Cambodian village gains hope from a child's healed heart

Davik Teng, 12, and her mother Sin Chhon, stand in the doorway of their new home, built with contributions by U.S. well-wishers. (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)

BATTAMBANG, CAMBODIA - Davik Teng does school work with her desk mate at Newton Thilay School on September 16, 2011. (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)

BATTAMBANG, CAMBODIA - Davik Teng, left, and her sister Davin Teng, make dinner in their new home on September 16, 2011. (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)

BATTAMBANG, CAMBODIA - Peter Chhun hugs Davik Teng before leaving her village on September 16, 2011. (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)

BATTAMBANG, CAMBODIA - Davik Teng plays a game of pick-up-sticks with friends during recess at Newton Thilay School on September 16, 2011. (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)

11/26/2011
By Greg Mellen Staff Writer
Long Beach Press Telegram

In 2008, Press-Telegram reporter Greg Mellen and photographer Jeff Gritchen traveled to Cambodia with the Long Beach-based nonprofit Hearts Without Boundaries and chronicled in pictures, video and words the journey of Davik Teng, the nonprofit's first patient, from her rural home to the U.S. for life-extending open-heart surgery. Since then, several other children have also made similar journeys.

Earlier this year, Mellen and Gritchen returned to Cambodia to check on the children and their new lives. The first part of the series appears today, and the second part will appear Monday.

SVAY CHROM, Cambodia - Prosperity has come to this tiny hamlet nestled off a dirt road near Battambang, Cambodia.

Of course, in this poverty-stricken nation, prosperity can be relative and incremental.

While cash may be in short supply here, there are other currencies. They are memory and hope.

This is a village that remembers how a little girl was saved from a slow spiral toward death and now represents something else - that miracles are possible, even in a desolate little village like Svay Chrom.

It is here where Davik Teng was born and has been raised. Nearly four years ago, she was slowly dying in a tiny, tilting bamboo hut. She was without hope, tucked away in a place few knew about.

Today Davik is strong and healthy, and her family compound has been upgraded. Davik's tiny hut has been replaced by a larger dwelling that is more like a real house. The same is true for her cousins next door.

Otherwise, life remains the same. There is still no electricity or running water. The villagers still fill their cisterns with water from a small, murky pond.

Chickens still run pell-mell through the compound. Employment is scarce and what there is barely pays - $2 a day or less. Several of the men in the village, those young and healthy enough, have gone to Thailand to seek work.

Time passes, the seasons roll by marked by the rainy and dry seasons, elders die and children are born. Life in Svay Chrom goes on, in some ways the same, but always in flux.

But villagers here know lives can change in an instant. They've seen it.

Profound changes for girl

For Davik and her family, life turned on a dime into something none of them could have imagined in the dark years when Davik's damaged, overworked heart fought a losing battle.

Davik suffered from a birth defect in her heart, a hole through which blood sloshed between the ventricle chambers. The hole, or ventricular septal defect, forced her heart to pump much harder to circulate and oxygenate blood through the lungs. Eventually the defect causes excessive tension and irreparable damage to the lungs and can also result in congestive heart failure.

Dr. Vaughn Starnes, who would repair Davik's heart, said she would likely have died in her 30s without the open-heart operation she underwent in 2008 in Los Angeles.

The defect made breathing hard, deprived Davik of energy and kept her weight low. As a result, while her cousins and village children played and went to school, Davik stayed home alone in a corner of the small tilting hut.

With the help of Long Beach nonprofit Hearts Without Boundaries, which discovered the girl by chance, Davik was brought to the United States and underwent surgery at Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

Now 12 years old, Davik is a tall, healthy preteen. She attends classes in nearby Battambang, at the Newton Thilay School, thanks to help from donors in the United States.

She shows virtually no effects from the defect except for a long thin scar that snakes down from her collarbone.

School days

There is a whir of activity at the Newton Thilay School on a typical day. There are 11 students in Davik's Khmer class. Davik towers over most of her fourth-grade classmates. She is even taller than her teacher.

Because of the years missed due to her heart defect, Davik is trying to catch up academically.

Even among her classmates who are two and three years younger, she has to work to keep up.

This is her first year of consistent formal schooling, and although she is behind, Davik is making strides.

"She works hard," says Davik's new Khmer teacher Sorth Seert.

On this day the children are studying the Asian fable of the rabbit and the snail.

In the tale, a rabbit is outwitted in a race by a group of snails, who space themselves along a course so that each time the confounded rabbit looks up, it sees a snail far ahead in the distance and can never catch up and is eventually worn out and defeated.

In class, students act out a rendition of the fable. Davik plays the rabbit, unaware of any seeming irony.

In Cambodia, education is still only beginning to emerge from its dismantling during the deadly Khmer Rouge era. Public schools are notoriously unreliable and corrupt, with teachers requiring payment to give students the lessons they need to advance.

Newton Thilay is a midlevel private school that doesn't meet the academic standards of elite institutions but far exceeds public schools.

Bunra Rath, the branch manager of the school, says it is for "poor and middle-class students."

Davik's tuition and school supplies, which cost about $420 per year, are picked up by donors in the U.S.

Even that modest amount is well beyond what her family can afford. Before Davik's chance encounter with her benefactors, Newton Thilay might as well have been in another universe to Davik and the millions of children just like her.

The Friday school day ends with a "respect the flag," celebration. Kids sing the Cambodian national anthem, do calisthenics and sing, in English, "If You're Happy and You Know It."

Life back in the village

This is Davik's new life, a life of learning, making new friends, expanded horizons and facing opportunities once unfathomable.

It is in Svay Chrom where the physical manifestations of change are most apparent.

The tiny tilting, bamboo hut where Davik grew up is gone.

In its place is a roomy, whitewashed structure with a rough-hewn brick foundation, white walls and a corrugated tin roof.

The floor is still dirt and there are no utilities, but it is unrecognizable compared with the old home.

Inside there is actually headroom along with two full-sized beds and a dresser/display case stuffed with clothes, toys, inexpensive jewelry and other bric-a-brac Davik received during her stay in the United States.

Across a wall in the room are newspaper clippings, tearsheets and photographs from the Press-Telegram, which chronicled Davik's journey from Cambodia to the United States.

When Davik and her mother, Sin Chhon, first returned to Svay Chrom in 2008, the front door had been torn off the bamboo hut in the previous rainy season.

The family had cash provided by well-wishers in the U.S. and Sin decided to have the new house built.

In addition to the roomy main room, there is a small kitchen area off the back and an enclosed outhouse nearby.

The other addition to the household is Ravith Rom, Davik's 11-month-old half- brother. Soon after returning to Cambodia, Sin remarried. She is currently a stay-at-home mom.

"Life is a little better after the trip (to the U.S.)," Sin says through translation. "You can see I built a new house. I can find enough money for food, but I don't have any extra money."

Although the family still struggles with poverty, it at least now has hope.

"It was not just a trip to repair a heart," Sin says of Davik's journey. "If she hadn't been found, it was only a matter of time. It was a long death sentence. There's no way I could have afforded to find a cure and send her to school. There's no way."

Sin and Davik are not the only ones to benefit from the trip to the United States.

Davik's older sister Davin, often overlooked in her sister's tale, is back in school.

The 16-year-old had started working in construction, like her mother once had, before U.S. donors provided money to allow her to finish her studies in public school.

Davik's cousins, who live next door, also have rebuilt their bamboo house thanks to several hundred dollars they received from U.S. donors. That house, like Sin's, has the white walls and tin roof, which replaced the old bamboo.

Otherwise, the pace of life remains the same as Davik and Sin's U.S. adventure slowly dissolves into the fabric of life, like a phantasmal story from a different existence.

"I talk to my friends and tell them I went to America and had my heart fixed," Davik says through translation. "Some kids don't believe me, but I just show them my (scar)."

Sin still dreams about the U.S., about the lights, the activity.

The memories, naturally, are laced with a certain melancholy for a lifestyle she experienced only briefly.

"Of course it's hard to adjust to life (in Cambodia) after. I often told people how great it was. How it was light, unlike here where it's dark.

"I know I don't have hope (of going back.) I hope one day Davik has a chance to go and continue her education there."

Davik is asked to demonstrate some of her new-found English skills.

Somewhat abashed, she launches into a song about fruit salad to the tune of "Frere Jacques."

It is at once an odd confluence of the girl Davik was and the teen she is becoming.

As the light fades into early evening and storm clouds scuttle in from the west, the time for visiting is over. There is dinner to be made, everyday life to return to.

Davik, Sin and visitors share an awkward moment before the visitors decide it is time to leave.

As she looks ahead to an uncertain future, one that will likely be decided as much by those who came to her rescue as anything she has power over, Davik understands on some level that she has a role to play and a responsibility in whatever the future holds, not only for her but her family in Svay Chrom.

"I study hard now and maybe one day I can have a good job," Davik says.

It may not sound like a lot, but in Cambodia, where prosperity and sometimes the life of a little girl can be tenuous, it is everything.

greg.mellen@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1291