the sale is written up. Already she feels a fondness for Yun, whose life is so unlike her own.

"I feel like it's 50-50," she says. "She could be me or I could be her. I could be living a life like hers."

When Sophie arrives at the village, Yun has just come back from cutting water spinach in a nearby marsh. A red and white krama is wrapped around her head.

Sophie waits by the motorbike.

"This is yours," she tells Yun. "We bought it for you. We wanted to make your dream come true."

Yun looks at the motorbike, her eyes wide. She is overcome. Tears pour down her cheeks and she presses her palms together in gratitude.

"Aw kohn," she says, over and over. "Aw kohn."

At the edge of the clearing, a thin man with bloodshot eyes squats in the shade, smoking a cigarette: Yun's husband. He says nothing. Yun glances nervously in his direction.

"What's wrong?" Sophie asks. "Something with your husband? Is there a problem? Does he beat you?"

Yun sniffles and looks at the ground. She wipes her eyes with her krama.

No, he doesn't beat me, she says, but he's drunk half the time. I can't depend on him to provide for the family.

Yun's voice is thin and fragile, like glass about to shatter. Sophie lifts her chin, makes her look directly at her.

"Listen. We put this bike in your name. It's yours. You can make a living all by yourself with it."

But I can't read or write, Yun protests. How can I figure out prices? Even if I had a calculator, I wouldn't know how to use it.

"I'll get you a calculator," Sophie says. "And I'll teach you how to use it."

At the lumberyard in Battambang, Sophie negotiates a fair price for supplies to raise Peath’s house on stilts. “I’m trying to do a good deed here, so don’t think about making yourselves rich off this,” she lectures the contractor and lumberyard owner, who seem amazed that a woman is speaking so forcefully. Sophie paid $500 for the lumber to raise Peath’s house, which floods every year during the monsoon rains.

Still Yun cries. Her children are sick all the time, she says. The older boy's face is swollen with mumps. Her other son is so constipated that he screams in pain when he tries to go to the bathroom.

Sophie's shoulders sag. Solve one problem here and you uncover another, she is learning. She feels as if she's lifting layer after layer from a pile of wreckage, never getting closer to the person trapped beneath.

Yun's way of addressing her troubles was to go to the grutaye, or fortune teller. He gave her the answer: Her house is facing the wrong direction.

Yun immediately dug a new foundation, several yards away. Now she just needs a few strong men to pick up her house and move it. Sophie says why not do it tomorrow, right before the big feast? With so many people gathered, it'll be easy to recruit helpers.

Yun's face smooths out. The tears stop.

Sophie has one last surprise for Yun: disposable sanitary napkins. At $1.60 a package, they are a luxury Yun cannot afford. None of the village women can. During their menstrual periods they wear cotton cloth diapers and rinse them out several times a day.

Sophie unwraps a napkin and demonstrates how to fold back the flaps on the adhesive strips. Yun is fascinated.

"Can I wash it and use it again?" she asks.

House-moving, Cambodian style: After a fortune teller told Yun that her problems would go away if her house faced a different direction, she dug a new foundation herself. Then, on the day of the feast Sophie put on, a group of village men lifted the house and carried it about 25 feet. Before it was set in place, a 100-riel note (about 38 cents) was placed on each support beam, for good luck.

THE NEXT MORNING Sophie is awake early, excited about the feast. The site is Yun's cousin's house, the largest in the village. When Sophie arrives at 9 a.m., people stare and bow to her. Yun's husband is taking children for rides on the new motorbike.

Rice is cooking in a huge iron pot over an open fire, tended by men who take turns stirring it with a wooden paddle. The women have been up since 4 a.m., chopping the vegetables and cooking the meat Sophie bought at the market. For enough food to feed 200, she paid $243.

In the house, four orange-robed monks sit cross-legged on the floor with large round alms bowls in front of them. Each bowl is heaped with rice. Atop the rice is a pack of Alain Delon cigarettes and a book of matches.

The room is jammed with people sitting opposite the monks. A small floor fan circulates the spicy smoke of incense.

Sophie, patron saint of the day, is ushered to a place front and center. She kneels before the monks and touches her forehead to the floor three times.

Sophie bows as Buddhist monks leave a blessing ceremony before the village feast in Beng. No matter how poor villagers are, they donate food and money to the local monastery. Sophie purchased all the food for the first such feast in the history of the village, spending $243 for enough food to feed about 200 people.

The monks chant in singsong voices, then the crowd responds. Sophie doesn't know the words, so she presses her palms together and closes her eyes.

The ceremony expresses the centuries-old relationship between monks and lay people, a cornerstone of Cambodian Buddhism. No matter how poor people are, they offer food and money to help support the monastery. Acts of generosity are seen as the key to a better rebirth.

Yun appears, wearing the smile of someone whose fortunes have changed overnight. Earlier, 26 men lifted the house off its stilts and carried it, on their shoulders, about 25 feet. Before it was set in place, Yun put a 100-riel note on top of each support beam, for good luck. The house now faces a more auspicious direction.

As that task is completed, a horse-drawn cart delivers the last loads of lumber that will be used to raise Peath's house. Sophie had paid $500 for it.

Now she sits with Yun and shows her how to use the Casio calculator she bought her. There are no coins in Cambodian currency, only paper money in denominations as high as 100,000. Yun must learn to work with large numbers if she is going to sell fish in the market.

How do you write the number 525? Sophie asks her.

Yun's brow wrinkles in concentration. She takes the pencil and writes: 50025.

Sophie bites her lip. She is falling down the rabbit hole of Yun's misery. But she can't quit now. She has to know she helped as much as she could.

When it's time to eat, rice is served from large bamboo baskets lined with banana leaves. The children line up to get soup and meat, then sit in ragged circles and wolf down their food. The adults sit on woven plastic mats spread on the ground, women in one circle and men in another, laughing and bragging over the feat of moving Yun's house.

After lunch, Sophie hands out gifts: hard candies, T-shirts and toothbrushes for the children; baseball caps and used clothing for the adults. People crowd around. A sea of hands reaches toward Sophie.

Packets of Kleenex tissues are enormously popular; so are hair elastics and the tiny bottles of shampoo Sophie saved from her hotel room.

Finally it's over. People bow to Sophie repeatedly. Old women tug on her sleeve, murmuring thanks. Children dance around her, laughing. She beams.

A man with salt-and-pepper hair and a torn shirt approaches. He is the village leader. Can you do us one more favor? he asks. We need some gravel to fix the road. One truckload would do it.

Sophie sighs. Her money is gone. We'll have to save this for next time, she tells the man. Let me go back to America and raise some more money.

"I need to win the lottery," she mutters.

THERE IS ONE MORE THING TO DO before she leaves. She has a few things to say to Weasna Sin, Yun's husband. At Yun's house, two plastic chairs are set out, face to face. Sophie invites Sin to sit down. A dozen villagers squat in the shade. Something is about to happen, but they're not sure what.

"This drinking habit of yours, it's no good," Sophie begins, in Khmer. Sin looks down, silent. His hands tremble in his lap. "You need to look at your wife and your children, and you need to decide which is more important, them or the bottle."

Her hands move up and down, like scales.

The crowd watches, wide-eyed. In Cambodia, a woman never speaks this strongly to a man, or tells him what to do. Public display of private problems is unheard of.

Suddenly Sin straightens up.

"I've never hit her," he says. "I've never laid a hand on her. When we fight, she hits me!"

Yun is standing behind Sophie, fanning her in the noon heat by waving a krama in the air.

"If he stops drinking, I won't hit him," she says.

BACK IN PHNOM PENH, Sophie is eager to see Samantha, the little girl she has arranged to adopt and bring home. Even though the Cambodian government has frozen all foreign adoptions, she hopes the law will change before she returns to Palm Harbor. It's awful to think of boarding the plane without Samantha.

During a visit with the Cambodian orphan she hopes to adopt, Sophie is delighted when the child plants a kiss on her cheek. It is the first sign that Samantha might accept her as her mother. Sophie has told her four sons, who are at home in Palm Harbor, that she plans to bring their little sister back with her.

Soeung Man, the child's foster parent, brings Samantha to Sophie's hotel room for a visit. This time Sophie has baby bait: a pair of star-shaped sunglasses, a pink Hello Kitty purse, a toy cellular phone that lights up and plays nursery rhymes.

The child, as usual, is in the nanny's arms, clinging tightly to her neck. She looks warily at the woman who would be her mother.

"I want desperately to hold her," Sophie laments.

One by one, she offers the new toys. Samantha looks at each one but makes no move to take them. Sophie sits close by and talks to her in a sugary voice.

After a few minutes Man nods to the nanny, who hands the child to Sophie. Instantly Samantha starts crying. Man and the nanny slip out the door.

Samantha is screaming. Sophie paces the room with her, patting, rocking, shushing.

"Chin gun," she murmurs. "Chin gun."

Hush, baby.

Sophie walks outside. That seems to calm the baby. They walk to the hotel pool. Samantha stops crying long enough to watch two boys playing in the water.

Sophie walks around and around the pool, cradling the child's head against her shoulder, murmuring in Khmer. She strokes her legs, the soles of her feet, her toes.

Finally Samantha falls asleep, exhausted, in Sophie's arms.