Mark’s voice interrupted to tell the interpreter to ask for the name of the facility. But Peou didn’t know its name or who owned it.

“Paradis sur Terre,” he said to me. “It’s gotta be.”

I didn’t answer.

The fancy lady told the people to line up at the tables, and when their turn came, they answered some questions and were handed either a red card or a green card. If they got a green card, it meant they got a job. Peou got a green card and was told to line up outside at the edge of the airstrip. She was so happy. The people with red cards trudged away with sad faces.

The fancy lady left on her plane, and the workers waited in the sun a long time, wondering what they were waiting for and what they were supposed to do. Finally a cloud of dust appeared at the far end of the airstrip, and a line of buses chugged into view. All the people with green cards were told to get on. Peou was nervous, but she was also very excited about her new job. She thought she would work hard and make much money to send to her family. She thought she would do so well that she would someday get an even better job. Maybe one day she might pass out green and red cards and carry the umbrella for the fancy lady.

She was on the bus for two days. It was hot and crowded and had no facilities. Three times a day it stopped by the roadside so everyone could get off and go into the bushes. They were given bottled water and plastic packets of unfamiliar food to eat. During the second day they drove deep into the jungle on a road so narrow that the leaves brushed the bus windows on both sides. Everything was green and dense and impenetrable. There were many snakes, and when they stopped, Peou was afraid to go very far into the bushes. Once they saw a tiger, its yellow eyes gleaming through the thick leaves.

But at last a clearing appeared in the jungle. Peou pressed her face to the grimy bus window and marveled at all the buildings. They were new and brightly colored, and some were two and even three stories tall.

“Paradis sur Terre,” Mark said again. “No question.” But still he peered at me for confirmation, and still I didn’t respond.

Peou got a job sewing sleeves on shirts. She made many mistakes at first, but her supervisor was kind and told her not to worry, that the cost of her mistakes would be deducted from her account. Her account, she understood, was where the money would be held until she could send it home to her family, but she never understood how it worked. When she asked to send it home, she was told there wasn’t enough money in it yet, and when she went to the store to buy soap or toothpaste, she was sometimes told she didn’t have enough money for that, either. It was confusing. It wasn’t until the second year, after everyone was made to work double shifts, that she was able to send a little money to her father.