A mother’s relief

Cambodian teen reunites with kin after medical work in Hawaii

STORY SUMMARY »

A 15-year-old Cambodian girl's life was forever changed by the year she spent in Hawaii.

Multimedia: » Video: Sithan's reunion » Video: Sithan's future » Watch the slideshow "Sithan's Journey" Part 1 of this series » A girl's arduous path to be able to walk From 2007: Sithan's journey begins Trip of a lifetime Oil-lamp burns disfigured her leg, but a trek to Honolulu could change a Cambodian teen's life Video: Sithan leaves Cambodia for Honolulu

Sithan Leam walked for the first time after surgery and physical therapy last year at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Honolulu.

She suffered a severe burn as an infant, and when the wound healed, scar tissue fused her foot and calf to her thigh. Star-Bulletin readers helped raise money to bring Sithan to Honolulu for treatment.

She returned to Cambodia for an emotional reunion with her mother in the capital, Phnom Penh. But instead of returning to her family and the rural village with no electricity or running water where she grew up, Sithan is starting on a long road to an education and a better life.

Reporter Craig Gima traveled to Sithan's village of Anglong Thor in 2006 to first tell her story, and he returned to Cambodia in January to cover Sithan's journey home.

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FULL STORY »

SECOND OF TWO PARTS

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia » When Sithan Liem arrived in Cambodia after a 36-hour journey from Honolulu, the one person she wanted to see was not at the airport.

On the Web » For information on Medicorps, the charity that brought Sithan to Hawaii, go to www.medicorps.org. » For information on the Shriners Hospital for Children, visit www.shrinershq.org/Hospitals/Honolulu.

Her mother was still on her way, after leaving at dawn to travel two hours on a motor scooter over bumpy dirt roads from the family's home village of Anglong Thor to Kampong Thom, the provincial capital, and then a three-hour bus ride to Phnom Penh.

The 15-year-old girl was met instead by a Cambodian television crew, a Star-Bulletin reporter and Gunther Hintz, leader of the charity Medicorps, which brought Sithan to Honolulu for surgery that enabled her to walk for the first time.

A crowd gathered as Sithan answered questions from the news crew, recalling how she suffered a severe burn on her left leg when she was 5 months old; how scar tissue fused her foot to her thigh; how people raised money to bring her to Honolulu for surgery; and how it feels to be home after nearly a year.

When asked, Sithan showed the camera the prosthetic foot and knee brace that enable her to walk. Because her leg did not develop properly, her left leg is shorter than her right, and the brace supports her knee.

After leaving the airport, Sithan waited in a guest room at the Future Light Orphanage, a charity supported by the Sunrise Rotary Club of Honolulu. She picked at her lunch and watched Korean soap operas on television.

Even though Sithan had only about six hours of sleep during layovers in Japan and Bangkok, she was not ready for a nap.

TEARFUL REUNION

On the ride to the orphanage, Sithan's mother said she had a hard time sleeping the night before.

"I was so excited, hoping to see her," Tim Thea said though a translator, adding that she was thankful to the donors and doctors and "happy beyond words" to see her daughter again.

When Tim Thea stepped out of the van, Sithan was nowhere to be seen.

Then, a door opened and Sithan walked out of her room.

Tim Thea said the first thing she looked at was Sithan's legs; it was the first time she had ever seen her daughter walk.

There were tears in Tim Thea's eyes. Sithan smiled and held her mother tight.

"I told you, Sithan," said Deborah Quigley of Airline Ambassadors, a charity made up of airline employees that provided Sithan's flight home. Quigley accompanied Sithan to Cambodia and waited with her until her mother arrived. "I told you your mother would cry. Oh, my goodness."

Sithan made a face that quickly turned back into a smile as she refused to let her mother go.

KINDNESS TO A BEGGAR

On a bus the next day, Sithan and her mother left the congestion and new construction of Phnom Penh for the countryside.

Cattle grazed in rice fields brown and drying in the sun, and naked children played in canals shaded by sugar palm trees.

The passing tableau reminded Sithan of her village, a place where her father's family has worked the land for as long as anyone can remember; a place without electricity or running water. Until she came to Hawaii, it was the only life Sithan had known.

At a rest stop, a beggar with an amputated leg waited by the bus door with his hands out. Sithan stopped and gave him money. She also gave her mother and her uncle money before her uncle got off the bus in Kampong Thom to return to the family village. Sithan stayed on the bus, headed for the city of Siem Reap.

In Sithan's knapsack was a composition notebook with schoolwork. When asked whether she opened it during the bus ride, Sithan said no.

Before Sithan left Hawaii, Rinou Kong, her guardian in Honolulu, told her that money had been raised to help her with her education but that they were not giving it to her yet.

"If you go to school, you'll get the money," he said. "If you don't go to school, you're cut off."

In an interview, Sithan was asked, "Do you want to go to school?"

"Yes," she answered.

"Do you want to live in the city or in the country?"

"The city," Sithan answered.

"What do you want to do?"

At first, Sithan said she did not know, then she said perhaps office work.

But when asked if she would rather be a teacher in a village like the one she grew up in, Sithan's face brightened and she answered yes.

Becoming a teacher will take years of study for Sithan, who left the school in the second grade and cannot read or write.

Sok Oeuy, a Cambodian boy who was treated at Shriners in 2001, knows what Sithan is going through.

Oeuy returned to Cambodia at age 14, and is only now entering high school at age 20. He has learned some computer skills and was working part time at Medicorps, the charity that brought him and Sithan to Hawaii, to help pay for his education. He wants to continue to college and perhaps get a marketing degree.

"When I come back from Hawaii, I go to my village, and my village don't have the school. Just go to the farm. Go to feeding your cow and don't have study," Oeuy said.

During a visit, Oeuy told Sithan to stay in Siem Reap and keep working on her English and Khmer language skills.

"If you want to go back to the country, then there's no school, no practice English. It's easy to forget," he told her.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Sithan has a long and difficult journey ahead of her, said Dr. Gunther Hintz, a former Honolulu plastic surgeon who founded Medicorps.

It will likely take two years before Sithan can read and write enough Khmer to go to high school, Hintz said. If she wants to get a college education and become a teacher, she will be in school until she is at least 25.

Medicorps is raising money to help pay for Sithan's room and board and her education. The charity will train Sithan in a trade, perhaps haircutting at first, so she can support herself. The Hawaii Cambodian community has also promised to pay for Sithan's schooling.

Medicorps, Hintz said, will try to impress upon Sithan that because she has benefited from other people's help, she needs to get an education and eventually give back to her community.

But not everyone makes it.

"Sometimes the smartest of them will go on the streets (to beg) because they will make more money than they ever could with an education," Hintz said.

Sithan could get married and have children, and that could also affect her schooling. Or she might decide she would rather return to her village and her family.

"I think physically for Sithan to go back to her village will not be all that difficult. However, mentally and emotionally it will be very much of a challenge," Hintz said, "because she now has experienced Western society and she has lived in a big-city environment in America for a year.

"So now, going back to the village where everything revolves around sunrise and sunset and the cows and the rice fields, it leaves her un-stimulated, and probably she will get very depressed after a period of time."

Sithan's mother said she wants her daughter to get an education.

None of her other children has had the opportunity to go to school, Tim Thea said. They are too poor, and school is too far away and too expensive, she said.

Sithan's older sister left the farm for a while last year to work in a garment factory in Phnom Penh, Tim Thea said. But the pay was too low and the cost of living in the city too high, so she returned home. Sithan will not be a garment worker, Tim Thea said.

Tim Thea says the family's hopes for a better life now lie on Sithan's tiny shoulders, on a girl that even her family once nicknamed "A Khvin," or "Cripple."

Asked whether she understood the responsibility she now faces, Sithan gave a shy smile, hid her face and did not know what to say.

Charity teaches Sithan to use prosthesis

Sithan Leam spent several weeks at Handicap International in Siem Reap, a city next to the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat.

The charity, originally founded to help land-mine victims, fitted Leam with a new foot prosthesis.

She was also able to practice how to use her new prosthesis in a village environment. Handicapped International has equipment set up much like a playground, which simulates conditions in a rural village such as wooden suspension bridges, rocks and muddy fields.

Leam is still in Siem Reap, taking Khmer and English classes through Medicorps, the charity that brought her to Hawaii.

Her older sister Sithath has joined her in Siem Reap and is working at Medicorps as a housekeeper and also is taking English classes.

So far, Sithan has not gone back to visit her home village.