Peter Fritz Walter

Yami Peter Fritz Walter

Yami is a short story that plays in 1970s Thailand. Yami, a little village boy from Buriram, went with his family to Bangkok after the death of his father, where his mother gave birth to his sister Tania. In the hospital for giving birth to her third child, Tania, his mother, made the acquaintance of Dr. Kenny Tsanaga who later leaves his family to devote his life entirely to care for chronically sick native children. Dissatisfied with the mechanical routines in his job as a hospital pediatrician in Bangkok, he moves to Chiang Mai with his daughter Kani and after having adopted Yami informally as the boy expressed his wish to live with him and Kani instead of staying with his mother and her new partner. Here Kenny becomes the right hand of the director of a pediatric clinic, Dr. Patum Cheng, who devoted his life to curing the children of Mong and other mountain tribes in North Thailand from child asthma. The story illustrates in all detail some of the holistic medical techniques used to heal the children, which Dr. Cheng adapted from actual native healing techniques he had found practiced with the Mong in North Thailand and the cross-border Mong tribes in Vietnam and Laos.