More, More…

February 11th, 2010 by Kim Lam

The past few days at the Social Protection Agency, I’ve been working with Tam who is disabled pretty much all over his body. He is 27 years old. I work on helping him stretch out his limbs and massaging him to loosen up his tightened muscles. His limbs are very stiff. He can’t walk, he can’t sit up straight without someone helping him out. You just have to withstand the sweaty palms and stench. He can’t help it as sometimes he reeks of urine. There just doesn’t seem to be enough people to care for him.

As one of my previous blogs mentioned, he was a very capable person. He is happy whenever he sees the volunteers from GVN. His body is gnarled up; from his hands to his feet. He suffered this, I found out, from having a fever as a baby and never receiving proper medical attention. In the western world, we often take for granted the medical facilities we have even if one is poor. In Vietnam, if you are poor, you just can’t see the doctor unless there is some benefactor.

The session usually starts with me wheeling him to the therapy building. This is just an empty shell of a building with floor mats for exercise and therapy. I park his makeshift wheel chair, which resembles a push cart, in front of the therapy room. The seat belt restraints are unbuckled and the leg plank is lowered to the ground. Tam then wriggles his twisted body onto the floor and rolls onto the cushioned mat where we being his stretching exercises. His speech is garbled even in Vietnamese which makes comprehension the more difficult. Tam knows how to say “more, more” if he wants you to stretch him further. Although his body seems fragile, it is surprisingly strong but tough and tight. In the beginning I was worried that I would break his bones by applying too much pressure. Through the past few days, I’ve discovered that his body is able to take the pressure. He will shout out “more, more” until he feels the pain is too much and shouts, out “no more”. After his physio, his passion is to learn English. I prop him up against a ladder rung against the wall and unfold a table in front of him. The table has the English alphabet and I get him to recite the ABCs. He seems to have grasped the concept of most of the letters but a few seem to elude him. I’ve been doing this for several days with him and notice that he gets lost with the letters E, G, K, L and V. I work on mnemonics to help him remember these letters but sometimes it doesn’t seem to stick. Even though he speaks Vietnamese he was never schooled in it. It is unlikely that disabled children are offered the opportunity to learn Vietnamese. He also wants to learn Vietnamese but that is beyond me. If I have an Vietnamese intern to translate, I try to help him recite the Vietnamese alphabet.

Today after a brief tutorial with the ABCs, we played a 3 card game. I think this is an Asian poker type game. You get 3 cards and add up the points, the closest to 9 points wins. Face cards and 10s are worth 0 points. We went back and forth and even gambled some of his New Year’s lucky money as he wanted to and that’s what most Vietnamese people do with their lucky money. I ended losing a few USD to him but I didn’t mind. It brought him some laughter and joy along with a few other residents of the Social Protection Agency who joined us in the physio room. Sometimes I wish I can do “more” but this is the least I can do, bring a smile to his face…