Angkor Hospital for Children is an independently operated non-governmental organization financed by the NY-based not-for-profit organization, Friends Without A Border.

http://angkorhospital.org/default.php

http://www.fwab.org/

"The mission of Angkor Hospital for Children is to provide nurturing pediatric care, medical education and community outreach. AHC has treated almost 500,000 children since 1999. Currently the outpatient department sees 300-400 children a day and maintains 50 inpatient beds, and it is the largest facility outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, providing anti-retroviral treatment to children suffering from HIV/AIDS. The Capacity Building and Health Education Program seeks to improve the health, hygiene, and nutrition of local communities."

All treatment and inpatient care as well as out-reach services are free of charge.

• 67,000 Cambodian children under the age of 5 die each year.
• Acute respiratory infections and diarrhea account for nearly 40% of deaths in children.
• Malnutrition represents the single most important risk factor for Cambodia children.
• There are 30 Cambodian doctors for every 100,000 people.
• Only 39% of Cambodia’s rural population has access to clean water.

Native Source applauds and supports the work of the Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC) for its compassionate, comprehensive, and ‘local’ approach to healthcare. Besides the fact that over 95% of the staff is Cambodian, to ensure that knowledge and skills are transferred to the local staff, foreign doctors working at AHC come to train the Cambodian doctors and not to treat patients – something all too rare with most Non-Governmental Organizations operating in the developing world. Most importantly, Native Source shares AHC and FWAB’s belief that compassionate healthcare, especially for children, is a human right and not just a privilege for those who can afford it.

Less than 10 healthcare professionals survived Pol Pot’s genocide; the “family” as an institution was completely dismantled under the Khmer Rouge (KR) and therefore all the knowledge and wisdom normally pasted from generation to generation was not. Almost all of the “old ways” or traditional Cambodian approaches to health and spirituality were suppressed if not utterly destroyed under the KR.

Today, Cambodia faces the legacy of this brutal history as well as the challenges of its devastating poverty. When it comes to health and wellbeing, the results are grossly insufficient infrastructures, poor-quality of services, and a dismaying lack of information on basic healthcare, hygiene, and nutrition in the general population.

Most Cambodian mothers, for example, do not know about such simple practices as breastfeeding. Many families will spend hard-earned money on expensive milk substitutes with high sugar and low-to-little nutritional content rather than breast feed – which only means they have to spend even more money bringing their overweight, malnourished, dying babies to a regional hospital or to AHC – many of whom never survive the often 3-4 day journey.

Most rural people don’t know that rehydration is important when a child has diarrhea or is vomiting. In fact, many believe that giving fluids to the sick will make them worse, and thus simple dehydration is one of the leading causes of preventable deaths in Cambodia.

Malnutrition is also a huge killer, so AHC maintains an onsite garden at the hospital where they teach parents how to grow highly nutritious traditional vegetables. AHC also provides daily cooking classes and free seeds for the parents to take home to their villages to start their own family and community gardens with. And through outreach programs, AHC staff travel to those villages to check up on patients, their gardens, teach basic hygiene and disease prevention, and dig wells so that whole communities can have access to clean water, thereby preventing a large percentage of the illnesses caused by contaminated water.

AHC's approach is a return to the traditional Cambodian model where healthcare providers visit villages (in the past it was monks that delivered and taught healthcare) and pass on knowledge and treatments -- in short, the ‘barefoot doctor’ approach that worked so well in Mao’s China, in Cuba, and now practiced by Partners In Health and other leading healthcare organizations operating in the developing world.

Most Cambodians cannot afford the cost of travel to a hospital, and even if they could, the quality of care is practically non-existent in the government-run hospital sector.

It’s also an approach that looks “upstream” for the problem. The analogy comes from the story of the man that spends all day rescuing people from the river but never bothers to look “upstream” to see who’s pushing them in the river in the first place. The concept of looking both "up stream" and "down stream" is integral to all traditional cultures but seems glaringly and painfully lacking in the West’s approach to health and wellness.

AHC has also opened a “green" Visitors Center that utilizes rain harvesting and bio fuels and incorporates traditional "green" Cambodian archtectural principles in design and fuction. See the section "Green Archtecture" for more information on this specific project.

Native Source believes that AHC’s organic garden, cooking classes, and outreach and capacity-building programs, also mark a return to the “old ways” that were lost during the brutal Pol Pot regime and genocide, as well as a step forward in terms of a more holistic, “green”,  and “up stream” approach to healthcare.

Native Source provides unrestricted donations to AHC and plans to provide scholarships for local healthcare providers here in the Tucson area the opportunity to bring their skills, passion, and compassion to AHC starting in the summer of 2010.*

*Check back here for applications in April, 2010.