Sok Phalla points to a 5-year-old girl and tells her story: Her parents died of AIDS. She is HIV-positive. The first time he saw her, she was inflamed with a skin rash. Sores lined the inside of her mouth.
Then he points to another girl. She is 7 years old. She is also HIV positive, but not too long ago she began a strict regimen of anti-retroviral drugs. With luck, the drugs will prolong her life
There are five other girls here at the immaculate house in Meanchey district, where Phalla works for Maryknoll, a US-based mission group. Most of the children were made orphans by AIDS. All of the girls have HIV.
The place where they stay is a hospice—a place where people live out the final stages of a terminal illness. But hope lives here as well: On a recent morning the girls bounded about a room like normal children, dancing to a karaoke video.
“At first, I was very sad to work with them because I pitied them because many of them are so sick,” Phalla says. “But in Cambodia, there are not so many people who work with AIDS patients.”
Phalla is just one of 19 people who work at the Little Sprouts hospice center and group homes, a branch of the New York-based Maryknoll mission that serves 853 people living with HIV/AIDS in Cambodia.
His department works exclusively with 122 children who are HIV-positive and another 20 whose parents are too ill to care for them. Their ages range from 3 months old to 13 years old, and almost all contracted the virus from their mothers.
The Little Sprouts program houses more than 36 children in three different homes in Meanchey district, and provides home care to HIV-positive children living with relatives. In all, 62 of the youths are given anti-retroviral drugs which are provided by the National Pediatric Program and paid for by donations given to Maryknoll. The medicines, which cost $500 per child per year, cost about $50,000 in total.
Although Cambodia has recently been praised by the UN for stabilizing its HIV/AIDS infection rate, it still has the highest prevalence rate in Asia, with some 157,000 people infected with the HIV virus or sick with AIDS.
Phalla says his official title is assistant to one of the Western doctors who works at Little Sprouts. He deals primarily with organizing the direct-care services for the children, such as taking them on field trips or driving them to medical appointments, or acquiring their anti-retroviral medicines. His intimate knowledge of the children’s lives and their needs is vital to the Little Sprouts program.
He opens a cabinet of drugs and describes each one in detail.
“This is paracetamol syrup for when the children feel bad,” he says, pointing to a the bottle of red liquid. He points to another, saying, “This is Spectrim Suspension, an anti-bacterial…this is Mycostatine for thrush…”
Two years ago, Phalla did not know the names or uses of these medicines. He was a low-ranking official at a tourist department in Oddar Meanchey province—a position he held for about a year. When he started working at the Maryknoll center as a translator in 2000 and 2001, he thought it was just a job.
“I needed a way to feed myself,” he says.
But the longer he worked at the center the more he was drawn to the children. He now organizes birthday parties, field trips to nearby parks or the riverside, accompanies the children to clinics for medical check-ups and often finds basic things like clothing for them.
“Many times, the children see other kids at school who have things like necklaces or wallets or pencils, and they want them, too,” Phalla says. “A few months ago, one girl was very sad because she wanted a necklace, so the next day we went to the market and bought her and all the girls at the home a necklace because it would be unkind to buy a necklace for only one child. We had to do this quickly because sometimes the children are not alive for a long time.”
Losing a child is the hardest part of the job, Phalla says. He deals with the pain by thinking of the afterlife. Calling himself Buddhist and “a little Christian,” Phalla says he believes the children with HIV/AIDS have done nothing wrong in this life, and will go to heaven. So far, 15 children have died since he starting working at Little Sprouts.
“The ones who die, we are always very upset, but we still have to work.”
•For more information on how to help the Little Sprouts program, please e-mail John Tucker at [email protected].
David – Maybe a box here saying if people want to hlep Maryknolls, how they can assist, who they can call?
