Ready to Go!

Saturday afternoon I was starting to get a little nervous. I was scheduled to work 12-hour shifts at the hospital Sun/Mon/Tue, and then fly out Wednesday morning!! Somehow I would need to finish organizing my stuff, and pack it all up by Saturday night!! To complicate things, I had three boxes of medical supplies I had agreed to try to pack in with my personal stuff. I soon realized my own personal luggage was not going to work. So I made a few calls and quickly found friends and relatives with larger suitcases I could borrow for a month. So now everything fits, but the new concern will be are suitcases over the 50 pound limit!!?

But then I got called off early at work Sunday, and for the whole day today (Monday). That gave me plenty of time to pack and make any last minute arrangements. So now I feel – Ready to Go!

I fly out from Indianapolis Wednesday, May 30th, at 10 a.m., and arrive 10:30 p.m. Thursday night at Siem Reap, Cambodia (via Atlanta and Seoul, Korea). The staff at Angkor Hospital will pick me up at the airport and deliver me to the Hotel/B&B they arranged for me to stay at during my visit. I am told everything will be within walking distance. I also plan on renting a halfway decent bicycle while I’m there to get places, and for exercise (the RAIN Ride – all 160 miles – in July 21st). I have received all kinds of great advise from several doctors and nurses in the U.S. who have volunteered their time before me, including an ophthalmologist from Riley Hospital. While it is still not entirely clear how exactly I will be spending my time at AHC next month, there are a few projects I expect to spend most of my time working on. The biggest project is to work with the head of nursing education at AHC to help him develop a Preceptor Program for their newly hired nurses. Some other projects might be: teaching basic pediatric oncology (to nurses and doctors), helping nurses start small research projects, and infection control. Of course, I also hope to be able to spend time with patients at the hospital, and possibly visit some of the remote clinics in the countryside operated in conjunction with AHC.

Thanks to several of my friends at work I have a sizable discretionary fund to spend on gifts and toys for the children at AHC. I had originally planned to buy the toys here in Indianapolis and have them shipped to Siem Reap; but the staff at AHC informed me I would be able to buy all the toys I want right there in town (and probably at much cheaper prices). See you in Cambodia!!

Scott Neeson - Cambodian Children's Fund

In an earlier post I mentioned that I was originally going to Cambodia to spend time at an orphanage in Phnom Pehn. The organization responsible for it is called Cambodian Children's Fund, and it was started by a guy who truly inspires me, Scott Neeson.

I visited CCF for a short time while I was in Cambodia last Fall. I felt a little conflicted making the visit, though. It's a busy place, and someone from there had to take time away from their busy schedule to take me on a tour. Plus there are billboards all over Cambodia discouraging tourists from visiting orphanages. For Cambodians such visits can be exploitative as the tourists visits are like a trip to the zoo, and do nothing to help (in fact may hinder) the work the orphanages are trying to do for the children.

In the end I was glad I went. It is truly an impressive place, and I plan to continue to support CCF financially as one of the best ways to help make a difference for children in Cambodia. CCF is not a typical orphanage; in fact most of the children have parents they live with at the garbage dump - Steung Meanchey. CCF provides the children a place to stay while their parents salvage a living at the dump. While at CCF the children can attend school, learn a trade, and get a proper meal. The young man who showed me around the CCF building I visited had himself been "rescued" by CCF, and ended up going to the local university. He now works at CCF as an accountant.

Cambodian Children's Fund Website

Below is the biography of Scott Neeson stolen directly from the Cambodian Children's Fund website.

Scott was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. At age 5, he emigrated with his family to Australia.

Scott grew up in Adelaide, South Australia and started what was to be a long, successful career in the film business when he joined a company that operated local and rural drive-in theatres. He moved to Sydney in 1983 to further his film career by joining the Greater Union cinema chain. Soon thereafter, he was chosen to head Hoyts Theatres film programming and purchasing, and then became General Manager of a joint venture in film releasing between 20th Century Fox, Columbia/TriStar and Hoyt's local film productions.

By 1993, he had relocated to Los Angeles to join 20th Century Fox as head of international marketing. In 2000, Scott became President of 20th Century Fox International, overseeing the release and marketing of several of the top films of all time – including 'Braveheart,' 'Titanic,' 'Star Wars' and 'X-men' – and managing gross revenues in excess of $1.5 billion dollars. In 2003, Scott left Fox to head Sony Pictures International's marketing operations.

In the five weeks between new positions, he took a mini-sabbatical through Asia, but a two-day stop-over in Phnom Penh became a four week mission that started him on the path to establishing the Cambodian Children's Fund.

Several early attempts at assisting the most impoverished children failed. Parents often removed their children from the schools where Scott had placed them, preferring that they be earning money instead. The gifts of clothing, shoes and books that he left them were usually sold within days.

Scott left Cambodia in September of 2003 to start his new role at Sony Pictures, but the impact of his experiences in Cambodia stayed with him, and it became increasingly apparent that incorporating a senior film industry position with his philanthropic mission was not an option. In the following year, as he laid the first tenuous plans for a permanent facility in Cambodia, he made the commute from Los Angeles to Phnom Penh eleven times.

While still maintaining personal ties with respected media industry leaders like Rupert Murdoch and Sumner M. Redstone, in 2004 Scott resigned from his 26-year film career and began the process of the long-term move to Cambodia, selling his home, car, boat and other assets. All initial costs for the establishment and operation of the CCF1 facility were covered by Scott, who now acts as the organization's full-time Executive Director.

In 2007, Scott was awarded the inaugural Harvard School of Public Health "Q Prize" in recognition of his extraordinary leadership in advocacy for children. In the same year, the CCF received the Rex Foundation Bill Graham award for creating a safe haven for Cambodian children to thrive, learn and grow.

Today, Scott divides his time between the CCF administrative offices and field work in Steung Meanchey and the rural provinces of Cambodia. He knows all 700 children in his care, their names, histories, personalities and aspirations. Having successfully established CCF1 – CCF6, as well as the CCF Community Centre and Daycare Program, Scott's future goals include the expansion of the CCF External Education Program.

Angkor Hospital for Children

Angkor Hospital for Children is a charitable hospital located in Siem Reap, Cambodia, that has treated over 900,000 children since 1999. Cambodia is one of the least developed countries in the world. With an average income of about $21 USD per month, very few families can afford to pay for health care. Services at AHC are provided to children free of charge. The hospital offers outpatient, inpatient, acute, emergency, surgical, low-acuity, dental and ophthalmologic care, as well as education and outreach programs.

In addition to providing healthcare, a mission of the hospital is to increase the self-sufficiency of the Cambodian people. It serves as a teaching hospital for Cambodian doctors and nurses, and as a training site for the WHO-developed Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) training program. After the devastation of the country's resources by the Khmer Rouge, only approximately 270 doctors remained in the country. As of 2010, there are approximately 2200 doctors and 374 dentists for the Cambodian population of 13.6 million people. There is a critical need for more fully trained doctors.

Angkor Hospital for Children is partially funded by Friends Without A Border, which has branches in the United States, Japan, and France and though direct contributions Angkor Hospital for Children . FWAB is a registered 501(c)(3) in the United States, which qualifies donations as tax deductible.

Friends Without A Border was founded by Kenro Izu of Japan. He saw the plight of Cambodian children while on a photography trip in Cambodia, and has dedicated his life to improving the lives of Cambodian children.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC) is located in Siem Reap, Cambodia, home of the famous Angkor monuments, relics of the Khmer Empire which lasted from the ninth to fifteenth centuries.

The vast majority of children who come to AHC suffer from preventable and treatable illness. In Cambodia it is not uncommon for a child to die from complications of untreated respiratory infections, diarrhea, or illnesses virtually eradicated in the more-developed world. AHC is child and family focused, using a patient’s time at the hospital as an educational opportunity. The hospital provides vaccinations and multivitamins in addition to extensive education on nutrition, wellness, and illness prevention.

AHC also reaches far beyond the hospital doors to provide care to some of its most fragile patients. The HIV/ Homecare Program delivers follow-up treatment and checkups to children who suffer from debilitating illness, including HIV/AIDS, meningitis, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and other chronic conditions. The HIV Homecare program was the first and remains the largest such program outside the capital, Phnom Penh.

AHC is also the largest facility outside of Phnom Penh which offers antiretroviral treatment to pediatric HIV/AIDS patients and currently administers this life-prolonging medication to hundreds of children.

Why Cambodia (Good Reason 3) - Tonlé Sap

Tonlé Sap

Geographically, Cambodia is a very wet and hot country, making it very conducive for fishing and rice farming. In the center of the country between the cities of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap is a gigantic lake called the Tonlé Sap. The Tonlé Sap River, which flows southward from the lake, is a tributary of the Mekong. Cambodia’s weather is punctuated by two major seasons, the wet season and the dry season. It rains so much during the wet season that the depth of the Tonlé Sap increases by dozens of feet each year. There is so much water that the Tonlé Sap River actually reverses flow backwards into the Tonlé Sap by the end of the rainy season. This gigantic shift in water levels brings a huge amount of nutrients in the lake, and is the reason Tonlé Sap is one of the most productive fishing lake in the world.

Tonlé Sap

Logan and I had the opportunity to take a long boat ride of Tonlé Sap when we were in Cambodia last Fall. The river culture of the Cambodians who live on Tonlé Sap is amazing! Some of their homes are built on stilts several stories tall, while others are simply anchored houseboats. During the dry season their small communities are on dry land. But by the end of the rainy season the Tonlé Sap rises up to the bottom of the stilts. We saw several children barely old enough to walk piloting small boats (or simply large buckets) with paddles all by themselves! In many instances, the families even had pet dogs, and floating cages of pigs next to their houses.

It was the end of the rainy season when Logan and I visited last November. It fact, it was one of the worst monsoons in the area in recent history; and several parts of Cambodia (and Thailand) were damaged by flooding last year. When I go back to Cambodia in June it will be toward the end of the dry season. So I should see a very different version of the country this time.

Why Cambodia (Good reason 2) - Prince Sihanouk

King of Cambodia

Perhaps the most fascinating and most revered individual in Cambodia is the head of their royal family, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Up until the early 1950’s, Cambodia was a colony of France. Sihanouk, a grandson of the previous king, was a jet-setting young playboy in his youth. When the king of Cambodia died in 1941, the French placed Sihanouk on the throne over the true heir, thinking Sihanouk would be easy to control.

Instead, Sihanouk help lead the Cambodian people to eventually gain independence from France in 1953. Sihanouk has been the consummate survivor ever since. Over the years he has used his charm and finesse to remain a powerbroker in his country. Even the Khmer Rouge dared not harm him when they took over the country. Many other members of the Cambodian royal family did not do so well in April, 1975. Sihanouk played the French, the US, China and the UN over the years to broker influence for himself and his country. Although he turned over his official royal duties to his son many years ago, Prince Nordom Sihanouk is still universally adored and revered in the country. Gigantic photographs and memorials of him and his number one wife can be found throughout Phnom Pehn and the Cambodian countryside.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk

Sihanouk is also a true renaissance man. He lives in a sprawling palace in the center of Phnom Pehn full of Buddhist temples and memorials. He maintains homes both in France and China, and is famous for his fine tastes in food and beverages. He is also a connoisseur of the culture and art of his country. He has even written and directed several films over the years.

You can read more about Sihanouk at Wikipedia.

Why Cambodia (Good reason 1) - Angkor Wat

Despite how the history of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as come to represent a negative aspect of the human condition to me, I have come to appreciate Cambodia for several interesting and exotic positive things.

There is the history of the ancient Khmer Empire. From the 12th to the 15th Century, the Khmer people, the ethnic majority of Cambodia, ruled over a vast empire that included most of Southeast Asia. It was a powerful kingdom with a rich culture as evidenced by the extensive temple systems that still scatter the countryside of northern and central Cambodia. Logan and I were able to spend two full days exploring many of the temple ruins, including the famous Angkor Wat temple, which was the centerpiece of the Khmer Empire.

Angkor Wat

Several movies, including Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Tomb Raider, were filmed on location of some of these fascinating temple ruins.

Spong Tree at the Ta Prohm temple

Why Cambodia (The Bad Part)

So why Cambodia? Why does a country on the opposite side of the world provide such a fascination for me?

By the way, Cambodia is a small country in Southeast Asia just west of Vietnam and south of Thailand. It is one of the poorest nations in that area, though recently it has begun to make a resurgence through foreign investments and economic advances, and a thriving tourism trade.

I was a senior in high school when the Vietnam War came to an end in April of 1975. At the time, I was not a fan of our military involvement in the region. But the US still had a military draft, and I was soon to come of age to be eligible for possible involuntary recruitment and service into the US military. It was heavy on my mind what I would do if I should ever be drafted. Other young Americans who had been drafted had refused to serve (sometimes as a “contentious objector”), or went to Canada to avoid the draft. The draft was a lottery then, and many of my classmates had their draft numbers come up. But I was lucky, and the draft was stopped just a couple of months before I turned 18.

During the Vietnam War, Cambodia had become a major chess piece in the conflict, subject to partial occupation by Vietnamese communist troops followed by extensive bombings of the Cambodian countryside by American aircraft pursing those troops. American financial and military support in Cambodia during the waning years of the war helped keep in place a corrupt military government that further suppressed the Cambodian population. Eventually this gave rise to a new insurgent group called the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge quickly gained strength, and by April 1975 they controlled major portions of Cambodia. Within days of the last American troops leaving Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital of Phnom Phen to take complete control of the country.

What happened next in Cambodia is partially chronicled in the Oscar-winning film, The Killing Fields. Immediately after taking control, the Khmer Rouge emptied all of the major cities, and forced the entire population into rural work camps. The stated purpose was to turn the country into an agrarian utopia based on the communist revolutionary model. They turned Cambodian society upside-down by placing the poor, working class farmers who made up the bulk of the Khmer Rouge army in charge, and branded anyone else as “enemies of the revolution” until proven otherwise. The killings began immediately. During the four years the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia two million people were killed (one third of the population), many outright by the leaders, but also through starvation, disease and war.

The Khmer Rouge was in power during the same time I was a college student at South Dakota State University. The truth about the Khmer Rouge came out while I continued my education at Purdue University through 1982. This was a formative time for me. One intellectual curiosity I had was trying to understand the human capacity to inflict pain and suffering upon their fellow man. I had already read about Hitler and the Nazis, and everything I could find on serial killers. The history of the Khmer Rouge became, to me, a story of how an entire country was turned into a bunch of serial killers.

The Khmer Rouge Leadership

The Khmer Rouge was supervised by a small band of communist counter-revolutionaries who, at first, remained hidden both inside and outside of the country. As a result, few people outside of Cambodia had any idea of what was going on inside. The leaders referred to themselves as Angkar, the omnipotent overseer of the Khmer revolution. The decisions and judgments of Angkar were considered always wise and perfect, and, therefore, never to be questioned. Eventually the leaders did reveal themselves; but even then, the Khmer Rouge’s top leader, Brother Number 1, Pol Pot, was not revealed until much later.

Pol Pot

This disconnect between the leadership and their decisions quickly caught up with them. Their attempts to convert Cambodia into the “rice basket” of Asia through highly productive rice farming was an abysmal failure. The leaders blamed the failures on enemies within, and became increasingly paranoid. They also started to pick fights with their larger and much stronger neighbor, Vietnam. Eventually Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, and installed a puppet government. But the Khmer Rouge remained a powerful force in Cambodia for decades afterward. Some of the top Khmer Rouge leaders who are still alive today are finally being prosecuted in a War Crimes Tribunal.

Introduction

During the month of June 2012, I will be taking a leave of absence from my job at a local children’s hospital in Indianapolis to volunteer at the Angkor Hospital for Children in Siem Reap, Cambodia. This blog will be a place where I plan to share this adventure with my friends.

Last November (2011), my son, Logan, and I took a vacation together to a little country in Southeast Asia called Cambodia. The trip was my second attempt to visit a country that has long held a special place in my heart (which I’ll explain in the next few blog entries). Our trip last year was a true vacation under the guidance of a reputable travel agency and a tour guide. My son and I were safely escorted through the country as tourists. Cambodia today (along with much of Southeast Asia) has become a popular vacation destination for Westerners, and is a safe and exotic place to visit. But this was not always so.

In fact, during the late 1970’s, Cambodia was possibly the most dangerous place to be on the planet!

A couple of years ago I came upon an opportunity to go on a medical mission trip to Cambodia. As a registered nurse, I had already been on several medical mission trips to Latin America through a wonderful Indianapolis organization called the Timmy Foundation, now called Timmy Global Health (http://www.timmyglobalhealth.org/). But I was ready to try something new. The trip to Cambodia was organized around doing some support work for a relatively new orphanage mission called the Cambodian Children’s Fund (http://www.cambodianchildrensfund.org/).

Unfortunately, the organization in Indianapolis planning the trip took a bad turn (to put it nicely). After canceling the trip twice, they tried to keep the money I had paid in full for the trip. Over a year later after several legal maneuvers and with the wonderful help of an attorney friend of mine I eventually got the money back. After that, I decided to plan a new trip to Cambodia, and invited my son to come along.

My trip to Cambodia with Logan was a wonderful experience! We were able to see all the of the places in Cambodia I had been reading about for the past twenty years. I even was able to make a short, but satisfying visit to the Cambodian Children’s Fund orphanage site during one of my free afternoons. It was also a great chance to have some quality adult bonding time with my now grown-up son.

But I left the country dissatisfied.

While we were in Siem Reap, I noticed there was a children’s hospital there called Angkor Hospital for Children. When I returned to the US, I went online and found the hospital’s website. I discovered that they welcomed volunteers to their hospital (as long as they paid their own way). And I found out that their theme for the second quarter of 2012 was hematology/oncology (I work on a hematology/oncology floor)! So I sent them an email along with my resume, and a couple of days later I received an email back inviting me come visit and help train their medical and nursing staff!!

One thing I have learned since becoming a nurse several years ago is to take these opportunities as gifts. It's just plain rude not to accept them in the spirit they are given!