The Disallowed

Heng Lee starts to feel very strange all of a sudden, so he calls in to see the local shaman, who happens to be his aunt. She carries out a few tests and decides that Heng has no blood, but how is he going to tell his family, and what will they do about it? Heng Lee is a goatherd in the remote mountains north-east of Chiang Rai in northern Thailand, very close to the border with Laos. It is a tight-knit community where everyone knows one another. Heng gets sick all of a sudden, but not too sick to take the goats out, until one day he has to go to see the local shaman, because he has started fainting. There are no medical doctors in the vicinity and the Shaman has been good enough for most people for centuries. The Shaman takes some specimens and comes to the conclusion that Heng’s kidneys have stopped functioning and so has little time left to live. The battle is on to save Heng’s life, but there are other forces at work too. What will become of Heng, his family and the rest of the community, if he takes the Shaman’s advice?