Meet three ‘tiny’ members of one ethnic minority community in Vietnam

Dinh Thi Huyen, 20, who is the first-born daughter of a family in the Son Nham Commune of Son Ha District, is only 80 centimeters tall and weighs a mere 11 kilograms.

Huyen’s body has refused to grow despite prescriptions of supplementary vitamins supplied by multiple visiting healthcare groups, the chairman of Son Nham Commune, Dinh Van Bay has said. Locals refer to her as 'the tiny girl.'

According to Huyen’s father, Dinh Eo, being the only child in the family that suffers from the condition, Huyen is childish by nature and finds joy in playing children’s games with other kids in the neighborhood.

Dinh Van K’Re (L), an eight-year-old boy from Son Ba Commune, Son La District in Quang Ngai Province who suffers from the Seckel Syndrome, a rare condition that stunts his physical development

Despite her physique, Huyen performs on the same level academically as her classmates, though she has stopped going to school since finishing junior high, as her family’s house is too far away from the nearest high school.

Dinh Van Khit, of Di Lang Town in Son Ha District, is another H’re boy with a body that is tiny for his age.

At 11 years old, Khit is 78 centimeters tall and weighs only eight kilograms, according to his father, Dinh K’Tenh, who said that Khit weighed a mere 800 grams at birth.

Khit is shy, eats very little and does not perform well at school, having yet to graduate from kindergarten, his father added.

“He once crawled into the family’s rice container and fell asleep there as the whole village set out to search for him, thinking he had gone missing in the woods. Later that night, my wife found him sleeping like a log in the rice container as she was about to prepare dinner,” K’Tenh said.

However, Khit is not the smallest person in the district. The record for the smallest Vietnamese human goes to eight-year old Dinh Van K’Re, of Son Ba Commune in Son Ha District, who stands just 50 centimeters tall and weighs a mere 3.5 kilograms.

K’Re’s father, Dinh Van An, said he was only able to eat a couple of spoonfuls of rice each meal, and had stopped growing from the age of three.

K’Re learns quickly with visuals and audios, but is challenged with reading and recognizing letters, said Dang Van Cuong, headmaster of Son Ba Elementary School, where K’Re is in the first grade.

According to the director of Quang Ngai Province’s Department of Health, Nguyen Tan Duc, Khi and K’re have had their conditions studied carefully by medical experts from both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, who have agreed that they both suffer from Seckel syndrome, a form of dwarfism.

People with Seckel syndrome, also known as bird-headed dwarfism, are characterized by a small head, a narrow bird-like face, a beak-like nose, large eyes with down-slanting palpebral fissures, a receding mandible and usually an intellectual disability, Duc said.

The syndrome is a recessive genetic disorder caused by defects in the genes on chromosome 3 and 18. According to health director Duc, there have only been eight cases of bird-headed dwarfism reported in Vietnam.

As for Dinh Thi Huyen, further examinations are still required before a proper conclusion can be made on the nature of her condition, with Duc saying Huyen’s small physique could be the result of hormonal disorders or congenital hypothyroidism.