In hospitals and health centres throughout the country, unwanted children are abandoned. One facility is dedicating itself to keeping them out of orphanages by convincing parents to take their infants back.

Two days after giving birth, Sek Khorn brought her baby to Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC) on a Tuesday evening in September 2012. She didn’t have an appointment, nor did she approach a doctor – instead striking up a conversation with a woman whose child was in the intensive care unit. Eventually, Khorn asked the woman to hold her infant so that she could go to the restroom. The woman took the baby in her arms, and Khorn hurried out, leaving the hospital for good.

Khorn’s child had been born with Down syndrome and with a cleft palate, the likely reasons behind the abandonment, said Sorn Sokchea, a senior technical officer with the hospital’s social work unit.

“She didn’t ask us for help . . . She planned to drop responsibility of taking care of the child,” he said.

Such abandonment of children remains a relatively common phenomenon in Cambodia – so much so that AHC has its own branch of its social work unit devoted to addressing cases of children left at the hospital, the only facility to do so in the country despite evidence of a widespread problem.

Following the abandonment, staff in the hospital’s 13-member social work department, of which two members focus solely on child abandonment cases, contacted 192 health centres in four provinces – Siem Reap, Banteay Meanchey, Oddar Meanchey and Battambang – in an effort to trace down the mother via the health centre where she gave birth to the child.

After two weeks, they found her.

LONG ANALYSIS TO BE READ HERE http://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend/finding-home-children-left-behind-0

 

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