Villagers Turn to the ‘Ting Mong’ For a Retreat From Sickness
po peal khe village, Battambang province – Residents here turned to an old friend when dengue cases surfaced last month and fears circulated that cholera had infiltrated this Route 5 village.
But the old friend wasn’t the family doctor. It was the “ting mong”—homemade scarecrows stuffed with straw or grass and clothed in old linens. Each is posted like a haunted sentry or welcoming angel to the side of a home’s front gate.
“I think that putting up the ting mong could help a little bit if you mix it with medicine,” said Sorn Chan, a mother of five children, all of whom are sick with dengue. “It helps on the spiritual side.”
They carry sticks in a threatening manner or lean on them like canes. One ting mong even points a stick unmistakeably like a soldier would an AK-47. They sulk behind scowls drawn on paper masks or let their straw spill grotesquely out from beneath cowls or kramas.
They slump lethargically against trees or lean forwards menacingly. They are bashful in the shade of overhanging leaves or bravely jut sticks and arms into the dirt paths leading up to the small, wooden homes here.
The ting mong, villagers say, is a cure-all for afflictions ferried in by bad spirits. Doctors say it is part of the fabric of superstition and localized traditional cures that dominate much of rural Cambodian life. In the prime rice-growing months of September and October, families shift the ting mong to the fields to warn away crows.
Sorn Chan put her ting mong up last month after her children began falling ill, one by one. The children have received medicine or injections from public health authorities, but she feared that wouldn’t be enough.
“My husband had a bad dream also,” she said, explaining that in the dream, he saw people who wanted to take his children away to feed them. They believe the people in the dream are bad spirits that would kill their children and take their spirits, she elaborated.
Here in Po Peal Khe village, 18 km north of Battambang town, people’s crops are dying for lack of rain. The people lead lower-class lives so 10,000 riel for their child’s three days in a public hospital is a lot of money. Over $30 for treatment in a private hospital is even less affordable for farmers. Most families here have at least one ting mong, some have two.
Doctors in Battambang town have found that 3 percent of children have dengue, but they say that figure is a huge underestimate. “The data we can collect…is very limited,” said Oscar Barreneche, a Colombian doctor working for Medecins Sans Frontieres.
Finding treatment for a sick child here is an “economic burden” to a family, he said, which keeps some families from seeking medical help until it’s too late.
“When they arrive at the hospital, it’s pretty late, so the rate of mortality is pretty high,” said Dr Ros Seyha, the provincial malaria and dengue program manager for the Ministry of Health. He estimates that 10 to 14 percent of dengue patients at Battambang Provincial Hospital die—the highest death for rate dengue victims in the country.
This year’s dengue epidemic, which is generally an urban virus, is comparable to the worst years in recent memory in Battambang, Ros Seyha said. While cholera was reported in the crowded and filthy western border town of Poipet, and a few cases have appeared in Phnom Penh, no cases of the infectious bacteria have been reported in Battambang town or nearby areas.
Asked whether the ting mong helps prevent contraction of dengue, Barreneche jerked his head to the north. “Ask them,” he said.
Most people questioned said the ting mong help. At least one man said they didn’t. “I don’t believe the ting mong can help make this thing any better,” said Po Peal Khe villager Mil Ma of his grandson’s dengue fever.
Do What They Do
As boys growing up, Ros Seyha and Dr Ou Vun, a medical coordinator with Medecins Sans Frontieres in Phnom Penh, both used the ting mong—in Kompong Cham and Takeo provinces, respectively.
Ou Vun’s family engaged in a series of customs to ward off disease as soon as one person in the village fell sick, he said.
He remembers a time in the 1950s when the deadly bacterium cholera had so deeply saturated the village’s population that one person there every day was dying from diarrhea-induced dehydration.
His family used to build ting mong as well as drew the likeness of the “jayan,” a fearsome face sketched in white paint at the gates of a house or on the large clay water storage containers. The family also used to gather its garbage and other debris from around the grounds and light a fire, “to show that we were strong,” he said.
With a record dengue fever epidemic plaguing Cambodia, Ou Vun and MSF engage in urban and rural prevention education programs.
In the city, MSF doctors tell people that dengue is mosquito-borne and that the ting mong does not prevent spirits from bringing bacteria or microbes into the home, Ou Vun said. “We say, ‘In the medical context, we cannot see any proof,’” he said.
Typical prevention education includes recommending use of mosquito nets, cleaning up the grounds of the home to eliminate the “dark spaces” in which mosquitos like to hide and scrubbing out water containers harboring bacteria or mosquito eggs.
In rural areas, MSF does not discourage the use of the ting mong. “Most of the time, when you’re not there, the ting mong is,” he said, explaining that villagers do not have a consistent exposure to modern medicine and thought.
What they have is traditional cures and superstitions, he said. Midwives and healers, who are known to prescribe the ting mong and treat patients with “magic,” are the medical experts at the village level, Ou Vun said. “If you want to be familiar to them, you must do what they do,” he sighed.
Po Peal Khe villagers say their decision to put up their own ting mong was because they were told it might help or because others in their village had done so. “People told each other to install the ting mong to prevent children from getting ill,” said Touch Thoeu, four of whose five children are sick with dengue and have diarrhea. “We have just been told to put it in, but I’m not sure if it has helped much.
“Most of the children in every house here got ill. My four children out of five [got ill] from fever and they always cry out in the night. Some children threw up blood.”
But Po Peal Khe is less rural than some areas in which MSF teaches prevention education. Villagers reported seeking a range of medical attention, from sending their children to public and private health centers to buying from local pharmacies or calling a traditional doctor to the home.
Most parents reported slight improvements in their children since the ting mong was put up and medical treatment was administered. They largely attribute the improvement to both sources.
Hollow Man
Neither Ros Seyha nor Ou Vun were sure how long the ting mong has been a Khmer tradition. But they were pretty sure it’s been a long time. “More than 100 years, 1,000 years maybe,” Ros Seyha said.
One elderly Po Peal Khe villager, 66-year-old Som Ny, said he had never seen the ting mong as a child. Senior Ministry of Health officials interviewed said they remember it vaguely from their childhoods, but did not know its previous history.
Pich Keo, acting director for the nation’s museums and libraries, said it is impossible to determine how long the ting mong has been used. “We cannot say that it has been used for 1,000 years or 100 years,” he said, “because we don’t have the documentation to back it up. It has not been written down.”
The ting mong, Pich Keo said, is one of many vessels for “Nhiet Ta,” a protection diety with roots in Theravada Buddhism dating back 1,000 years. In a sense, the ting mong is “an assistant” to Nhiet Ta, Pich Keo said.
One symbol of the diety are the stone lions at the gates of the Angkor Thom temple complex, north of Siem Reap town. Each pagoda, he said, contains some form of prayer altar to Nhiet Ta.
Literally, the phrase “ting mong” has no exact translation, but roughly means “scary toys,” or something that’s scary but not real. As a boy, Ou Vun’s parents told him the ting mong would “get” him if he was bad. They also told him it was there to protect them when he was afraid.
Used figuratively, the words can insinuate one of dubious character or one who is essentially broken. “If someone tells you, ‘you stand like a ting mong,’ it means something is not good in you,” Ou Vun said.
It refers someone who is a blank slate or an illiterate, Pich Keo said. It also implies a stupid person, a wooden or hollow man. It is soulless, a kind of Frankenstien. “We didn’t have enough people to guard the rice field, so we made a person,” Ou Vun said of his family when he was a child.
But it should not be surprising if there is a dark side to the protective amulets. After all, as Ou Vun explained, it was created out of the “shadow of a person.”
(Additional reporting by Kimsan Chantara)
