One of the few Khmer words Stephen Sumner knows is\u00a0chhue<\/em>. It means \u2018pain\u2019, and it\u2019s something Cambodian people know a lot about from their three-decade-long civil war. Stephen, 53, is a brawny Canadian with an ebullient, even boisterous, manner. This is his third time here in as many years. He rides around on a longtail bicycle with a stack of lightweight mirrors behind the saddle, going to villages, hospitals and physical rehabilitation centres looking for people who have lost their limbs.<\/p>\n Just as the pain of war lingers long after it is over, so an amputee\u2019s pain can persist long after the limb has gone. It can be harrowing and difficult to treat with medication or surgery. Stephen helps people deal with their phantom pain, and he does it with mirrors.<\/p>\n We\u2019re in Spean Tomneap village in the Battambang province of north-western Cambodia \u2013 the most heavily mined region in one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. We\u2019ve driven up along a mud road lined by fields and houses surrounded by tangled greenery. Stephen is perched on the landing near the staircase of a weathered wooden house on stilts. Chickens scurry about. A few onlookers gather.<\/p>\n In front of Stephen on an upturned pail sits Ven Phath, a soft-spoken, middle-aged father of five. His left trouser leg is rolled up to reveal a stump below the knee, the result of stepping on a mine in 1983. A plasticky prosthetic leg lies beside him.<\/p>\n Ven Phath still experiences pain in his missing foot, and Stephen is showing him how to position a mirror against the inside of his left leg, so the reflection of the right makes it look like both are still intact. \u201cLook. Move. Imagine,\u201d Stephen instructs through an interpreter.<\/p>\n After a couple of minutes of watching his virtual left foot moving, as if revving an imaginary accelerator, Ven Phath smiles and looks up. He says he feels better already. \u201cTell him,\u201d Stephen says to the interpreter, \u201cif you do this twice a day, ten minutes per session, for five weeks, then\u00a0chhub chhue<\/em>.\u201d Pain stop.<\/p>\nReference:<\/h4>\n
\n