Beggar mayhem: don't try this away from home

A friend and I stopped for a drink on a recent afternoon in one of the small streets of Siem Reap, Cambodia. We were exploring the town, where we had stopped on our way traveling overland from Bangkok to Phnom Penh. I have a story to do in Cambodia, and she is on holiday.

Incidentally, this is my third visit to Cambodia this year. I can't visit any more countries on this trip, or else I might need to get a new passport. I only have one or two pages left free for stamps, and I am thinking about Indonesia.

We were sitting at a table outside, sweating in the shade, when several boys selling postcards approached us. The postcard boys aren't so much different from beggars. They are basically street children who have evolved certain skill sets aimed at separating you from your money. To be fair, the photography on their postcards is quite nice, but I already am lugging around several packs of them, none of which I am likely to send.

I don't think my friend has had much experience with these kids. She engaged them in conversation, took a look at their postcards, and soon we were surrounded by more than a dozen of them, all clamoring for us to by their wares. But neither of us intended to buy anything.

It got worse in a hurry when she tired of talking to them and tried an experiment. She told them she was going to give them each 2,000 riel (50 cents, roughly) if they went away and didn't come back. Word spread quickly, and the group's number swelled. We were surrounded.

She handed a $20 bill to the restaurant server to break into ones. It would have been simpler if she had gotten it back in riel; she told the kids to pair off, handing one of each pair a dollar and telling them to go get it changed and to share it. It worked initially, because the kid with the dollar would sprint off with the other trailing him. But then kids started coming back, saying their buddy had fought them off and kept the whole dollar. Now they were displaying the bruises from the fights, and they wanted their own dollar.

God, what a madhouse. The narrow street was packed by now. Adult beggars started showing up. We had to get really tough with them before they finally left. This was probably my least satisfying Angkor ever.

At last, only two kids were left, a boy with lesions all over his neck and a girl who had shown up late to the party. I am pretty sure the boy had already received his 2,000 riel, but he wasn't belligerent or pushy, just stood with his postcards about five feet away and watched us. Like all of the kids, he was very small and thin.

This was the disturbing part. The girl seemed a little older than the boy, and spoke English better than most of her comrades. While most of the kids would banter and joke back and forth with us, trying for more money, she seemed to possess a fierce, almost evil sort of cleverness. Some of the things that came out of her mouth reminded me of Regan in The Exorcist, honestly.

Now that most of the kids were gone, my friend felt more comfortable talking to these two once again. She asked about the lesions on the boy's neck. He didn't speak English at all, it seemed. The girl said something in Khmer, and the boy hung his head. I know she wanted him to go away, because she wanted a dollar, and he was competition. Leaning against the side of my friend's wicker chair, the girl answered for the boy.

"He has HIV. He die," she said with a smirk.

I was so shocked. I don't know what she said to him in Khmer, but he looked so ashamed and so sad. My friend reprimanded the girl for being so mean, but she was unrepentant. What we should have done was probably to have given the boy another dollar and explain to the girl that it was for how mean she was being to him. But I didn't think of it until later. I just wanted to leave.