Nursing Student Has 'a Story to Tell’

Chhan Touch

The day Chhan Touch best remembers is the day he would most like to forget.

It was April 17, 1975. He was 8 years old, standing on a balcony in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, watching the Khmer Rouge soldiers march into the city. There were hordes of them. They emptied the city in hours, murdering thousands — tens of thousands in the weeks to come. His sister was killed trying to make it to Thailand. A niece died of starvation. They murdered his brother-in-law. When he arrived with his family at the Mekong River, it was swollen with corpses. They were too thirsty not to drink.

“They shot them in the head, in the chest. I remember it vividly,” he would say later of the Khmer Rouge. “They looked at humans as a field of grass. The only way, in the Utopian society [they envisioned], was to kill all the grass.”

Today, more than 30 years later, he is somewhere he could never have dreamed: in Londonderry, N.H., a husband and father to two children; at Lowell Community Health Center as a nurse practitioner, where he treats many of his countrymen with the same horrific stories to tell (“I have never seen anybody so sick as this group, they stop caring for themselves, they fall apart”); and at UMass Lowell, where he is halfway through his PhD. in Nursing, thanks partly at least to the support and generosity of the school.

“Chhan is a very dedicated student, who has overcome incredible obstacles,” says Nursing Chair Karen Devereaux Melillo, who – together with Chancellor Marty Meehan, Associate Chancellor Jacqueline Moloney and others – was instrumental in securing the $5,000 scholarship that will enable him to complete his 2008-09 PhD. year. “He’s supporting his family, both here and in Cambodia, at the same time working full-time. That’s a remarkable thing. We welcome the chance to help him.”

It is an extraordinary story. He survived the killing, and the refugee camps that followed, then made it to the U.S., sponsored by a sister who had come before. He earned his B.S. in pre-med and nursing, then his MSN from UMass Lowell — all the while working full-time. Somehow in the early ‘90s, he managed to find his way back to his native country and reunite with his high-school love, whom he brought home with him to New Hampshire, where they are now a family of four.

There is a book about all this, more than 400 pages long. You can probably guess who wrote it: “When I am unhappy or under stress,” he says today over the phone from his office at the Health Center, “I write to find release. I find peace in it. And I have a story to tell.”