Healing Hearts in Cambodia

How a trip to Siem Reap changed one TODAY producer's perspective on life
By Lauren Ina
Producer
TODAY

In Siem Reap, Cambodia, the first thing that hits you is the heat. You cannot stand in one place without sweat pouring down your back, dust wafting up your nose and diesel fuel stinging your eyes.
But if you wipe your brow and adjust your vision you will look into the eyes of beautiful, kind and gentle people. The brutal regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge might have destroyed the country, but the Cambodian spirit is alive and well.
We spent 10 days in Siem Reap, Cambodia, documenting a Variety Children’s Lifeline heart surgery mission at Angkor Hospital for Children. A team of American doctors from UCSD/Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego donated their vacation time to perform 21 heart surgeries on children suffering from patent ductus arterious (PDA), a leaky heart condition which causes the lungs to fill with blood. Most Cambodian children with this condition will die prematurely; a heart surgery there costs $2,000 — that’s what the average family will make in 5 ½ years.
But a simple, half-hour procedure can save their lives and they leave the hospital cured after two days.
Two lucky sisters, age 4 and 7, had their hearts repaired during the mission. The girls’ mother was about to give them up for adoption because she couldn’t afford their medicines anymore. ($2.50 a day, what the average person spends at Starbucks).
We took several of the children home to their villages, not just to tell their story, but because they would have otherwise ridden on the back of a motorbike on dusty, bumpy dirt roads — not an ideal journey home right after heart surgery. One mother told us she lived 30 minutes away from the hospital. We loaded her and her 4-year-old daughter Chreb into one of our cars and started driving. And driving and driving and driving. Eventually the road narrowed and we reached a lake. She got out of the car and said, “this is where I take boat.”
Everyone on our team started laughing (the best medicine since we were dehydrated and didn’t eat lunch) and we persevered. Chreb, her mother and driver piled into our SUV to cross a strip of land as wide as the Toyota tires. At one point I looked out the window and saw the back of a water buffalo.
At literally the end of the road, we could travel no further. An entire village came out to see the Americans with the big car and lots of cameras. At that moment, fate stepped in and a tractor with two empty seats drove by. We asked the driver of the tractor if he knew where Chreb lived and could navigate the bridge over the lake. He smiled a toothless smile and said yes. I will always remember tiny Chreb waving goodbye from the tractor, clutching the teddy bear I had given her.
When you travel and produce these kinds of stories there is always an enormous gap between the fast-paced world we live in and a tiny village in the mountains of a place like Cambodia. But the one bridge for me is always the face of a child, smiling with bright eyes. It is a reminder to be thankful for everything I have, and mindful of the gigantic world out there that I want people to know about.
End note: The photographers on this trip were my NBC colleagues, editor Ann Shannon and editor Peter Chhun, a native Cambodian. Peter made this trip for us that much more special not just for his outstanding creative eye and camera work, but because he bridged the cultural gap with the parents and children. His passion to help his country recover from years of loss is tireless.