In a Rocket Made of Ice: Among the Children of Wat Opat, Gail Gutradt; The Inheritors
This is a certain kind of book that I like to read, about a kind of person that most of us are not as good as, doing a kind of work that most of us can't do, but we can support. Wat Opat was founded by a former Marine medic and a Buddhist monk on a piece of scrap land in Cambodia as a hospice and orphanage for children with AIDS. Over twenty years, it became not only a place to die, but with the introduction of antiretroviral drugs into Cambodia, a home for children with and without HIV and sometimes their infected parents as well. Children at Wat Opat used to die before they grew up; now some of them have lived to attend college or to become independent.
Gail Gutradt has lived and worked at Wat Opat for six months at a time. She paints a portrait of Wayne, the former Marine, and the philosophy that has allowed him to keep Wat Opat alive, sometimes by the skin of its teeth, for twenty years - do what is do-able, don't overreach, and trust in God.
Also read: The Inheritors, by William Golding. A review of another book mentioned that William Golding had written a novel about Neanderthals. Exciting! I didn't know that! I went to Paperbackswap to try and get a copy so I could embark on that right away, because I like prehistory. None available, but put it on the wish list. A few days later, I was tidying up the landing where there might be a few stacks of books. Maybe. And there was a copy of The Inheritors, with the Paperbackswap trade slip still in it. I guess I'd already had that good idea.
But sadly, I didn't like the book. Golding writes from the point of view of a Neanderthal man with only limited abstract thought and some of the time I could not figure out what was going on. A group of people constructing something of logs - a lot of "he stood the largest log on its end and wedged it between that and the mountain wall, then placed another log crossways" - becomes a lot of incomprehensible description. I just lost track of the action sometimes. The Neanderthals could not figure out the Homo Sapiens' behavior and neither could I.