Project Phongsali 2011: In one small village four children have recently died. Not bombs… illness. But what illness?

Week Four

Day Twenty-Eight:

As our deminers continued clearing the schoolyard in Kiew Ka Cham village I observed four men working in a stand of trees not far away. When I first spotted them, they were taking turns with a shovel, either digging a hole or leveling a mound; I didn’t have a clear view through the trees. Later, it appeared as though they were constructing either a tiny house or a model of a house — in any case, a wooden structure with four walls and a roof. Eventually, my curiosity demanded that I walked over to investigate.

When I asked Yai to accompany me as interpreter he, uncharacteristically, begged off; he’d already summed up the situation and deduced that the wooded area was a graveyard. Although an avowed agnostic, Yai was disinclined to venture where spirits of the dead might be hovering.

What I learned on my own was that the villagers were preparing the burial site for a young child who died earlier in the day. To my surprise, the newly constructed spirit house sat near three other freshly dug graves.

When I asked the village teacher if he knew the child who had died he said that he knew the family but not the child, an infant just six weeks old. He then shared the alarming news that two other children had died in the last week and yet another earlier in the month.

The teacher said that all four children showed the same symptoms before they died: fever, malaise, and cough. He didn’t know whether any of the families had taken their sick children to the district hospital in Muang May. All had died quickly after becoming ill.

This village has a population of 429 people. Males number 210; women 219. Four children dying out of a population so small and all showing the same symptoms, is alarming to me.

The teacher told me that the village is thinking of instituting a quarantine while they conduct a spirit ceremony. (The villagers are ethnic Phu Noi and are animist, not Buddhist). For the moment, traffic into and out of the village is occurring without interruption. The teacher said that since the schoolyard is on the extreme edge of the village, if quarantine is introduced, we will probably be permitted to continue our work.