‘Little yellow flower’ starts to bloom

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32474, 8 December 1970, Page 6

‘Little yellow flower’ starts to bloom

(H.Z.P.A. Staff Correspondent) QUI NHON (Vietnam). Nguyen TN Tuyet Mather name mean* "Little Yellow Flower, which bloom* In th* spring”—it only Just beginning to bloom. One of the innocent victim* of th* Vietnam war that ha* plagued her unknown mother** generation, little Mai was bom two month* premature and abandoned at a week old. Weighing little more than 21b, she was a microscopic skeleton, blue, breathless, and sickly when she was found at the gate of a Qui Nhon orphanage, apparently cast aside by a distraught mother who could not feed her.

Today, almost five month* old, she tips the scales at 81b Boz, and gurgles with pleasure at the young New Zealand nurse who ruffles her curly, black hair. Little Mai is blooming in her white cot, with a blue plastic fish strung between the bars, in the Save-the-Children Fund’s home at Qui Nhon, 260 miles north-east of Saigon. “It was touch and go whether she would live,” said Nurse J. Couchman, of Wellington, who began working at the home a few days before little Mai came into the world. “But she has made one of the most startling changes I have ever seen.”

In a nearby cot lies Tran Thl San, three months old, and monkey-like with her baby skin wrinkled like that of an old woman. Three week* ago she weighed only 31b and coughed, morning and night. "How she has survived this long, I’ll never know,” say* Miss Couchman. But away from the refugee camp where she was bom, Tran Thl San ha* put on 21b and promise* to live at least a little longer. "Little Yellow Flower” and little San graphically illustrate the other side of the Vietnam war. They have not been tttuck by bullets or grenade fragments, or had teir tiny bodies shattered by mine*. But they are every bit as pathetic victims of the war a* the nation's hundreds of thousands of battle casualties.

They owe their survival to Miss Couchman, another New Zealand nurse. Miss D. Turver, and an Australian and two British girls who look after them ana 82 other sick children at the Spruce Home in Qui Nhon, South Vietnam's fourth largest city. But most of all they owe their strengthening grip on life to two things that are common as dir and water to mothers and babies in New Zealand, but as rare and precious as gold in war-tom Vietnam—milk and baby cereals.