Then Neth's health began to decline. She suffered inexplicable fevers and headaches that persisted for months, and she lost some of the weight she had recently put on. She went to a clinic in Battambang, and the staff gave her a routine AIDS test. Half an hour later, they handed her a slip of paper: the test was positive for HIV.
Neth was shattered. She walked out of the clinic with the paper scrunched up in her hand. In rural Cambodia, an HIV diagnosis felt like a death sentence, and Neth didn't think she had long to live. She spent days crying, and she couldn't sleep at night. Neth was not one to confide in others or to express emotion, but the pressure built inside her, and she finally shared her bad news with us. American Assistance for Cambodia tried to get her medical treatment, but Neth thought it was hopeless. She was taut with denial and rage, and she drifted back to her village so she could die near her family. A young man named Sothea began courting her. He was a catch for a peasant girl like her: a college-educated man who spoke some English. Tall and scholarly, he was older and more mature, but thrilled to have found such a beautiful woman. She curtly fended him off, but he wouldn't listen.
Neth's health began to decline. She went to a clinic and the staff gave her a routine AIDS test. Half an hour later, they handed her a slip of paper: the test was positive for HIV. Neth was shattered. "When I fell in love with Srey Neth, she discouraged me," Sothea said. "She told me: 'I am poor. I live near Battambang [he is from Phnom Penh]. Don't love me.' But I told her that I still loved her and would love her to the end."
Neth found herself falling for him. Soon he asked her to marry him. She agreed. Neth told him that she had worked in Poipet and was friends with an American journalist, but she balked at acknowledging that she had been a prostitute—or that she had tested positive for HIV. Her secret nagged at her constantly, but she never dared confide.
Soon after the wedding, Neth became pregnant. If a pregnant woman takes a drug called nevirapine before childbirth and does not breast-feed afterward, she can drastically reduce the risk of infecting her child with HIV. But to take that route, Neth would have to tell Sothea that she was HIV positive and had contracted the disease as a prostitute. It was wrenching to watch Neth and Sothea during the pregnancy, because Sothea was so much in love with a woman who was secretly endangering his life and their child's life.
One afternoon we were sitting outside their house as Sothea told us how his parents had looked down on Neth, because she had worked for a time in a restaurant. They considered that low-class behavior for a young woman. "My parents are mad at me, but I promised Srey Neth that I would love her forever," Sothea said. "My parents said they would never allow me to go home. They said: 'If you choose Srey Neth, we don't care about you anymore.' My parents tried to separate us by sending me to Malaysia, but even though I was there with good food, living in a nice place, I missed Srey Neth so much that I had to go back to her. Even if I run into problems, I will never leave her—even if I starve, I want to be with her."
Neth looked uncomfortable with this public pronouncement of love, but they caught each other's eyes and dissolved into giggles. This should have been a high point in Neth's life, but she was scrawny and looked sickly. She seemed already to have contracted full-blown AIDS.
"She's become weaker and weaker," Sothea fretted. "Normally pregnant women want to eat, but she's not so hungry."
When Sothea stepped away for a few minutes, Neth turned toward us, looking haggard.
"I know, I know," she whispered, sounding anguished. "I want to tell him. I try to tell him. But he loves me so much, how will he take it?" She shook her head and her voice broke: "For the first time, somebody really loves me. It's so hard to tell him what happened to me."
We told her that if she loved Sothea, she had to tell him. When Sothea returned, we tried to direct the conversation to the subject of Neth's health. "You should both check your HIV status before the birth," Nick suggested, in what he hoped was a casual tone. "People get it in all kinds of ways, and it's a good time to check."
Sothea smiled indulgently and scoffed. "I'm sure my wife doesn't have HIV," he said dismissively. "I never go with other girls, or to brothels. So how could she get it?"
On several occasions, we visited Neth and gave her bags of food and powdered milk for her pregnancy, and each time we saw her was heartbreaking. Her brief time in the brothel seemed to have left her with a disease that would kill her, her husband, and their unborn child. Just when her life seemed to be coming together, it was being torn apart.
Then, as the time for delivery approached, Neth agreed to be tested again. And this time, incredibly, the result came back: HIV negative. This test was more modern and reliable than the previous one. Neth had definitely been sickly and gaunt, but perhaps that had been from tuberculosis, parasites, or exhaustion. In any case, she didn't have AIDS.
Once she knew this, Neth began to feel better. She put on weight and soon looked healthier. The prospect of a grandchild led Sothea's parents to forgive the couple, and the family was reunited.
In 2007, Neth gave birth to a son. The baby was strong, healthy, and pudgy. Neth radiated joy as she cuddled him in the courtyard of her home. When our family dropped in on Neth and her husband at the end of 2008, she showed the boy to our children and giggled as he tottered about. She had returned to school for her final classes in hairdressing, and her mother-inlaw was planning to buy a small shop where Neth could set up a little business as a beautician and hair-dresser. "I know what I'm going to call the shop," she said. "Nick and Bernie's." After so many twists and setbacks, she had put her life together again; the young girl who had quivered in fear in the brothel had been buried forever.
For us, there were three lessons in this story. The first is that rescuing girls from brothels is complicated and uncertain. Indeed, it's sometimes impossible, and that's why it is most productive to focus efforts on prevention and putting brothels out of business. The second lesson is to never give up. Helping people is difficult and unpredictable, and our interventions don't always work, but successes are possible, and these victories are incredibly important.
The third lesson is that even when a social problem is so vast as to be insoluble in its entirety, it's still worth mitigating. We may not succeed in educating all the girls in poor countries, or in preventing all women from dying in childbirth, or in saving all the girls who are imprisoned in brothels. But we think of Neth and remember a Hawaiian parable taught to us by Naka Nathaniel, the former Times videographer, himself a Hawaiian:
A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water.
"What are you doing, son?" the man asks. "You see how many starfish there are? You'll never make a difference."
The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean.
"It sure made a difference to that one," he said.
Excerpted and condensed from Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Copyright © 2009 by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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