What ever happened to Ponleu?

When I first met Ponleu, he seemed like your average 12-year old Khmer boy.

The younger brother of my friend Loy (pictured), Ponleu flashed the easy smile of a bright young lad who had been blessed with academic talent (he was always top of his class at school) and the security of a loving family.

What happened to this little boy during the space of two weeks last Summer was one the saddest experiences of our time here in Cambodia.

It all started when Loy happened to mention one day that his brother was sick. In the past week, he had developed flu-like symptoms, including aching bones and a rising fever. Loy described how earlier that day they had taken Ponleu to see the Doctor, who had given him an injection in attempt to reduce the symptoms. They were waiting to see if he would get better.

The next time I saw Loy, he was standing outside the Kantha Bopha Children's Hospital in Phnom Penh, tears rolling down his face as he explained what had happened since we last met.

Immediately after receiving the injection, Ponleu appeared to recover his health. But this glimmer of hope was quickly dashed when, only a few days later, his symptoms returned, this time with a nasty rash and belaboured breathing.

Ponleu had developed a severe allergic reaction to the injection and he was rushed to hospital in the morning.By the time we arrived in the afternoon, he was on a ventilator, slipping in and out of consciousness and beginning to show signs of liver and kidney failure.

We talked, we prayed, we hoped, we willed. We even asked the Doctor whether we could pay for him to be evacuated to Bangkok to receive specialist treatment. But it was too late. Within 48 hours, first his kidney, then his liver and finally his heart failed and he passed away.

The shock of seeing the life of a healthy, 12-year old boy snatched away in the matter of just a few days has been hard for all of us to comprehend.

There have been tears and heartfelt conversations. We have had a funeral and a cremation. But even after all these things, the burning question of still remains.

Why did this happen?

For most of Ponleu's family, Buddhists who also worship the spirits of their dead ancestors, the answer is simple: "It was meant to be. It was the fate of the gods."

For Loy, a Christian since for the past five years, the answer is simple too: "God took him. It was his time to go."

The spiritual dimension of what happened to Ponleu we will never fully know. But what we have since learnt of the physical aspect of why he died has been almost as painful as the realisation that he is no longer with us.

It was a headline in a newspaper article two weeks later that caught my attention and confirmed my worst fears about what had really happened to Ponleu. The headline read "Dengue Disaster" and the article outlined how a dengue epidemic was gripping Cambodia and affecting thousands of children.

The article explained how between January and August 2007, nearly 20,000 "severe cases" of dengue had been treated at the three privately-funded Kantha Bopha Children's Hospitals in Cambodia.

As well as describing the symptoms of dengue - the same symptoms that Loy had described Ponleu as having - the article went on to detail how 181 of these children had died in the care of Kantha Bopha so far this year.

Then the awful truth that "95% of these patients died, not because of dengue symptoms, but because of liver failure and kidney failure. This was caused by intoxication, a result of drugs being wrongly administered by another Doctor."

The sad fact is that Ponleu's death was not inevitable nor necessary. The smiling 12-year old boy had contracted a disease which thousands of children contract every year in Cambodia - a disease which, though dangerous, is very treatable and should rarely result in death.

In the end, all the love in the world could not save Ponleu nor the other children mentioned in the article from the tragic mess that is Cambodia's healthcare system. We may never know the whole truth, but we are pretty sure that Ponleu died as a result of a severe allergic reaction caused by an injection given to him by an ill-trained Cambodian Doctor.

Our prayers for him were not answered, but we can still pray that others will not suffer the same fate.

In a place like Cambodia, these are big prayers. But we pray knowing that we have a big God - a God who sees the bigger picture, even when we can not.