As I cautiously walked across the empty, stifling baggage check in Phnom Penh, still weak from being food poisoned by a tuna sandwich in the Korean airport and the resulting vomiting on a tiny, claustrophobic shuttle plane for three hours, I found myself questioning the wisdom of traveling to the 3rd world.
A few seconds later, after I emerged from the airport and saw a sea of faces staring at the door that I just came through, and was led by a man who held up a sign of Meghan and called me "egan" to a tuk tuk ( a wagon pulled by a motorbike), I was in the back of the tuk tuk driving through small, dark streets lined by piles of burning trash.
I had foolishly watched Slumdog Millionaire in the plane to Korea- and as I fearfully watched from my tuk tuk, I realized that I had seen this place before- as the slums of India in the movie. I was in Slumdog Millionaire. As the tuk tuk took me deeper and deeper into the ghetto abyss that was Phnom Penh, I had a horrifying moment of clarity.
1) I had no idea where this man was taking me.
2) No one else did either.
3) my organs? worth around 400,000 dollars on the black market
4) being sold into the human slave market is very prevalent in southeast asia.
5) the minute I left the phnom penh airport, I vanished. If something happened to me, no one would ever find me.
I tried to hold back the tears and remain calm, but I couldn't help sobbing as I contemplated my fate of being sold or killed for my organs- all by my own foolish doing. Unfortunately, since I had taken a class and done many papers on organized crime syndicates and the human trafficking, I had a cornucopia of dire visions of what was in store for me. I tried analyze my options- I had been carefully tracking our journey since we left the airport- so i knew that 3 lefts, 1 right, half a circle and 2 lefts bought me to the "villa." I weighed my option of leaping out of the tuk tuk and making a break for it- but i knew that I would be free of the tuk tuk but still in the middle of slumdog millionaire.
I stayed in the tuk tuk until we arrived at the villa that was surrounded by a barbwire fence. Every window had bars on it, every door in the bleak gray building had a deadlock, the sides were covered in pieces of sharp, rusted tin to either keep me in or keep others out. Either way, it wasn't that reassuring.
"Where is everyone?" I asked the tuk tuk driver.
"What?"
"Everyone else in the program- where are they?"
(pause) " they asleep." he answered as he unlocked the door to a small, sweltering room with faded white walls upon which a fresco of sad dinosaurs was painted. The man shut the door behind me and as I took in the cracked glass of the mirror and the fact that my windows had heavy duty bars on them, I realized I really, really wanted my parents. Then I heard the noise that I would now know as the fighting of the packs of wild dogs that roam the street of Phnom Penh at night.
I haven't cried myself to sleep since I was 13, but I cried myself to sleep that night. I woke up at 6 am to await the awakening of fictitious "other people" that were part of the "program" which I was 95% sure was a front to capture people in Cambodia. I also started drafting an exit strategy that consisted of me stealing the tuk tuk and driving away.
Finally, at 9 am, my patience wore out, and I opened one of the many doors to see ....another American girl. I have never, in my entire life, been so happy to see someone else.
