A Change of Guard

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Friday 9 December 2011

How my son drowned in flood-hit Cambodia: a mother’s story


Mao Sophat, whose two-year-old son drowned in September in Kampong Kramourn village in Cambodia's Prey Veng province, sits next to her grandmother. ALERTNET/Thin Lei Win

08 Dec 2011
Source: alertnet
By Thin Lei Win

PREY VENG, Cambodia (AlertNet) – When floods devastated Cambodia and killed close to 250 people this year, almost half of the casualties were children under 17 years of age. Many died as a result of drowning.

While infants are protected by their mothers, once they are old enough to walk, drowning becomes a major hazard and it is the single leading cause of death for children older than one in Cambodia, according to SwimSafe, a programme run by The Alliance for Safe Children.

AlertNet spoke to Mao Sophat, a 23-year-old mother whose two-year-old son drowned in September in Kampong Kramourn village in Prey Veng, one of the provinces most affected by the floods.

I was working at a garment factory in (the capital) Phnom Penh on September 19 when I received a call from my family telling me my son was very sick. They didn’t say he had died. I rushed back here in a taxi. It was only when I got here, around midday, that I found out he had drowned. My grandmother had gone to the pagoda so she left my son with my older sister. She was looking after her baby who was born only a month and a half ago. My parents are working in Thailand because they borrowed too much money and did not have enough to repay (the loan). My husband left when my son was about four months old and I have never heard from him. At around nine in the morning, my sister realised she’d lost sight of my son and started looking for him. They suspected he may have fallen into the water and went to look behind the house. The water level was very high there – more than the height of an adult – because of the pond and the paddy fields. But it was only calf level in the village. The water was full of flooded plants … they tried… to clear it but couldn’t find anything. Then at about 10, his body floated up to the surface. He was probably playing by himself, fell and drowned. He just knew how to run, not how to swim. He was not even speaking properly yet. Here, older and bigger kids who take their cows to graze know how to swim but not the younger ones. They are not aware of floods either. I had been worried about the floods when they hit in early September. I’d planned to come home and look after my son but it was time to get my salary so I waited and he drowned a few days before I could come back. I'd bought new clothes for him because he never had new ones and I was imagining him wearing them. I cried all the way in the taxi after I heard he is very ill and they couldn’t get him to a hospital. When I got here and found out what happened, I wanted to just hold my baby the whole day and night but it is bad luck to have a dead body in the house when you have a newborn (my sister’s). So we had to bury him on the same day. I've been working in Phnom Penh for four years. I stopped when I was pregnant with my son but went back to work when he was about 10 months old. I get about $65 a month and with overtime, my pay comes up to about $85. I returned to Phnom Penh two weeks after my son’s funeral. He is my only son. I had the baby alone and looked after him myself. I’m not sure I want to marry again. I want more kids but I’m really afraid of meeting the same kind of man. I sometimes compare myself to others. If they lose their husbands, they have their children. If they lose their children, they at least have their husbands. Me, I have neither. Not even my parents.

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