Help the children who are victims of war at the Kim Phuc Foundation International [find the link at the end of this story]
Years ago in Gander, Newfoundland, a young Vietnamese woman disembarked from a plane refuelling from Moscow to Cuba and asked for asylum in Canada. Her name is Kim Phuc and she was the girl on the famous 1972 photograph that brought the world's attention to the horrors of the Vietnam war.
If there was one photograph that captured the horrific nature of all wars, one photograph that tore at our collective conscience, it was the picture of a nine year old girl, running naked down a road, screaming in agony from the jellied gasoline coating her body and burning through skin and muscle down to the bone. According the the eyewitness account of Wolfgang P. May, Advisor of a South Vietnamese battallion in Trung Lap, her village, a few miles NW of Saigon, was bombed with napalm on the 8th of July 1972, and the little girl was among the victims. It would take 14 years and 17 operations to save her life and restore her appearance. And when she finally felt well enough to put it behind her, that very photograph would make her a victim, all over again.
"Napalm is the worst pain that can ever be imagined. It is to feel that you are burning under your skin. I would faint each time that my nurses submerged my body in the healing sollution and started to cut away the dead skin", expalins Kim.
Kim's Story is both a universal and a deeply personal story. It parallells the fate of Vietnam itself. Both Kim's suffering, and her courageous recovery mirrors the plight of a whole people during and after the war. It is also the story of how one little girl's tragedy would be used by all sides. Peace activists, journalists from all over the world, and Vietnamese government officials saw Kim as a symbol to be used, not a person. Therefore, she has tried over the years to tell her story just once as a testimony, and then, she wanted to move on. That wasn't possible.
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