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3 Year Old Boy Revered As Healer
Ray Rong, 3, blesses bottles of water in Svay Chrum village, Prey Veng province. Hundreds of people come to see the child and get the water every day, believing it can heal their illnesses. Photograph: Heng Chivoan/Phnom Penh PostEven before dawn, a few hundred people have gathered to sit in line, reminiscent of the queues of waiting patients which snakes outside the grounds of the Kantha Bopha Hospital during pandemics.
They have travelled from different cities and provinces to get a chance to be healed by Ray Rong, a resident of Prey Veng’s Svay Chrum village. Rong is known far and wide as one of the best healers in the area, and the blessing water and herbal medicines he gives to patients are claimed to defeat a hundred different kinds of diseases. Many other traditional healers proffer the same goods, but there’s one important difference: Rong is only three years old.
Still too young to speak clearly, Ray Rong is the third child of five to Tep Saray and Un Saroeurn, a pair of impoverished farmers.
In the last couple of months, the boy has risen to fame on the back of claims that he has healed hundreds of people. Every day, at least two hundred patients, including some from across the border of nearby Vietnam, wait outside his house to get blessed water and medicine. Some of Rong’s patients travel hundreds of kilometres and spend several nights sleeping near the toddler’s house in the hopes of getting a chance to meet him.
The 60-year-old Yay Hom was one of Ray Rong’s patients, who brought incense, candles, cake and pure drinking water as an offering to the child healer.
“I have to wait for my turn to be called in and see the healer,” she says. “I have suffered from diabetes for 10 years. My blood sugar level was never less than 410 mg/dL.” (Healthy blood sugar levels range from 70-180 milligrams per decilitre.) “I took medication and saw other doctors, but I never felt better. After the holy child gave me magic water to drink and some fig fruits, my blood sugar level dropped to 110 mg/dL.”
Srey Sokhon, another patient from Phnom Penh, told 7Days that she rented a nearby house for four nights while waiting for her turn to be called in.
“I suffered from a condition that made my whole body go numb,” she says. “I visited many famous doctors in the cities, but it never got better. After I asted the holy water, I felt much better and I was able to eat properly.”
